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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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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. … Read more
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 … Read more
Aryans assemble! Hollywood’s most Nordic get together for The Northman, Robert Eggers’ latest exploration of arcane mindsets, and the sort of film that’s probably on a loop at White Supremacist HQ. The men are tall, blond, hairy and sculpted, the women are fierce, brave and yield only to their liege-lord husband. There is dirt, there … Read more
Möbius, not Morbius. The Marvel supervillain was still in the uncertain future in 2013 when Eric Rochant wrote and directed this spy thriller set in the chi-chi world of high finance. Also in the future was Rochant’s magnum opus, the brilliant TV series The Bureau (aka Le Bureau des Legendes), for which Möbius can be … Read more
Like a Butch and Sundance but with no glory days in the rearview, On the Count of Three is the story of two desperadoes riding towards their moment of reckoning, and opens with Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) taking aim at each other’s heads, in a moment of pre-planned mutual annihilation. They don’t … Read more
1996’s Cuba Libre is only Christian Petzold’s second movie, after 1995’s debut, Pilots (Pilotinnen), but already he’s got the formula and the team all in place. It’s a chilly thriller, in other words, with a man who’s losing his head over a woman, a woman who’s so otherworldly she might in fact be more metaphysical … Read more
Is Morbius, Marvel’s tragic brooding vampire, a bad guy or good guy? The eponymous movie strings a line between two opposing conceptions of the same individual and hangs Jared Leto out to dry on it – here’s a character and a movie that’s indecisive in a deadly way. So, no, Twitter, it’s not the bad … Read more
