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Harry Baer plays a newly released ex-convict who slowly but surely finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. Meanwhile, his attentions are torn between two women (Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta) and the friend (Günther Kaufmann) who shot his brother. This sensual, artfully composed film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a study of romantic and professional futility.Read More »
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Based on the personal recollections of Danish film journalist Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is an episodic but thorough examination of the man and his works. Starting with the terrible reception of his first feature film Love Is Colder Than Death at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, the bio-doc builds through photographs, stills, audio recordings and filmed interviews a portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his loose but consuming relationships with his family and the extended families he created around him. [MARK WILSHIN, Dog and Wolf]Read More »
Frost is a landmark European film, cementing Fred Kelemen as an inheritor of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. This three-hour epic 16mm film focuses on a mother and son fleeing her abusive husband in Berlin and wandering the former East Germany seeking a town that has long since vanished. Set during a sunless Christmas, Frost slowly unfolds during their one-week odyssey across glacial landscapes, towards peace. Introduced by the film critic Jonathan Romney.Read More »
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This is an excellent hour-and-a-half documentary overview of Fassbinder’s career. For those new to the director, this is the perfect starting place (perhaps even before watching the films).Read More »
A “Three Movie Buffs” review:
This early Fassbinder film tells the story of two very different women, both friends, in a small German town. One is Berta an innocent maid and virgin who falls hopelessly in love with Karl, the first man she has sex with. The other woman is Alma the town slut. She is sleeping her way through all the soldiers (or pioneers as they are called) that are in town to build a bridge.Read More »
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“A comedy in six parts,” each introduced with a quote taken from a public bathroom wall (“Slave seeks master to train me as his dog,” etc.). The Kaiser Wilhelm Church dominates the Berlin skyline as seen from a glass-paneled, high-rise office, a shooting takes place on a monitor. Surveillance footage? No, the ending of The Devil, Probably. Each generation has the revolutionaries it deserves, after the Baader-Meinhoff affair you’re stuck with middle-class ninnies: leader Volker Spengler secretary Hanna Schygulla, schoolteacher Bulle Ogier, composer Udo Kier, housewife Margit Carstensen. The puppet master is the industrialist (Eddie Constantine) who heralds cinema’s utopian lies (“As long as films are sad, life isn’t”); his corporate must promote security equipment, so he manipulates the radicals into kidnapping him and sits back to enjoy the clown show.Read More »