Lars Eidinger

Code Blue

by
Bien de Moor as Marian

Code Blue is the second of six (as of June 2023) features by Poland-born, Netherlands-based film-maker Urszula Antoniak, and the second one I’ve seen. The first one I saw, Magic Mountains, was made in 2020, nine years after Code Blue but both feature single women locked in near-mortal struggles, with intimacy an issue. Does that make this a feature of her work or a coincidence? Three’s a trend, as they say, so I don’t know. Either way, Antoniak is someone to watch. She has a way with space and sound, and on the evidence of the work I’ve seen, makes stylish films bristling with menacing moods and atmospheres of psychological imperilment. There is … Read more

Summer Window

by
August and Juliane

When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve lingered longer with his style of humane drama than they expected. In Good Bye Lenin!, which Handloegten co-wrote, the fantasy was more oblique, existing only in the mind of its East German characters, who were playing a gigantic game of make-believe with their frail mother, recently awake after a coma, in which the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen and … Read more