In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often…
Caleb Michael Johnson’s sophomore feature amounts to little more than a clumsy attempt at intellectual horror. We open on a shot of a dog’s wagging…
Bad Tales certainly tries hard but comes off mostly like an artfully-directed after-school special. The stink of desperation wafts heavily from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s…
The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures, so…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in…
Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense, it…
IFFR returns this week, a short couple months after its last iteration. As a response to the pandemic, IFFR 2021 decided to split itself a…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror…
In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as…
Jerichow isn’t really an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, at least not any more than Transit is an adaptation of Casablanca or Undine…
All Light, Everywhere is a Herculean effort meriting praise, but one in which the parts prove more impressive than the whole. If it hadn’t already…
Kala azar is an obvious, stultifying, and facile lecture masquerading as art cinema. Kala-azar is the Indian name for Black Fever, a potentially fatal parasitic disease,…
The liminal sensibilities of Christian Petzold’s films accord their material spaces an air of contradiction: the gleaming surfaces of steel walls and glass doors exude…
Over the course of his decades-long career, Christian Petzold has come to shape something like a cinema of failure; potently and precisely carving itself from…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only…
This latest Conjuring effort displays a bit more awareness of precisely where its strengths lie, resulting in a lot of dumb fun for those happy…
Slow Machine introduces a directing duo happy to noodle and experiment with various modes, but who aren’t yet refined or cogent enough in purpose. Jacques…
Following his breakthrough film, The State I Am In, Christian Petzold returned to smaller-scale television production for his next project, 2001’s Something to Remind Me.…