Based on the autobiographical novel by a German international correspondent who published her wartime journal under the pseudonym Anonyma, Max Färberböck’s A Woman in Berlin presents a raw and sobering account of the waning days of World War II as the Russian army seized control of a town in war torn Berlin and, consequently, lorded […]
At the heart of Valeska Grisebach’s slender, yet meticulously observed slice of life portrait, Longing, is the seemingly ideal marriage of metalworker and volunteer firefighter, Markus (Andreas Müller) and his wife, Ella (Ilka Welz), a chorus singer who, in the film’s establishing sequences, casually describes their romantic union as the result, not of love at […]
There is an ominous, impressionistic cadence to Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser: an obscured man in a rowboat, a woman rubbing clothes against a washboard, the sound of warbled music from a warped phonograph record. A brief, incidental foreword chronicles Kaspar Hauser’s mysterious appearance in a Nuremberg town square one Sunday morning in […]
Aguirre: The Wrath of God opens with an astonishing landscape shot of a mountain side in the heart of the Amazon jungle. Images of men, reduced to size of imperceptible dots, descend along the precariously steep trail, briefly disappear into the horizon, and reemerge into the foreground of another mountain. It is late 1560, and […]
Stefan Krohmer’s deceptively lyrical Summer 04 chronicles the unexpected, life altering summer vacation of domestic partners Mirjam (Martina Gedeck) and André (Peter Davor), and their teenage son Nils (Lucas Kotaranin) as they attempt to navigate through the murky, uncharted waters of romantic – and emotional – entanglements caused by the introduction of Nils’ precocious, 12 […]
Curiously opening near the end of the second act of Tosca as the heroine (Maria Slatinaru) fends off the advances of Scarpia (Günther Reich), the corrupt police commissioner, the unexpectedly abrupt, in medias res performance of the Puccini opera provides an incisive prelude to the elliptical structure of Alexander Kluge’s “anonymous city” symphony, The Assault […]