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- Remember the Night
- What the heck, so it's Christmas, so one buys a 1.99 DVD with a supposed Christmas movie from 1940. It's all a bit sappy and unbelievable, but hey, it was a different time then. But in the end the movie doesn't decide whether the female lead is redeemed (via a lengthy prison spell) and then gets the male lead, or whether she is spared prison and gets her prince rather sooner via a christmas miracle. I suppose the viewer can decide for himself, but I fear the morals of the time demand the former. A very disappointing sudden ending. (Oh well, at least I got American Hustle for 2.99 at the same time :-)
- 25 km/h
- At the funeral of their father, two brothers meet for the first time for 30 years, get drunk, and decide to take their old mopeds on the cross-country trip they had always wanted to do. It doesn't go exactly as planned, but that's the charm of road movies. While the brothers do make up for lost time, occasionally the attempts to inject meaning and deepness are too clumsy or sappy. But a good cast more than makes up for that.
- Crooked House
- I generally go for Agatha Christie movies, and didn't even know this story. A private detective gets hired by his former girlfriend to investigate a suspicious death in her family. More mysterious events unfold as he investigates at the mansion, where the family does not get along with one another splendidly. But a lot of money is at stake that just about every one of them could use. Not-your-usual-suspect has their work cut out for them.
- A Simple Favor
- A much more comedic version of Gone Girl, with a few more twists and turns thrown in, might be the short description of this film. Both suspense and humor are in ample supply, making this a highly enjoyable film.
- Der Vorname
- The plan to name a son Adolf starts a very spirited discussion around a family dinner table which proves to be just the starting point for airing dirty laundry and revealing family secrets of all kinds. Being a comedy, even the deepest-held secrets provide fuel for laughter - a very funny film.
- Bad Times at the El Royale
- As usual, Jeff Bridges does not disappoint in this murderous thriller that delivers a bunch of corpses in a remote motel that attracts some special guests with its special features. Don't bet on who will kill who, and who will get out alive; plot twists abound. Great entertainment if you don't mind dead bodies.
- Mackie Messer - Brechts Dreigroschenfilm
- The film intermingles the plot of Brecht's WikiPedia:The_Threepenny_Opera with the story of how the theater production did not get remade as a movie. Film production was started, but Brecht wanted to make substantial and expensive changes -allegedly to sabotage the movie production entirely- and the whole thing ended amidst various law suits. The mixing of plot and meta-plot works well, the cast is superb, the visuals are appealing, and there's enough of the plot line in it to give a good idea of what The Threepenny Opera is all about for anyone who doesn't know it to begin with. Highly enjoyable.
- Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
- The life story of Hedy Lamarr, one of Hollywood's bombshell actresses of the 1930s and 40s, with lots of commentary from herself, her children, friends and colleagues. The fascinating story of her inventing radio frequency hopping (along with composer George Antheil), yet never receiving credit until old age, or remuneration in any form, is treated in detail.
- Mission: Impossible - Fallout
- A summer action flick like this one surely needs no plot description. The latest MI does not disappoint, taking itself not too seriously, and despite being almost 2.5 hours long rarely feels stretched. A good movie to see on a hot summer day in a cool cinema.
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
- Apart from the ridiculous premise (dinos have to be rescued from extinction by an impending volcano eruption), the film reassembles all the predictable elements: baddies out for a quick buck ending up as food, good guys being misled, a couple new nasty dino species, lots of chomp action etc. in a funny package. Never mind that the animals end up on the loose in a populated environment - the next sequel will deal with that.
- Usedom: Der freie Blick aufs Meer
- WikiPedia:Usedom might just be the loveliest of the German Baltic Sea islands, but ever-increasing tourism and a disregard for the WikiPedia:Resort_architecture for which it is famous make its future uncertain. This documentary traces the history of the island, what's happened to it since the fall of communism in Germany and Poland, and talks to people who make their living there.
- Rampage
- Glorious, funny nonsense. Nuff said.
- One Hour Photo
- A movie with a blond Robin Williams that has other surprises as well: although it's a suspenseful film surely headed towards some kind of showdown, nobody is actually killed, nor even intended to be killed. The main character veers between nice and sad, but ready to boil over when pushed hard enough. Robin Williams engagingly shows what he was capable of.
- The Death of Stalin
- A satire about the days following Stalin's death and the ensuing struggle amongst the Soviet leadership for survival, influence and succession. There's lots of dark humor; if there are no circumstances under which you would consider the death of an innocent person funny, then this movie is not for you. Some Pythonesque moments occur, not least courtesy of Michael Palin as Molotov, while Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev is hilarious. My kind of humour :-)
- Zwei Herren im Anzug
- A family saga covering 3 generations of a Bavarian family through the tumultuous 20th century, the movie depicts the story as father and son tell it to one another after the mother's funeral. As long repressed or forgotten memories are aired, sometimes for the first time, some unusual cinematography helps make it more than a father/son talk. I liked it, but it's not easy fare, not the least because of the heavy use of Bavarian dialect.
- Arthur & Claire
- An Austrian man and a Dutch woman who are both about to commit suicide happen to meet, and spend what is supposedly the last night of their lives together. It works out differently, but the journey is full of dark humor (Josef Hader, who admittedly has more of the better lines than Hannah Hoekstra, doing what he does best), and shows off the many sides of Amsterdam. Not exactly a comedy, but the film has its fair share of laughs amidst more somber moments.
- Game Night
- This was great fun. A game night amongst friends goes very wrong when the game is hijacked not just once, but twice. Enjoyable confusion results about which events are tied to which layer, which harkens back to The Game of 1997. The film does not take itself too seriously, allowing for hilarious moments amidst the ensuing carnage. It also introduces a new problem-solving approach: WWVDD as in What Would Vin Diesel Do?
- Berlinale 2018
- The Bookshop tells the story of a woman pursuing her dream of opening a bookshop in an English seaside village in 1959. But the powers that be don't want her there, and despite her best efforts, ultimately prevail. Though a sad story, humanity shines throughout the film in small ways, and give hope for the future, even if not for her.
- SPK Komplex is a German documentary about the WikiPedia:Socialist_Patients'_Collective in Heidelberg in the early Seventies, a psychiatrist's approach to mental illness based on the concept that nobody is mentally ill, but rather that society makes people ill, and so people's societal context needs to be changed rather than people themselves be treated. Part of the group took this a step further by trying to change society forcibly, and drifted towards the terrorism of the WikiPedia:Red_Army_Faction.
- Dovlatov chronicles six days in the life of Russian writer WikiPedia:Sergei_Dovlatov in Leningrad in 1971. Everything and everybody in the Soviet Union seems stuck, even the weather, but the artists and writers find ways to carry on, even if they can't publish or exhibit. It's heavy on dialogue, and I suspect something is lost in translation of the subtitles, but it's still an interesting in-depth look at a bleak place and time.
- 7 Days in Entebbe dramatizes the events leading up to WikiPedia:Operation_Entebbe, an Israeli military operation to end an aircraft hijacking in Uganda in 1976. The film does a good job of showing the differences of goals and tactics of the Palestinian and German hijackers, as well as the divergent opinions within Israeli government as to how to respond, and exposes the muddled revolutionary thinking so prevalent amongst German left-wing terrorists at the time. To the director's credit, the audience is spared a big Tom Clancy-style shootout at the end.
- Unsane is the story of a woman involuntarily being committed to a mental institution where a previous stalker of hers is apparently working. Starting out as the story of a troubled young woman, it develops into a fast-paced psycho thriller as the death toll rises. Shot entirely on an iPhone (and featuring a cameo by Matt Damon), this is another great film by director Steven Soderbergh.
- Museo tells the real-life story of a break-in into the Mexican Museum of Anthropology in 1985, where numerous valuable Maya artifacts were stolen. The film looks at the family lives of the perpetrators, their attempts to sell the loot, up to the eventual return to the museum. The plot is rolling along nicely, but doesn't really engage the viewer. Watching the two young men, mostly disaffected from their lives, go through it all seems a bit pointless.
- Wind River
- Life in Indian reservations can be nasty, brutish and short, all of which is on display here. A young FBI agent investigates a murder in an Indian reservation, and recruits a local hunter to help her. After lots of mental and physical violence they succeed, thanks to the hunter sniffing out all human prey. Not easy to watch, but a reminder of how grim conditions still are in those reservations.
- Loving Vincent
- An animated movie consisting of tens of thousands of paintings, done in the style of Van Gogh and bringing some of his best-known pictures to life, while exploring his life and death. While different from what I expected, it was thoroughly enjoyable. I only wish I'd checked out some of the paintings he made of his friends and acquaintances beforehand, so I'd have been better prepared.
- The Philadelphia Story
- While the story of a society girl who suddenly discovers inner values after several men tell it to her like it is just before her wedding isn't particularly appealing, it's well acted by a superb cast to good comedic effect. Allowances have to be made for the fact that the script is from 1940 - times have changed since then.
- Gremlins
- I remember that I consciously avoided this one when it came out, but having seen it now, I can't for the life of me say why. Most likely I wasn't a fan of horror back then, but it's really more of a comedy - I laughed a lot.
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