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Pick Up the Pieces: Leonardo DiCaprio is The Revenant
Alejandro González Iñarritu is the most versatile director of our time. After the highly complex Birdman, which reflects on media and show business in a self-referential way, he surprises the public with a movie which couldn’t be baser. It reminds me of the famous quote by Auguste Rodin, ‘I choose a block of marble and […]
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Lost in Darkness: The Cruel Post-war Germany of Finsterworld
Finsterworld by Frauke Finsterwalder is a movie that tells a lot about Germany to foreigners as well as to the homegrown. Scripted by the director’s husband, the renowned Swiss author Christian Kracht, Finsterworld provides a broad kaleidoscope of German life today. Through several entangled stories the viewer is drawn into a world of ugliness, fetish, […]
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In the Cards: Christian Bale is Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups
Terrence Malick remains an enigma. First, the reclusive director vanished from the filmmaking landscape for two solid decades between his sophomore effort Days Of Heaven and the acclaimed The Thin Red Line. Then, he returns with a new movie every other year from 2011’s The Tree Of Life on, after never having spent less than […]
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Broadway The Hard Way: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, or the Psyche of an Actor
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu had already been a known commodity in Hollywood circles for a while. His debut feature, Amores Perros, became a fan favorite, while his U.S. projects 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful landed him the star power of Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Sean Penn, or Javier Bardem. With his fifth movie, Birdman: […]
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The Monster Is Loose: Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as a Parable of Putin’s Russia?
Russian cinema has always commanded international respect, even when things were frosty between the Soviet Union and the ‘West.’ The same still holds true for the modern arthouse movies from the country. Since the early 2000s, Andrei Zvyagintsev has become one of the more distinguished Russian directors. Particularly because of the recent crisis between his […]
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The Midget’s Lament: Tod Browning’s Freaks, or the Birth of Cinema from the Spirit of the Fair
Every once in while movies give a new direction to pop culture by starting a new epoch. Take A Clockwork Orange (1971), which influenced the punk movement by providing a new dress and language code for youth culture. Moreover, a hip-hop culture without Scarface (1983) would be hard to imagine. The movie I am going […]
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Food, Glorious Food: Chef Jon Favreau Goes Back to the Roots
In Hollywood, Jon Favreau has become a household name as the man at the helm of the Iron Man trilogy. While he admittedly did a commendable job as the director of the first two movies from that franchise, he actually started out as an indie comedy filmmaker. Chef, a pet project of his, sees the […]
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The Doors of Perception: Nietzsche Revisited in The Diving Bell & The Butterfly
Le scaphandre et le papillon by the American artist and director Julian Schnabel is a good example of what cinema is able to accomplish. Based on a novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, the movie is depicting his real and unique destiny. After a stroke Bauby (Quantum Of Solace […]
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The Musical Box: Marion Cotillard Plays Wicked Games in Love Me If You Dare
Jeux d’enfants by French director Yann Samuell begins as a rather sad version of Amélie but develops a dynamic of its own which leads to catastrophe. The young Julien Janvier (Guillaume Canet), whose mother is on the brink of dying from cancer, meets Sophie Kowalsky (Marion Cotillard), a Polish classmate who is bullied. They become […]
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Pleasure to Kill: Winona Ryder and Christian Slater Get Rid of the Heathers
Heathers is maybe the first realistic high-school movie and – at the same time – the most sophisticated. Due to its highly intelligent script, this movie has the depth and the wit of a Shakespearean play. It starts like your usual John Hughes or ‘Brat Pack’ film, with teenagers struggling with everyday problems in their […]
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Sexual Healing: Charlotte Gainsbourg Enters the Dark Side in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. II
The second act of Nymphomaniac isn’t the first sequel shot by notorious Danish director Lars von Trier; that honor belongs to the horror movie Epidemic. Yet his latest two-part film carries the distinction that it comes with the first cinematic cliffhanger in his storied career – one that works almost like a coitus interruptus in […]
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Lust for Life: Charlotte Gainsbourg Becomes Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
Lars von Trier has never run away from controversy. The Danish enfant terrible has rather made a career out of embracing it – whether by being banned from the Cannes Film Festival for fascist remarks or by tackling the lives of mentally challenged people in Idiots. Whereas his 2011 feature, Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst, was […]
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Money for Nothing: Martin Scorsese Makes Leonardo DiCaprio The Wolf Of Wall Street
After some rather unconventional career choices lately, Martin Scorsese has finally returned to the world he knows best – that of the real-life gangsters transported to the big screen. For The Wolf Of Wall Street, he has also brought back his favorite actor of the last decade and a half, Leonardo DiCaprio. This time, however, […]
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The Sand Pebbles
The Sand Pebbles, starring the “King of Cool” Steve McQueen, is one of the best films of the 1960s. The film focuses on the journey of a Navy Engineer by the name of Jake Holman in the year 1926 in China, a time of great political upheaval. After nearly a century of foreign domination, with […]
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Basket Case: James Stewart Defends Ben Gazzara in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy Of A Murder
James ‘Jimmy’ Stewart is one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors of all time. His noteworthy movies range from an Oscar-winning performance in Frank Capra’s The Philadelphia Story to becoming an Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite in Rear Window and Vertigo. After ‘Hitch’ had infamously ditched him for Cary Grant on North By Northwest, James Stewart managed to […]