No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His…
In Christian Petzold’s latest film, sexual tensions rumble with such intensity that the only natural outcome is the eruption of a devastating forest fire.…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time…
It’s been a particularly horny year for films. Perhaps not unnaturally; having been cooped up indoors while the viral blizzard howls outside, stoked by…
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…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the…
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…
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,…
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…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing…
“Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had…