Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : 'Do you mind if I sit here for two hours?' Thomas ( Vladimir Vulević ) in a scene from German writer-director Angela Schanelec 's relationship drama, ' My Wife Cries ' ( Meine Frau weint ). Still courtesy of Berlinale . The films of German writer-director Angela Schanelec require context. Her cinema is of the domestic. Characters ride bicycles, are cultured and have blue or white-collar jobs. They are considerate inasmuch as circumstances will allow. Nothing excessive occurs on camera. Schanelec lowers the threshold for what might be considered exceptional. She minimises the expressiveness of her actors. Her films aren’t deadpan. Rather her characters are focussed on what is front of them at that particular moment. There is little intentional humour or extra-diegetic music. Credits are handwritten. The part played by each person in the production isn’t differentiated. In some scenes, Schanelec places her camera far from the action. An event unfolds; we ...

  Contains spoilers. You wait for a film in which a married woman played by Vicky Krieps travels to a Nordic country and two arrive within twelve months. Krieps’ terrific central performance in co-writer-director Emily Atef’s French language drama, Plus Que Jamais ( More Than Ever ) is award-worthy by any reasonable measure of quality. It follows her lighter turn as a filmmaker in Mia Hansen-L ø ve’s Bergman Island , in which her character travelled to the late Ingmar Bergman’s home for inspiration, as well as her performance in the fanciful year-in-the-life of Empress Sisi in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage . Krieps has more interesting roles in films by women directors than in the work of their male counterparts, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread notwithstanding. Her achievements on screen have reached a purple patch. Co-written by Lars Hubrich, More Than Ever explores a simple truth more clearly than any film I’ve seen on the subject: the living and dying have nothing to say...

  A frivolously enjoyable if slight ‘odd couple’ romantic comedy, German writer-director Nicolette Krebitz’s fourth feature, A E I O U – Das Schnelle Alphabet der Liebe ( A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love ) wears its subversion lightly. Ageing widowed actress Anna (Sophie Rois) reluctantly agrees to offer a juvenile purse snatcher, Adrian (Milan Herms) speech therapy to help him with an upcoming theatrical performance. The young man becomes obsessed and leads Anna into a life of crime on the French Riviera, until the law catches up with them. Krebitz, primarily an actress with more than sixty credits, doesn’t have a particularly satirical eye. At a certain point, she – and we – forget that her protagonist is an actress with a keen awareness of clich é , including the relationship in which Anna finds herself. There is some enjoyment in seeing an older woman find pleasure with a younger man, but at no point is the source of Adrian’s delinquency dealt with. The film begins with...

  The oddball pairing of Maren Eggert and Dan Stevens – she from the indie, arty films of Angela Schanelec, he from Downton Abbey and The Guest – gives director Maria Schrader’s film, Ich Bin Dein Mensch ( I’m Your Man ) a lift. As Dr Alma Felser (rhymes with Alka Seltzer) she is frazzle-haired, uninterested in relationships, having failed at one, and utterly devoted to her work at the Pergamon Museum. As Tom, he resembles a high-functioning autistic person whose social skills are at best mechanical. That is because he’s a robot – artificial intelligence in human form, programmed to meet Alma’s preferences and to learn from his mistakes. But if Alma failed with another human being, can she really expect to find happiness with artificial intelligence? Schrader and her co-writer Jan Schomberg have taken an idea from Emma Braslavsky’s novel, The Night was Pale, The Lights were Twinkling and turned it into a Making Mr Right -style romantic comedy. Braslavsky’s novel was set in 2060...

  What drives a woman to sleep with both a man and his adult son in the same house? In her second feature film, Ein fisch der auf dem R ücken schwimmt ( A Fish Swimming Upside Down ), Bulgarian-born, German-based writer-director Eliza Petkova doesn’t answer this question directly. However, she drops a heavy hint. At dinner, some way into the drama, crop-haired Andrea (Nina Schwabe) is asked about her past, having just heard a story how Martin (Theo Trebs) had cut the roses from the family rose bush to present to his teacher. Andrea deflects the question: ‘I can’t remember anything. I have no past.’ To me, this means one thing: trauma. Andrea was subject to abuse early in her life from the adults around her. She negotiated it by accommodation, understanding that those who made demands of her required unconditional tenderness. She never recognised that she should say ‘no’; that no person can be all things to everyone. Her response to being touched is to surrender herself. It is a ...

  One of the arguments proposed for not venerating women’s cinema more is that (apparently) there are not enough recognised auteurs. These are directors with signature styles that work through a theme over a body of work. Whether it is Alfred Hitchcock’s meditation on male desire, or Steven Spielberg’s yearning for a lost father or Martin Scorsese asking (again and again) whether forgiveness for violent acts and other misdemeanours is possible. The auteur poses the same question in different ways, as if unsatisfied with the answer they got last time around. Art is enquiry and true artists are always curious. If you meet a director who doesn’t ask questions, then how can they possibly answer them on a movie set? With this in mind, I should like to nominate the German writer-producer-editor-director Angela Schanelec as an auteur. Not because I have seen the many other feature films she has made since the 1990s ( Places in Cities , Passing Summer , Marseille , Afternoon and, most r...

  We like to believe that everyone can be helped. Human beings can be lifted out of poverty, taught to walk again, have their cancer removed and their psychic trauma reduced to a manageable state. Central to this is an unwritten contract between society and the individual: submit to treatment and you will be cured. The individual must buy into their own salvation. Unfortunately, some people can’t and won’t submit. They have their addictions to manage, their perceived needs and bad habits. Benni (Helena Zengel) the nine-year old titular System Crasher of writer-director Nora Fingscheidt’s film is one such person. She cannot bear to have her face touched – it turns her feral. Rejected by multiple group homes for her violent conduct and unable to live with her mother (Lisa Hagmeister) – Benni doesn’t approve of her mother’s boyfriend and when she won’t ask him to leave, Benni attacks her with a jug – she remains a force to be contained. Micha (Albrecht Schuch) has an idea: to take her...

  Recently, one of my reviews was re-tweeted with the words ‘spoiler alert’. A film review in the proper sense is a re-watching of the film in the head of the reviewer - in other words, an act of memory - with some commentary. Other forms of writing are consumer advice. I do reviews. I don’t offer consumer advice. The purpose of the review is to draw links from the film I have watched to other movies and to representations of life in general, hopefully with some humour. Many of the films I describe won’t be seen by users of the platform Bitlanders, so I am to some extent describing a foreign culture. The words ‘spoiler alert’ sting because they refer to a corrupted form of film reviewing, one frequently prone to superlatives offered without adequate evidence. Most reviewers talk up films, I just talk about them. German writer-director Susanne Heinrich has crafted a film, Das Melancholische Mädchen , translated into English as ‘ Aren’t You Happy? ’ which is a commentary of the rep...