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The Match Factory Girl
The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki was already a critical success when he had his first hit (in cult terms), 1989’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, a road movie about a fictional Russian rock band on
Barbara
By the time Christian Petzold made Barbara in 2012, enough time had passed for his film not to seen as the latest in a line of Ostalgia movies (2003’s Good Bye Lenin! is a
Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg. The title is a bit of a joke, a reference to the city/state in Germany where Volkswagen is headquartered. The fact that there’s not a single VW in the film suggesting that either
The State I Am In
Christian Petzold was 40 when he made The State I Am In (Die Innere Sicherheit in the original German) in 2000. Which means he’d have been in his mid-teens and at his most impressionable
Fatima
In many ways a bog-standard bible flick given a cursory wipeover with a humanist rag in the figure of Harvey Keitel – doing penance for Bad Lieutenant all those years ago – Fatima is
Materna
Not so much a film as four shorts held together by a framing device, Materna looks at women through the prism of the family – the mother, the daughter, the sister, the neice. All
Something to Remind Me
It’s called Toter Mann in German, the literal translation of which is Dead Man, but instead the distributors went with the possibly even more ironic Something to Remind Me for the English-language release of
The Twentieth Century
Where to begin with The Twentieth Century, a mad bit of nonsense that’s initially exasperating but eventually works so hard at what it’s doing that your resistance might start to crumble. We’re in the
Undine
So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused
Small Axe: Mangrove
Small Axe: Mangrove is the first of a series of five standalone films made for the BBC by Steve McQueen. The umbrella title takes its name from the reggae song by Bob Marley (or
Jerichow
Jerichow is the fourth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss – both names a guarantee of at least a degree of excellence. But before we get there – just quickly skimming
Persona
Ingmar Bergman beat Mr Spock to the mind meld. Persona, Bergman’s masterwork about one person’s identity merging with another’s, debuted in August 1966. The Vulcan psychic control technique first saw light of cathode ray
