Review | MovieSteve

Beats Being Dead

2022-11-012022-06-15 by Steve

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

2026-07-012022-06-14 by Steve

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 the dramatis personae of Superbad or … Read more

Winter Sleepers

2022-11-012022-06-13 by Steve

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

2022-11-012022-06-12 by Steve

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

2022-11-012022-06-11 by Steve

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

2022-11-012022-06-10 by Steve

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

2024-03-212022-06-09 by Steve

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

The Northman

2022-11-012022-06-08 by Steve

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 are runic inscriptions, there is lore and there are any number of other tokens of authenticity. It’s the hipster version of The Vikings, the one that starred Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, made in the days when no one particularly minded a pair of New York Jews playing characters out of the Nordic sagas (though there were sniggerings … Read more

Möbius

2022-11-012022-06-07 by Steve

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 seen as a dry run. Though TV had already clearly won the Movies v TV race by 2013, old-school movies still had prestige and many were still being made which, all told, should really have been a TV series. The result is too many films of this era with overstuffed storylines, too many characters, too much event, too … Read more

On the Count of Three

2022-11-012022-06-06 by Steve

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 go through with it. Spoiler. Well, kind of. This flashforward opener catches up with itself within about ten minutes of this film’s running time, leaving the two smalltown American dudes to spin out the rest of the time in an orgy of nostalgia, payback, bucket-list moments and re-appraisal of lives lived almost totally pointlessly. It’s billed as a … Read more

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