Month: June 2022

Bad Bones

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Russ in the crawlspace

Bad Bones has good bones. Which is handy because microbudget movies have hurdles to get over, and a good story really helps. No prizes for guessing it’s a horror movie, what with a title like that. It’s also director/writer Stephen Eggleston’s feature debut and he teases to deceive in the opening setups – a pre-credits sequence featuring a nice couple so keen to get away from what looks like a very normal suburban house that they’re prepared to die doing so. Cut, post credits, to two other people, Russ (Chris Levine) and Jen (Maddison Bullock), a loved-up couple who’ve just moved into the same house. It was going cheap (of course) and so … Read more

Summer in Berlin

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Katrin and Nike drink wine

One of the big films of 2006 in Germany, Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) caused barely a ripple anywhere else. Which is a pity, because it’s a great example of a precisely acted, brilliantly crafted film telling a good story without histrionics. In a world dominated by superhereos, subtlety sometimes struggles to get a hearing. It’s shot warm, and that’s the idea – the fuzzy, warm friendship between two women, Katrin and Nike, who spend most evenings after thankless days drinking wine together on a balcony and setting the world to rights while summertime Berlin burbles away below. While their relationship is good, the rest of their lives are a little shaky. … Read more

All My Friends Hate Me

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A gunman menaces Pete

Psychological horror is delivered in an unusually pure form in All My Friends Hate Me, a British movie saving its best moves for its closing moments, when it shifts tone three, four, maybe five times. It repurposes the plot and some of the mood of The Wicker Man – a guy bumbling around in a situation he’s drastically misreading – but instead of murderous yokels as his nemesis, this guy is having a reunion weekend away with old university friends at the country pile of one of them, the incredibly wealthy George (Joshua McGuire). Things get off to a bad start when Pete gets lost en route, disturbs a mysterious/furious man sleeping in a filthy … Read more

Beats Being Dead

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Johannes is smitten with Ana

The story behind Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod) is an unusual one. Three hot German film directors belonging to what’s often loosely termed the Berlin School were corresponding together about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the DFFB (Berlin’s film and TV academy), and generally bemoaning the state of German cinema – what was there to celebrate etc? And so they decided to make a trio of loosely linked films to plug what they saw as a few gaps. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler were the dynamic trio and, following Petzold’s lead, they set their stories in the bleak and romantic forests of Thuringia, in a place called Dreileben, … Read more

Dinner in America

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Patty and Simon

Dinner in America starts raucously, in shock joke territory, and ends up as a tender love story. In scene one a zonked-out woman taking part in a drugs trial is gesturing lasciviously towards a fellow trial member, fingering the sliced meat on her plate of food in a clear “fuck me” invitation. He’s spraying puke across the formica by the way. By the finale, the territory has shifted into the domestic and the lovey-dovey though writer/director Adam Rehmeier has cleverly managed to keep the overall tone more or less the same. This is your 1990s grunge superdweeb comedy revisited, with everyone a relation at various removes from characters in Superbad or Napoleon Dynamite … Read more

Winter Sleepers

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Rebecca and Marco on a bed

In 1997’s Winter Sleepers (Winterschläfer) German director Tom Tykwer warms up the engines for his breakthrough hit, 1998’s Run Lola Run. There are fewer tricks here, not as much visual pizzazz, the fourth wall remains unbroken, and yet Tykwer is clearly up to something as he spins out a tale of two different couples, one whose relationship is in the hot flush of urgent sexual need, while the other two at the outset don’t know each other at all. On the one hand a blond pair who seem bright and charming and a dark pair whose standoffishness looks like it might be dooming them to a life at one remove from the action. … Read more

The Sadness

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Zombies smiling

Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut, the Taiwan-set movie The Sadness, revives two genres. Welcome back the zombie movie, which has been having an afternoon nap since Train to Busan persuaded more or less everyone that there was no point trying to top it. And the torture porn/gorno movie, which has been absent without leave for a little longer. Both combine spectacularly and splattertacularly in a story that’s ostensiby about a nice young couple who wake up one day to find that the world outside their window is now populated by virus-infected flesh-eating humans. In fact The Sadness is more about Kat (Regina Lei) than it is about Jim (Berant Zhu), a handsome young man … Read more

Gigantic

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Floyd, Walter and Ricco play football

Gigantic is a German film from 1999 about three Hamburg lads – 20somethings – who inhabit the back end of the cultural landscape. McJobbers and party animals, they’re so-so at everything, at best, terrible at some things, but one thing they do have is enthusiasm for life. It makes for largely unsuccessful lives, but fascinating, sometimes humorous if uneven viewing. 1999 was the year of the McJobber movie and Gigantic (Absolute Giganten in the original German) could almost be seen as the German equivalent of something like Human Traffic, but with the drugs dialled right down, a tale of lairy lads, living for the weekend and the desire to escape. The story kicks … Read more

The Batman

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Catwoman and Batman

The Batman. Let’s get the plot out of the way first, since it’s the most straightforward aspect of the latest bulletin from Gotham City. A caped crusader, a trio of villains in the shape of Paul Dano’s Riddler, Colin Farrell’s Penguin and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, a campaign of murder being waged against city officials. The mayor dies first, in the opening moments of the film, forcing Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to call in Batman – he rates the mysterious vigilante but no one else does. Along the way Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) becomes involved, a good girl in this version, and a crimefighting sidekick, should Batman want one, which he doesn’t seem to. … Read more

The Sex Thief

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Petra and Franziska

The Sex Thief is an attention-grabbing title for a film. In the original German it goes by the more cumbersome Die Beischlafdiebin. Run that compound noun through Google Translate and you’ll find no mention of sex at all. No mention, either – unless AI is more advanced than any of us can imagine – of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a clear influence on a story about a person who is trying to make over another person for reasons rooted in a dark pathology. It’s a Christian Petzold film and so there’s a mysterious female at the centre of it, a woman devastatingly attractive to men but trying to escape her situation (a Petzold constant). Both she … Read more