Timm Kröger

The Universal Theory

by
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 Trouble with Being Born

by
Elli the android

The Melbourne International Film Festival wouldn’t screen The Trouble with Being Born when it debuted in 2020. Likely to be “used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material,” said the two forensic psychologists who informed its decision. Director Sandra Wollner’s German-language film ran into trouble at the Berlin Film Festival too, though it also won a special jury prize, just one of many from film festivals. Not that awards and bans are usually much to go on, but in this case the various responses do say something. This is a tough film but a good one. Tough not because of the suggestions of paedophilia but because of its … Read more