Waedliman

A mini-series with 10 episodes of quite different quality, but which really picks up in the last third. In the middle, I thought that everything was dragging on a little too much, but from episode 7 onwards it got exciting. And in the end I'm glad I didn't stop, because what The Crowded Room offers is of a high quality. Of course, everything stands and falls with Tom Holland in the lead role, which he does really well. The switch from introverted to extroverted young man also works perfectly. And anyone who thinks that Amanda Seyfried's role is underexposed in the first few episodes should wait and see, because she too will be showcased even better. That's what I mean - the series lures you in a bit, but that's also what the story does, which offers quite a few surprises. However, if you know the name of the book on which it is based, you can already guess a lot. A successful series for a more mature audience that takes its time to discover the characters and their stories.

Why make a movie in 2008 that is set in the seventies and is as reactionary as a movie that was made 30 years earlier? Well, you have to ask James Bolton in particular, who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie himself. It's better not to ask the actors, because throughout the film they give the impression that they've each swallowed two Rohypnol and then shuffle back and forth in front of the camera or mumble their dialog. The result is a movie that really confirms all the clichés of queer films, right up to the death of the protagonist, who then returns as a ghost and takes his lover in his arms. What horrible nonsense with a TV movie look. If there are gay teenagers who grow up in the Bible Belt and see this movie, they have no choice but to commit suicide, at least that's the message of this film, because otherwise they will suffer sexual abuse by their father, rejection by society and above all classmates, the church anyway and ultimately everyone. I thought we were long past this deprikram, but at least in 2008 there was still a great genius at work. Not.

...and failed. Whatever the director was thinking when he tried to put the thin story on celluloid, I don't know. As an actor, reading the script, you immediately know that this is going to be a celebrated effort if you can be extremely pretentious because all the rest is going to fail. And so it does. The story is not plausible and whoever believes in it, probably also believes in the tooth fairy. I was never emotionally involved in anything. Phoenix gives a predictable performance showing his girth and proves that he doesn't want to be likeable at all. 10 points for that but all the rest goes down the drain because of boredom and senseless violence.

Horror films nowadays pretend to be special. The dialogue here is like a blurry painting. You desperately try to find something constructive in it but you fail, no matter what others say. Regarding this movie, it's a mess of pointless lines that lead nowhere and I haven't even started yet about the stiff acting of everybody involved. But we all know anyway that when in a supposedly scary movie - which this one isn't - we get snippets of snake images interwoven, that we are dealing with a bad movie. Yes, Longlegs can't resist the good old formula and it is so see-through and conservative that it's just boring. And the ending could mean they are already working on a sequel. Hell, no!

I'm always happy to see series that are specifically aimed at women and gay men. There's already enough for straight men, they don't have to like Hot In Cleveland and probably won't get along with these 4 tough women, but then that's the way it is. All 6 seasons have enough drive and humor to never get boring, after the first two episodes still bump a bit, and the absurdities gradually increase and my initial smiles sometimes turned into loud laughter. Especially when Victoria tried out a new product for her Japanese commercials. A refreshing series and many have already written about it, somehow also a bit like the legitimate successor to the Golden Girls. The heart is in the right place, and that's important.

It may be that Guy Ritchie has always dreamed of following in Tarantino's footsteps. Some sequences in this film remind me of Inglorious Basterds, but they're nowhere near the same class. Guy Ritchie has no class at all, he just throws something into a pot and sees what comes out. The result is German Nazis who can't speak German, homophobic references, stupid clichés that I as a German have long since stopped seeing, but which once again still seem to work well for a UK audience, violence that is senseless but "beautifully" staged - no, everything about this movie, whether based on true events or not, is tasteless. But not intentionally, Ritchie probably can't do any better. Oh, and the acting? Let´s not talk about it.

I'm a Streisand fan, but I'm sometimes at war with her movies. It's no different with Yentl. I realize that the cinematic aesthetic was different 40 years ago, but for me everything in Yentl seems sterile. Whether I find Streisand credible as a man remains to be seen, but the story isn't combative enough for me and the love story is too much in the foreground. The score, on the other hand, is an absolute treat, for me the soundtrack to the movie is one of the most fitting ever, every song is a feast for the ears, which unfortunately I can't say about the movie itself. So let´s give it 6 stars basically for the music.

After the first two episodes, I still thought that this series was quite flat, but entertaining. In the sixth episode, I fell asleep from boredom. Endless chatter in dialog situations where they are sitting on a couch, standing at the kitchen table or somewhere else, Cuoco with her usual 2 to 3 different facial expressions and a story that is completely on the spot and needs further twists due to a second season, which are just as implausible as the fact that the same 4 people always travel around the world together in their job and do nothing but party. Apart from the fact that the job as a flight attendant is completely different from what is portrayed here, nothing is original or exciting, but quickly flattens out and bobs along.

This is probably the worst documentary I have ever seen. How could anyone have the idea of putting a star in front of the camera for 90 minutes, melting into self-pity, no matter whose initiative, without telling anything other than an illness that gets in the way of vanity. I was never a fan of Celine Dion and always found her a bit strange and over the top. I always knew she wasn't an intellectual, but the way she presents herself in the midst of her wealth as if she were the Empress of Las Vegas is very strange to me. This documentary has not made me like Celine Dion any more as a person. Sorry, but this whole project seems to be a testimony of someone´s own vanity.

Whenever a series suddenly appears here with high ratings and praise, I'm warned. I suspect that I'm clearly too old for something that is probably mainly watched by a young male audience for whom it can't be bloody and cynical enough. Fallout is exactly that - a disgusting work of art in which the sex is inevitably followed by an orgy of violence, which is choreographed to be a treat. Not for me, I'm sorry, because I can see through the emptiness that surrounds the story and which is filled by a lot of assertion. First of all, that it is something like an observation of the state of human souls. That was already nonsense in Game Of Thrones and it's nonsense here too. The producers are coldly calculating on a hit with the target group of male adolescents. And they seem to have succeeded.

German film and me (also German) - it's never going to be a great love affair, especially when it's a comedy. The same stories have been told over and over again for at least 30 years. They take place either in Munich or Berlin, you live in huge old apartments and have problems that you would only smile about in real life. These problems are played up as if it were a matter of life and death, with dialog that is completely unrealistic and situations that want to be slapstick but are usually badly written to make you laugh. "Wunderschön" is a movie in which no one is likeable and nothing is important or credible. Even good actors (Gedeck, Król) perform badly and the fact that Karoline Herfurth won the Lubitsch Award is an insult to the grand master of humor. If you don't know how to write good comedies, take a look at the ancient Greeks. They knew their craft, but German screenwriters don't.

The first three episodes of the first season of this series show what it might have been like to move into a white neighborhood as a black middle-class couple in an exaggerated but uncomfortably believable way. And as if the scriptwriter had run out of breath, everything suddenly goes downhill from there. Characters are not thought through to the end or suddenly take on a paranormal life of their own, there is the inevitable and completely exaggerated violence that is unfortunately typical of such series and in the end the question remains as to what it's all about after the last few episodes are a jumble of genres, scraps of thought and nonsense. I almost fell asleep at the end, that's how boring the whole thing was and after the first episode of season 2 at the latest, I decided to stop. A good initial idea is literally sunk here.

It's always nice that even I, as a non-US citizen, recognize that there are Canadians among the cast, whether a film is set somewhere in the USA or not. I just hear it and then wonder if there might be a connection. But I should stop doing that. Just like looking for logic in thrillers, because it's usually not there. It's the same here. Everything we see could be exciting, but it only is to a limited extent. One reason for this is that this movie is once again too long. After quite exciting scenes, you just sit around and talk. Shailene Woodley in the leading role is always the same. She has a rather sparse acting repertoire, in her roles she is the fragile tough one, but I don't see what happens to this character. It's the same here. Everything remains vague and even the killer ends up being an uninteresting peripheral phenomenon in a movie that doesn't know what it wants to be. It's definitely not exciting, and it's only exciting to a limited extent. A missed opportunity.

Watching the movie after the horrific massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the subsequent invasion of Gaza does not change my basic attitude towards the situation in the Middle East. However, the film makes the whole ambivalence of the topic clear and leaves me with a few questions that I don't want to ask here, but with which I am not really satisfied. The motive for the suicide bombing is not clearly worked out for me and remains a vague motive. The interesting constellation of the first 40 minutes or so unfortunately turns into a tough affair in the second half of the film as the pace is slowed down and the search for motivation and justification for the assassination attempt takes on an aftertaste that I don't like at all and which I also consider dangerous. Ultimately, the film can certainly be accused of legitimizing the assassination attempt in question, if you only understand the people who do such things. But that falls far too short, because it only briefly touches on the historical and current contexts and unfortunately doesn't put them into context enough.

A story about people suffering from mental disorders can often be bitter. There are plenty of examples of this and sometimes they are a torture because they do not accurately portray illnesses or feast on the suffering of their characters. Silver Linings doesn't do that. On the contrary. Here we are presented with characters that we have to accept as they are, with all their quirks and demons that they have to deal with every day. And when you have two actors as good as Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who also seem to have good personal chemistry, there's hardly anything that can go wrong. I only wish that some of the dialogues had been shortened a little, as they sometimes dragged on a bit. The humor that runs through the entire film, which always finds a new commentary in Robert De Niro's wonderful facial expressions, is never offensive, but always creates a refreshing distance to this amusing dissection table, on which people like you and me find themselves who simply don't know what to do with themselves. We accompany this journey for a while and are probably delighted with the result at the end. And I can't get enough of Cooper and Lawrence's flair for comedy. It's a good thing they met again in American Hustle. Their acting style is a perfect match.

Auschwitz commandant Höss lives with his wife and children next to the concentration camp in a kind of postcard idyll, which makes the viewer wonder how much repression a person is actually capable of. The latest gossip is exchanged at the coffee table, items of clothing from deported Jews are picked out, the children play with the teeth of murdered people. The normality of this situation is occasionally broken in very brief moments by director Glazer in the play of his actors, but the world in which the family lives does not seem at all unusual in Nazi Germany. After the first 30 minutes or so, I was disgusted enough by these people that I waited for a story to develop. But unfortunately nothing happened. As much as I got involved in the saturation of colors and images by cinematographer Lukasz Zal and especially the all-dominant sound, I gradually lost interest, because I had the impression that I had understood everything after half of the film at the latest. And nothing really happened in the hour that followed. The director can certainly be blamed for this and despite the truly outstanding production value of all those involved, the Oscar for best international film seemed a little excessive. Another Sandra Hüller film was much better for me: Anatomy Of A Fall.

I don't care if a historical event is used for a fictional series, because I either do my own research to find out what is true and what is not, or I simply don't care and watch what the series has to offer. Unfortunately, the promising approach is not really successful here, because episode after episode is devoid of suspense and pace, time jumps are constructed that you have to follow and don't really seem to make sense. Why can't the story be told in a linear fashion? In addition, I can't get much out of the main character either, he is too reduced in the game for me and I don't discover many rough edges. It's clear that he's supposed to be instantly likeable, but that seems a little too manipulative for me and, especially in view of the fact that I was bored, I was done after episode 5.

As this movie is released in Germany from the age of 18, it will hardly be suitable for children. For adults, on the other hand, it is clearly too stupid, too badly acted and written. So who is the target audience for such nonsense, in which a talented actor, a couple of moderately talented actors and a talentless actor have to pretend for two hours that they are in a comedy in which the constant use of violence is merely for the entertainment of a borderline-obnoxious audience? I don't want to offend anyone, but who gives this piece of work more than 5 stars? And even if the discussion whether crocodile or alligator is ultimately irrelevant, perhaps we should think about what level we've sunk to when a promising director makes such filth and an actor like Gyllenhaal gives himself over to it? The only pleasant thing about this trash was Gyllenhaal's body. Yummy. The rest - unappetizing.

A day after watching the movie, I'm still trying to get more clarity on some things. That's a good sign. But I'm not really succeeding, because I realize that my first impression wasn't wrong: The movie has outstanding actors, Adam is someone I would immediately take under my wing and comfort 24 hours a day. Nevertheless, the dialog could be more compelling, some of the lengths could be taken out to make the rather tightly constructed story even tighter and one or two of the situations Adam gets himself into perhaps need more clarity. In addition, I don't like soundtracks where well-known songs are played to explain the plot. I would have preferred the director to work exclusively with original music. There are a few illogical points in the script that could easily have been removed, such as the question of why the family home has no inhabitants when Harry visits and whether the first meeting with Harry actually takes place or not. The result is a good movie that is carried by its actors, but it is not as outstanding as some would like it to be. 7.5.

When you watch this film in 2024, which is already 25 years old, you realise that not that much has actually changed. A conservative opinion is still behind the absurdities of such pageants, is still as stupid as many of the protagonists of this film and lives in a bubble somewhere in the provinces where there are no other highlights than the change from winter to summer time. Formally, however, the film is probably no longer feasible today. Here, everyone, including the disabled, is pulled through the cocoa with such relish that there would be angry waves of protest from woke groups, so that a new version that would do justice to left-wing opinions would probably be completely humourless. So let's enjoy this cheeky but never below the belt comedy, which boasts great dialogue and once again an outstanding Allison Janney. Situational comedy also works so I can only say that this is one last good example of successful comedies.

Ben Affleck has done it again - make a bad film and prove that he can also be a miserable actor. How you manage to look like you've taken sleeping pills for 90 minutes and have no idea where you are is remarkable. But he must have read the script beforehand and should know that not everyone is a Christopher Nolan. And Robert Rodriguez definitely isn't, as this mishmash of well-known originals and a little too much violence clearly shows. The ladies in charge of the casting got it wrong in every respect, because there is simply no less chemistry than between Affleck and Alice Braga. Plus a crude story that is so confused that it's better not to worry about it. Ultimately, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, so I can only recommend spending these 93 minutes on other things.

There are series where you know after just one episode that they're not going to be funny. Red Oaks is such a series. The fact that it's supposed to be set in the 80s is embarrassing. I was there, I know the era, there's no sign of it here. Then there's the dialogue, which is so bad that I sometimes get the feeling that it was written by stoned university students who don't know how to write clever texts. The actors aren't really likeable, the clichés aren't funny and so I have to ask myself why you should sit through the whole thing and be bored to death. Absolutely not funny or in any way interesting.

When I make a documentary about a person, I have to have something to tell, an intention, a plan, what I ultimately want to communicate to the viewer. I don't blame Mahmood for saying little about himself and trying to express this through his songs, which, if you don't speak Italian, seem to have confused lyrics that don't necessarily make sense. Even after the documentary ended, I didn't get any closer to Mahmood as a person, as if the director was deliberately keeping him at a distance. So I can say for myself that the whole project has unfortunately failed. But I don't begrudge Mahmood his success and would have liked him to win the song contest.

If there's one thing the Swedes are good at, it's making films that really get to you. This mini-series is one such example. The early days of AIDS in Stockholm are the subject, shown through a group of young gay men who lose their lives one by one. Their social stigmatisation by the church and relatives is also thematised; the cruelty of rejection towards people who are simply looking for support and love becomes a martyrdom that some can only escape by committing suicide. So much for the fiction and when I look back on my post-adolescence, which roughly coincides with this time, I can confirm that the mood, insecurities and despair have been excellently captured. You can't accuse director Simon Kaijser of going too heavy on the tear ducts here, because the fate of the young men won't leave anyone cold. And death is cruel in its mercilessness, that much is clear once again. The almost 3 hours flew by for me and I often found myself fighting back tears. For all gay men under 40 who have not lived through these times, the series should be made compulsory viewing. Maybe then they will be a bit more humble and less hedonistic.

A substitute teacher comes to a problem school for a month and is confronted with social ills that should be overwhelming. Why does this teacher with the strange name Henry Barthes seem to be strong enough to face and overcome the daily challenges? However, in a kind of interview situation that sets the scene for the story, we quickly realise that this is not the case and that Barthes' own story is central to his actions. Detachment throws a depressing reality in your face that you first have to come to terms with yourself. Every viewer is probably inclined to give these pupils a thorough going over, at least that's how much they tantalise me. Insults, violence, cruelty to animals and even suicide are all addressed here and you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that this is a story in search of realism. For me, the name of Adrien Brody's teacher refers to the French philosopher Roland Barthes, whose difficult childhood also lies like a shadow on Brody's character, which he plays excellently, by the way. You can see this film as a philosophical reflection, a sociological outline of the questionable future of a country, the hopelessness of existence or the daily pressure that children are exposed to today. But you can also just watch Adrien Brody as he succeeds in giving this character, who actually has no prospects, a fascination that goes straight to the heart.