Daniel Brühl

Alone in Berlin

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Otto and Anna Quangel face each other over the dinner table

During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice. In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their … Read more

Eden

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Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby

Ron Howard loves a fact-based story and in Eden he delivers a punchy one about romantic and naive people getting a rude awakening – the natural state of humanity isn’t bliss but blood. After recent films about Pavarotti, JD Vance and Jim Henson, Howard turns to the far less famous Margret Wittmer, who along with her husband Heinz and son Harry decamped to a remote island idyll in the Galapagos in the 1930s. There, inspired by the example of atheist intellectual vegans Friedrich Ritter and partner Dore Strauch, the Wittmers hoped to build a new life alongside them, and possibly chart a new course for humanity while doing so. It all went badly … Read more

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Paul in unform ready for action

Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view. This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined … Read more

Good Bye Lenin!

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Daniel Brühl

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 June Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, 1987 On this day in 1987, US president Ronald Reagan made a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, where the Berlin Wall erected in 1961 by the Soviets bisected the city, making the Wall and Berlin the symbol of the Cold War. The speech was made in honour of Berlin’s 750th anniversary and in a climate of increasing openness and freedom in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc. The speech has a famous peroration “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if … Read more

Rush

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Chris Hemsworth as James Hunt

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 February Enzo Ferrari born, 1898 On this day in 1898, Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was born. The man who would later be known as Il Commendatore, founder and leader of the Ferrari racing team (and car manufacturer) was taken to a racing track as a kid and realised immediately that he wanted to be a driver. By the early 1920s he was Alfa Romeo’s test driver, and when the company decided to outsource their racing unit, it was Ferrari that ran it. He went solo during the Second World War, during which time Alfa paid him not to compete, and by … Read more

Rush

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Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the pits

Is Rush – about the rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt – Ron Howard’s best film yet? After those terrible Da Vinci Code films recently, made for who knows what favour to the studio, this might not seem like much of a claim. But let’s not forget that Howard made Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon. If there’s one thing uniting those three films and Rush it’s that they’re all based firmly on real events. And yes, to bolster the argument, it’s necessary to forget about boxing drama Cinderella Man, Russell Crowe’s Rocky, also based on the life of a real man, but only of value to archaeologists … Read more