Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  For film directors, third films can be difficult. Your debut has calling card qualities - pace, invention and a fresh perspective. Your follow-up can consolidate your strengths but also make a statement about what you’re really about. Your third film is more commercial. You show what you can do with someone else’s material and – on occasion – someone else’s script. If you discount An Angel at My Table (a TV series released as a movie), The Portrait of a Lady is Jane Campion’s third film, a dull and emotionally unengaged adaptation of a Henry James novel starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich. Quentin Tarantino’s third film is Jackie Brown , a remarkably unadventurous adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch . If you discount Boxcar Bertha , an assignment for Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese’s third feature is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in which he proved – sort of – that he could make a women’s picture. Steven Soderbergh’s third film was the mechanical King of the Hi...

Pictured : An extended family (from left to right, Peter Kurth, Max Riemelt, Lotte Shirin Keiling, Sandra  Hüller,  Anselm Haderer and  Ursula Werner )  are faced with the proceeds of their crime in a scene from the 1990-set German reunification comedy, ' Zwei zu Eins ' (' Two into One ') written and directed by Natja Brunckhorst . Still courtesy of X-Filme Verleih / Warner Bros . (Germany). Natja Brunckhorst has had an unusual, mould-breaking career in cinema, from child actress playing a teenage heroin-addict in Uli Edel’s 1981 international hit, Christiane F , to roles as an adult in film and television to screenwriting and from 2021, feature film directing with Alles in bester Ordnung . On the face of it, she is Germany’s answer to Jodie Foster. There is nothing new about actresses retreating behind the camera as the roles dry up, but Brunckhorst initially chose screenwriting above directing, perhaps as way of an easier way of achieving career transition. Her s...