Tag Archives: German Cinema

Faraway – Movie Review

Posted on by
1

TL;DR – A fun little story about finding love in a faraway land, where you might find yourself for than anything else.    

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film

The Croatian Coastline.

Faraway Review –

Sometimes you sit down to watch a film with no real plan as to what you will watch. You are just looking for something to spark your interest, and the story of a woman finding love in a long-lost house bequeathed to her by her late mother, who no one knew about. That is a good plot hook to make me interested in how that plays out.

So to set the scene, Zeynep Altin (Naomi Krauss) is trying to keep the family together as they prepare for her mother’s funeral. But things are not good at home, as just about every member of her house walks all over her. But it is at this lowest point when the family lawyer tells Zeynep that her mother purchased a home in her homeland of Croatia and left it to Zeynep in her will. What do you do when everyone has let you down? Well, how about you head to the coast and find a new view on life?  

Continue reading →
Advertisement

Tár – Movie Review

Posted on by
2

TL;DR – A phenomenal performance in a severely dull film   

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Disclosure – I paid to see this film

Records on the floor.

Tár Review –

This will be a difficult film to review because it is a movie of two very distinct parts, performance and narrative. Thus it becomes a work of incredible highs and deep lows, and trying to pass that feels like climbing a mountain. But climb we will as we dive into this fascinatingly frustrating film.

So to set the scene, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is at the height of her career. She is the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, being asked to do masterclasses at the Juilliard School, she has a book coming out Tár on Tár, and she has a beautiful homelife with her wife Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss) and daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic). But there is a growing sense that Tár is walking on shifting sands as actions of the past start bubbling to the surface.     

Continue reading →

Movie Review – The Windermere Children

Posted on by
1

TL;DR – A deeply emotional and confronting film that looks at the aftermath of trauma and how you can walk back from it.   

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Awards:

Nominated: The Emotion.

The Windermere Children. Image Credit: Fremantle.

Review –

There are those moments in life where we get to see the full depths of human cruelty and few moments have exemplified it more than the Holocaust. It was a moment where human depravity was industrialised and weaponised in the endeavour to exterminate an entire race. Today we explore a film that deals with the aftermath and trauma through the eyes of the children that survived it.     

So to set the scene, we open in on a bus full of children as they make their way through the British countryside at night. The bus is full of children refugees rescued from Holocaust camps. One thousand children brought from the camps to Brittan and 300 of them came to Calgarth Estate on the shores of Lake Windermere. As they arrive, there is a real fear that they have swapped one camp of despair for another. Their families are likely all dead, and all of them have suffered travesties that make every dog a threat and food something you hide when you can. They only have funding for four months to help them with their trauma, which is not enough time given everything they had gone through.

Continue reading →

Movie Review – Rising High (Betonrausch)

Posted on by
Reply

TL;DR – An interesting concept and set up, that does not quite have the strength to get all the way to the end credits.     

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Rising High (Betonrausch). Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

There is something about a good con film that can really engage you. It can be the way they upend the system, the suave chaos of its, and the way they pull of the graft. There is that feeling that they could be caught out at any moment, making every moment feel tense, especially as it starts to spiral.

So to set the scene, we open in on a party in full swing, boobs, drugs, and dancing everywhere, it is a chaos of ecstasy and excess. In the morning, there is carnage across the house and only Viktor (David Kross) is awake looking at all he has made when police storm the property. Arrested and in custody, we hear all the charges laid against him, which is many, so what is there to do, well you can tell your whole story to the police which is what Viktor does.

Continue reading →

Movie Review – Quantification Trilogy

Posted on by
1

TL;DR – A fascinating experimental film that I think would work much better as three shirt films that one complete future    

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Warning – There is extensive use of Strobe Lighting in the second part of the trilogy.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Quantification Trilogy. Image Credit: Jeremy Shaw.

Review –


Today we look at a film that is truly experimental in scope and form. It is a film that has taken footage from the past (I believe) and then repurposed it into something new. This transformation in tone and purpose through editing is not something I have seen before.

So to set the scene, in the distant future the human race has become extinct, replaced instead by quantum humans and their universal connection to the hive. However, there are some quantum humans that due to a genetic quirk have reverted a little back to their long-dead human ancestors. These Quickeners have gathered together in Area 23 in the long-abandoned American continent to practice old rituals and to find some meaning away from the hive.

Continue reading →

Movie Review – Kidnapping Stella

Posted on by
Reply

TL;DR – It starts really strong with moments of real tension, but it is let down by a muddled ending.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Kidnapping Stella. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

Today we get to look at a film that is almost the reverse of the norm. It is not at all uncommon for there to be English adaptions of foreign language films as there is a long history of people assuming that subtitles are a real barrier for commercial success. Well, today we get to see a film that has made the reverse trip with Kidnapping Stella being the German adaptation of the English film The Disappearance of Alice Creed. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how well a film does going the other way across the channel. Though I must say that at times this is a deeply confronting film, and you should probably know that before jumping in.

So to set the scene, we open in on two gentlemen Tom (Max von der Groeben) and Vic (Clemens Schick) as they go about their day running errands and picking up supplies. They renovate a room, get a van ready, and put in a new bed. All really normal, but for the fact that they block out all of the windows, and that they have masks. Because what they are doing is not renovating, they are prepping the room for something, and that something is Stella (Jella Haase) who they kidnap off the street to ransom back to her parents.    

Continue reading →

Movie Review – A Cure for Wellness

Posted on by
7

TL;DR – A truly unpleasant film, there are not enough interesting individual shots in the world that can save this overlong mess of a film

Score – 1.5 out of 5 stars

A Cure for Wellness. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review –

Oh my, where do I begin with A Cure for Wellness, it is a difficult film to approach because individual aspects of the film are quite interesting, but yet other parts of the film were horrific, and yet still so much of was just an overextended morose mess. Ok, to start the review off we will go through the setup of A Cure for Wellness, talk about its interesting aspects, and then look at its many, many issues.

Continue reading →