David Bennent

The Universal Theory

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Jan Bülow as Johannes Leinert

If Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka made a multiverse movie it might look like The Universal Theory, a fabulous and madly forensic undertaking by Timm Kröger, who gets just about all of it right and tells a really good story. You don’t need to be well versed in the works of any of the above to be well entertained but it really adds to the enjoyment. Kröger opens his story in a TV studio in the 1970s, where an author is bristling at his interviewer’s description of his book as fiction. It’s true, all true, the author says, causing the interviewer and fellow guests to smirk and titter. As Johannes Leinert … Read more

The Tin Drum

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Oskar bangs his drum

The Tin Drum won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980, as well as the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979. Not everyone was enamoured, though. While the Los Angeles Times thought it “a masterwork of cinema” and the New York Times slightly less effusively reported that it “compels attention,” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times took against it, doling out only two (out of four stars) in a review that expressed bafflement at other critics’ admiration of the film. The years have tended to vindicate Ebert. The movie, like the original Günter Grass book on which it was based, has been steadily rerated downwards over the decades, not least since … Read more