Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Nosferartu (1979)

In his 1979 remake of the 1922 original film, Werner Herzog brings sound and colour to the story, which helps him achieve his usual painterly, mesmerizing style, but he also takes the opportunity to align the story much more closely with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which of course is exactly what Nosferatu is - Dracula with the title and character names changed after a copyright challenge from Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker.

★★★★☆

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Lara (2019)

All sorts of ideas about what is going on will run through your head watching this intense and drily funny character study of Lara (Lara Jenkins, the ubermother of a concert pianist) who, on her sixtieth birthday, buys up the remaining tickets for her son's premiere concert recital and spends the hours leading up to the event handing them out to her acquaintances, and exactly who she is and what she is doing and what drives her, and how and why she drives so many around her away, not just old coworkers who hate her but also her son who appears not to welcome her to his concert, isn't perfectly clear until the film ends with the formidable lead Corianne Harfouch's casting one last long deliciously ice-blue stare down the camera...and then you'll know.

★★★★★

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Gutland (2016)

Gutland (literally 'The Good Land') is a large part of Luxembourg, I didn't know, and is presumably where this rural noir is set: Jes turns up one day looking for farmhard work, but the fact he is toting a bag full of cash suggests he has other reasons for being suddenly in this lush and peaceful, prosperous and oh-so-welcoming land, but the locals are about to be rocked by other, more menacing outsiders.

★★★★☆

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Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh, Ich Seh) (2014)

On many fronts, this Austrian horror thriller is remarkable - for the beauty of its photography, the uniqueness of its chilling premise - but not least it is remarkable for the extraordinary performances of Elias and Lucas Schwarz in the lead roles as twin boys who start to suspect the person with the bandaged head in their home is not their mother -  the twins appear to mirror and morph in and out of each other in a way that makes you start to wonder if the characters are played by just one actor, not two.

★★★★☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) (1998)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

When her boyfriend loses a large bag of cash on a train, Lola has just twenty frantic minutes to find a replacement bag of money and get it to her boyfriend before anyone scary gets to him, and this inventive, low budget German independent film with a pulsing techno soundtrack gives Lola the opportunity of a do-over when things don't pan out, a sensational quirk in 1998 but one that seems pedestrian by today's Memento/Sliding Doors standards.

★★☆☆☆

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

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Mostly Martha (Bella Martha) (2001)

Even though No Reservations with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart is basically a scene-by-scene remake, this original from Germany is a far superior film - funny, affecting, and involving, not odd, charmless and limp - but like the Catherine Zeta-Jones film, this too irks with those unnecessary shrink appointments, tacked on at the start and finish and thrown in occasionally here and there, suggesting that despite her being the top chef in Germany who runs her own kitchen and despite her taking in her deceased sister's daughter and caring for her without hesitation, and despite her choosing to take time-out in the walk-in refrigerator rather than lose her steam at at her team, Martha apparently feels herself in need of a mental health professional - or perhaps the writer feels she is - because...why?...she is orderly, in control, and lives life without a man?

★★★★☆

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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) (2007)

This film adaptation of Adolf Burger's memoirs, historically fascinating, gut-wrenching, and haunting, details his time in a concentration camp, a part of a team of prisoners forced to work towards the Nazi's goal of flooding the British economy with counterfeit money.

★★★★☆

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Compulsion (aka Sadie) (2016)

Orgies in movies are usually not grubby suburban affairs involving bogan swingers but are instead more often hypnotic masquerades held in castles with everyone sashaying about in slow-mo wearing masks - Venetian and sequinned, not gimp - and resplendent in tuxedoes and ballgowns, not chaps, and the party always proves so tedious that by movie's end, sex and death, pleasure and pain must become synonymous; of course, our heroine here ends up running, but might she just be afraid of experiencing the vice-like grip (around her neck) of simply too much pleasure, yawn?

★★☆☆☆

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Fado (2016)

It is about a med student who goes to Lisbon to reunite with his girlfriend so maybe the title Fado has something to do with the traditional Portugese music, fado, or maybe it is a portmanteau of the med student's name, Fabian, and his girlfriend's name, Doro, suggesting their union - them together, reciprocally - is responsible for his monstrous jealousy...but that can't be right, so maybe the remaining letters of their names, BIAN and RO suggest they are black to an absent white...this is where the under-engaged brain of a viewer goes when watching this relationship drama and domestic abuse case study of only the barest surface details - we do not learn anything about his abuser psychology or the reasons for her putting up with his green monster over and over again.

★★☆☆☆

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The Door (Die Tür) (2009)

Forget how he manages to time travel (by following a resurrected butterfly through a hole in a wall) and forget how it ends (fairly nonsensically) and just enjoy the quirky thriller in between, as a man whose neglect leads to the death of his daughter ventures back in time to momentarily enjoy the good things of the past...before chaos reigns.

★★★☆☆

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Frantz (2016)

In the aftermath of World War I, a grieving young German woman comes across a foreigner at the grave of her fiance, in this beautifully photographed, beautifully acted, beautifully scored, and beautifully unhurried story of romance and intrigue from director François Ozon.

★★★★☆

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Land of Mine (Under sandet) (2017)

Imagine the task of Sisyphus compounded with an explosive boulder and an illusory end-in-sight and you've got this drama about German boy soldiers retained in Denmark at the end of World War II, tasked with defusing 1.5 million landmines: a powder keg of a story threatening at every second to explode, made only slightly less thankless by the presence of Roland Moller as Sergeant Carl Rasmussen, the overseer of the work who grows ever more sympathetic towards the plight of his young charges, which is one small improvement upon Sisyphus.

★★★★☆

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The White Ribbon (2009)

In this, another grim Michael Haneke movie, German village folk are besieged by strange, er, accidents, and while it is an intriguing mystery with a fairly satisfying conclusion, it is also quite disturbing and bleak with its main character providing a bleak monotone voiceover narration while the bleak story unhurriedly unfolds in bleak (but often stunning) black and white photography.

★★★☆☆

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