Woyzeck (1979)

I keep thinking I’ve only seen Kinski in, at most, Creature (aka Titan Find), a movie that I was drawn to by my childhood worry and concern about images from it in a magazine (the Feburary 1985 Monsterland) floating around my childhood home that also featured images from Return of the Living Dead. Both held […]

Das Leben der Anderen [The Lives of Others] (2006)

I recalled as I sat down to write this that I unfairly held something against the movie–the sense of foreign language “Oscar bait”?¹ It was when I was reading through reviews after watching that I remembered: it won best Foreign Language over El Laberinto del Fauno, which thoroughly upset me at the time.² I knew it […]

Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten [Ballad of the Little Soldier] (1984)

I’m behind on my planned movie-watching, so I started digging for the shorter films I own. This is one of the shortest, at a mere 46 minutes, but I’m not entirely certain it was the wisest of first dives. Child soldiers are a sobering concept in general, and a film centered on the idea is […]

Angst [Fear] (1983)

Unusual, half-known and heavily banned, this is not often a recipe for my interest. That Klaus Schulze (once of Tangerine Dream) scored it and much was made of the cinematography, it sounded like a more interesting film than I might other feel (for instance: I have zero plans to ever watch The Men Behind the Sun, Salo, […]

Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum] (1979)

When I gain a realm of taste that is derived from choices made by others–a distributor, a record label, so on–it gives me both confidence and breadth in my exploration. I choose those that I feel I can trust, but never know exactly where they will lead. So it was that I acquired Volker Schlöndorff’s […]

Der Himmel über Berlin (lit, “The Heavens Over Berlin”) [Wings of Desire] (1987)

After watching this, my father immediately told me about it and said it was the first film that he immediately re-watched with commentary. He loaned me the movie at the time, but I bought it before I watched it and so returned his copy, then took these last few months to get around to seeing […]

Lola Rennt [Run Lola Run] (1998)

German is the language (other than English, of course) that I come closest to understanding without aid, though not enough to read or listen to it and fully understand. Part of this comes from an ear for similarities in sound that can tie words together, part comes from English’s Germanic origins and a fair bit […]

Das Boot (1981)

NOTE: This review refers to the 209 minute “Director’s Cut.” Das Boot has a peculiar release history, having a number of cuts not far from Blade Runner, but a much greater disparity in running time between any of them. Originally released theatrically at 150 minutes, later in two miniseries forms, one set of three 100 […]

Was tun, wenn’s brennt? [What to Do in Case of Fire] (2001)

Honestly, the title of this film is not “What to Do in Case of Fire” which is more a statement, but something more like “What do you do when things are burning?” I realize this is semantic, but it annoys me that they changed it from a question, and it’s slightly awkward in the sense […]

Große Mädchen weinen nicht [Big Girls Don’t Cry] (2002)

One of many foreign, arthouse and independent films I’ve purchased in the past year or so without much awareness of their quality, content or, really, anything else, I didn’t approach any with real expectations, other than the idea that, indeed, they would be of said varieties–each of which does have some kind of feeling, even […]