Germany

Desciption from the Criterion version:
Germany in the autumn of 1957. Lola (BarbaraSukowa), a seductive cabaret singer and prostitute, exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out–she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor (Mario Adorf) against the new straight-arrow building commissioner (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.Read More »

Quote:
As great as it is merciless, a film that inevitably precipitates violent disagreements, Fox and His Friends (the rhyming German title of which roughly translates as Fists of Freedom or, better, Might Makes Right) is the male mirror of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: a portrait of class exploitation and emotional sadomasochism amongst a group of homosexuals. Fassbinder plays Fox, a carnival entertainer who wins a lottery and thereby becomes an alluring object of desire for an antiques dealer who is on the verge of bankruptcy. The posh businessman takes the naïve carnie as his lover and introduces him to the world of Munich’s upper-crust gays, with tragic results.Read More »

Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis’ rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries. (IMDb)Read More »

Carl Celler (CC) Culture Institute specializes in selling art projects to big companies: Carl Celler, the dynamic boss with an inherent melancholic drift towards failure, feels that his first project proves to be a difficult one. For the project, he invited a young elite group of artists and curators to Berlin to realize a project: videos, photos, campaigns, and art objects about a specific topic, namely brand logos and animals. The invited artists are furnished with a sufficient budget and insight into Berlin’s arts milieu. Furthermore there are two male (anti-)models, Kai and Jork, arbitrarily chosen, non-styled, people from the street. Kai is over 30 and he confronts this world with nonchalance. He feels his late juvenile attitude is in anger and the ambition he encounters in CC takes him by surprise. Rena Yazka, one of the invited artists, catches his attention. Their little flirt is the background for Kai’s experience to become an object, to be regarded as a body. Is he in love – or only eroticized in this dazzling experience? Is he exploited and abused by the creative industry? The mood of this bizarre, tightened coolness gives way slowly to an existential problem. What kind of life are they working for, or, if they live for their work, what kind of life is that? (IMDb)Read More »

Kemal Kayankaya, a private detective, was hired by a Turkish women, Ilter, to search for his husband, Amend, who has been missing since the death of her father, Vassif. Unknownst to him, he was about to unravel the secrets of his client’s family, as well as their various dealings with the underworld and the police. Moreover, being a Turk raised in a German foster family, he has also begun to understand and accept his own ethnicity.Read More »

German plot description:

Quote:
Polizeimeisteranwärterin Ariane Fink aus Dortmund verschlägt es ausgerechnet nach Starnberg: gesichtsloses Städtchen, Wahnsinnssee. Höchste Millionärsdichte Bayerns. Eine Idylle mit Reißzähnen.

Und eben hier wird Ariane gleich an ihrem ersten Arbeitstag mit dem bayerischsten aller Klischees konfrontiert: Der tote Kini, oder besser gesagt, ein Wiedergänger von ihm, liegt am Ufer des Starnberger Sees, und zwar genau da, wo Ludwig II. 1886 ins Wasser ging.Read More »

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“The film is a melodrama in the high Sirk style (Leander is a cabaret singer in 1840s London who takes the rap when her lover passes a bad check and gets deported to the penal compound that was then Australia), but with a great deal of music, performed by Leander in the wrenchingly emotional style that has made her as much of an icon to German gays as Garland is to the US community.”Read More »

Umay is a young woman of Turkish descent, fighting for an independent and self-determined life in Germany against the resistance of her family. Her struggle initiates a dynamic, which results in a life-threatening situation.Read More »

Quote:
O-Take-San (Lil Dagover) is a beautiful young woman pursued by an evil Buddhist monk (Georg John) who wants to make her one of his many geishas. She has an affair with the Danish officer Niels Prien (Olaf J. Anderson) who leaves her alone and pregnant. O-Take-San considers ritualistic suicide when she is abandoned in this tragic melodrama directed by Fritz Lang. A nitrate print of the 1919 silent classic was found in the Dutch Film Museum and restored in 1988. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
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