Diane Kruger won Best Actress at Berlin for her work in Fatih Akin’s thriller In the Fade set in contemporary and über rainy Hamburg. Katya, a native German and her Kurdish-German husband are trying to live a normal life following his drugs conviction and jail term. They’re doing well and have a young son but one morning she’s off to the spa… View Post
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Happy End may or may not be a sequel to his arresting masterpiece Amour, and the earlier Cache, but it is the latest example of Haneke’s supreme talents as a filmmaker. It appears to be a continuation, at the very least, of the Laurent family stories, heavy on psychological elements and tough truths, revealed and “hidden” in a… View Post
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s films are singularly unsettling and voyeuristic; they are uncomfortable, icy and compelling. His 2009 stunner The White Ribbon predicted the Nazi rise to power in Germany via the perpetrators’ childhood cultural traumas. The children went on to kill millions in the Holocaust. Haneke leaves enough space for us to lock in on a psychological level and… View Post
Daniel Day-Lewis says he’s made his last film. By my count that’s three times since 2003 that he`s said as much, so I pay zero attention because he’s back in frequent collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful Phantom Thread. If it is his last gig, what a way to go. The film follows a difficult and claustrophobic affair between a famous British women’s… View Post
Let’s face it, for many of us, the days of partying like it’s 1999, ended in 1999! Whether you have young kids with early bedtimes, a job that saps the life and energy out of you, or just a plain ol’ fashioned desire to enter into 2018 with 8 solid hours of sleep under your belt, there are many reasons… View Post
I, Tonya is a trip! The sad, low rent story of skating Olympian Tonya Harding whose team infamously hobbled her skating rival Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994 is a masterful and savage biopic that teeters on satire. Harding was born dirt poor and loved skating and became one of the best in the US, a two time Olympian, the first woman… View Post