Armin Mueller-Stahl

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In its most unsettling scenes, set at a castle being used as a military training school for Hitler youth, Volker Schlondorff’s film “The Ogre” suggests the stirring cinematic equivalent of a Wagner opera.

As you watch hundreds of adolescent boys being hyped with a messianic blend of heroic German mythology and Nazi ideology and participating in torch-lit rituals and athletic contests, you sense of the thrill of being a boy swept up in the demented pageantry and passion of the Nazi cause.Read More »

Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl (Brandauer), an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.Read More »

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In post-war West Germany, the charming Von Bohm is appointed a city’s new Building Commissioner. His morality is tested when he unknowingly falls in love with a brothel worker, Lola, the paid mistress of a corrupt property developer.Read More »

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In this “film essay,” director Alexander Kluge handles two different stories with both fictional and documentary aspects. In one story, a foster parent cares for a traumatized young girl who is now an orphan after witnessing a car crash that killed both her parents. After the foster-parent does the right thing and takes the girl to her aunt — her court-appointed guardian — she is shocked to see that neither the wealthy aunt nor her servants are very interested in the girl. An unusual decision follows. In the other story, a director goes blind in the middle of a film project but has to be kept on because of his contract. This situation leads to some philosophizing on the nature of film and art in the modern world. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

Spider’s Web is a 1989 West German film directed by Bernhard Wicki. It is based on the eponymous 1923 novel by Joseph Roth. It was chosen as West Germany’s official submission to the 62nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, but did not manage to receive a nomination. The film was the last ever submission by West Germany, due to German reunification in 1990, Germany competed at the 63rd Academy Awards as a single country.

The film was also entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Vienna 1938. After Kristallnacht and the murder of his father, Ferry Tobler, a young Viennese Jew flees from the Nazis and profiteers of Vienna. He scrambles for various exit visas and entry permits, and finally arrives in Prague, where he meets an anti-Nazi German soldier who has escaped from Dachau and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris and eventually to Marseille, hoping to sail to a safe port.’
– National Center for Jewish FilmRead More »

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Armin Mueller-Stahl plays Hungarian family man Mike Laszlo, whose American citizenship is suddenly threatened when reports unearthed from a UN basement link him to horrific war crimes as part of an SS Death Squad.

He immediately turns to his daughter, defense lawyer Ann Talbot (Jessica Lange) who dismisses the charge, assuming it to be a simple case of mistaken identity. When the case progresses quickly to court, Ann goes against the advice of her peers and represents her father to defend him against the onslaught of allegations thrown at him by the prosecution (Frederic Forrest). Read More »

In Taxandria, a totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watched have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefor has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror. The digital era has begun. “Servaisgraphy” threatens to become obsolete. It was finally only to be used for the fabric of the backgrounds and no longer for the encrustation.Read More »

Plot
In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers’ arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

Nominated
Venice Film Festival – Golden Lion – 1983Read More »