Rest of the Munich Film Festival for yours truly:

Angelo, directed by Markus Schleinzer: this one was a case of „director, I completely agree with the. point you‘re making, I get why you make it this way, but I still wish you‘d have told the story differently (while still making said point)“. Based on the 18th century story of Angelo Soliman, who ( Read more... )

Vita & Virginia: directed by Chanya Button, script by her and Eileen Atkins, on whose theatre play of the same name the movie is based, starring Gemma Aterton as Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia Woolf, Rupert Penry-Jones as Harold Nicolson (Vita's husband), Peter Ferdinando as Leonard Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini cameoing as ( Read more... )

Greetings from heatwave-ridden Munich (not much fun if you don't have AC and live under the roof, let me tell you), where this year's Munich Film Festival has started; yesterday was the first day. I went to a talk between director Emily Atef and journalist Katja Eichinger titled "The Female Gaze", and two movies - "Insumisas" (Cuban-Swiss, directed ( Read more... )

Jane Fonda in Five Acts: directed by Susan Lacy, a documentary on guess who. using old and new footage well. Jane Fonda's constant reinventing of herself sometimes eerily goes with the decades in question - 60s: girl next door turns sex symbol, 70s: political activist, 80s: wife of billionaire - and has the kind of happy ending uniting all the ( Read more... )

I am not a witch, directed by Rungano Nyoni, lik its director a Welsh-Zambian co-produced effort (with some German producing money added as well). This is a directing debut, half satire, half J'Accuse. Not without flaws, but it gets to you and makes you note the director's name down. Our heroine is a little girl later named "Shula" by one of the ( Read more... )

Parting (Raftan), directed by Navid Mahmoudi, is an Afghan-Iranian drama about a young Afghan couple trying to make it to Europe via Iran. The director himself arrived in Iran as a child, the film is dedicated "To my immigrant parents", most of the cast consists of lay Afghan workers living in Iran - the leading lady was one of the few who had ( Read more... )

The Infiltrator was part of the Bryan Cranston retrospective and basically came across as a well-made routine thriller without anything being either bad or having anything innovative going for it. I.e. if you've watched thrillers about undercover cops working to bring a drug cartel down, you can predict all of the story beats. (Other than ( one spoilerly bit )

Aka what consumes my days these days, as every year around this time. Of course, every year doesn't have Bryan Cranston as one of the guests of honor, so there was this additional perk.:) (Here's an article about the award ceremony he was there for.)


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Zorba the Greek is of course a decades old classic, but the former Lord Mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, who is extremely popular in Munich, finished his last term and the Munich Film Festival whose patron he always was (not just because it was his job as the Mayor; the current festival runner owes him her job, and he got the budget for the ( Read more... )

Actually, I watched Andrzej Wajda's Walesa: Man of Hope in between these two, which was a good thing, because while it's not a must but an entertaining biopic, it provided a breath of air between emotional pummelling by more original films for me. If you want a review, basically: what he saidOn to more directing debuts which are currently going ( Read more... )