Tag: German film
Perfect Days
Thursday, April 4th, 2024 Film Reviews,If you thought Kenny (2006) would be the only film you’d ever see about a toilet cleaner, in Perfect Days Wim Wenders shows us there’s plenty of life in this universal subject. Like Shane Jacobson’s Aussie “waste management expert”, Hirayama, a middle-aged man with a neat moustache and salt-and-pepper hair, is completely satisfied with his […]
I by Day and You by Night
Saturday, April 29th, 2023 Blog,When we think of the Weimar Republic we inevitably think of crazy, decadent cabarets and social chaos, inflation so rampant that workers would carry their wages home in a wheelbarrow and rush to spend them before they lost more value. It sounds ridiculous, unbelievable, but at its worst – in November 1923 – one US […]
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once & All Quiet on the Western Front
Friday, February 24th, 2023 Film Reviews,With another Academy Awards looming, I’m taking the opportunity to look at the two remaining candidates for Best Picture. Both have form. The first, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, leads the pack in 2023 with 11 nominations. The second, All Quiet on the Western Front, has been nominated in nine categories, and won seven BAFTAs this week, […]
German Film Festival 2018
Friday, May 18th, 2018 Film Reviews,There have been occasions when the German Film Festival has chosen to kick off with an echte deutsche Komödie. This allowed many iterations of that lazy gag about German comedy being a contradiction in terms. This year the Germans have returned to more familiar territory: earnest dramas, with perhaps a touch of Olympian irony. This […]
German Film Festival 2015
Saturday, May 16th, 2015 Film Reviews,“What does cinema know, that we don’t?” This is the question asked by Rüdiger Suchsland’s documentary, From Caligari to Hitler, one of the highlights of this year’s Audi Festival of German Film. The topic is the cinema of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first tempestuous experiment with democracy, which lasted from 1919 -1933, when it was […]
Audi Festival of German Film & The Hunt
Saturday, May 4th, 2013 Film Reviews,Having done the stats on the French film industry earlier this year, the annual Audi Festival of German Films tempts me to take a quick look at Europe’s other great cinematic powerhouse. While the French clocked up 272 features in 2011, the Germans managed a respectable 212. This makes it the seventh biggest film producer […]
Iron Sky
Saturday, May 12th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Why is it that film-makers think the Nazis are funny? There may have been something inherently absurd about the Third Reich, with its fetish for uniforms, racial purity and Wagner, but it was no laughing matter for those obliged to share the planet with Hitler’s minions. A few weeks ago I expressed reservations about Hotel […]
German Film Festival
Saturday, April 21st, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,That old injunction from Fawlty Towers – “Don’t mention the war!” – is no longer relevant. Nowadays the German film industry is mentioning the war at every opportunity. The game-breaker was probably Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall of 2004. After a movie devoted to Hitler’s last days in the bunker, there was nothing that might prove more […]
Pina
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 Film Reviews,Wuppertal in Germany’s North-Rhine area is chiefly known for two things: the Pina Bausch Tanztheater, and its suspended monorail, the Schwebebahn. In Pina, his ground-breaking foray into the field of 3D documentary, Wim Wenders gives us a generous helping of both these attractions. It is a premise of Pina that dance, or bodily movement, is […]