Uncertain Maps: aufbrechen — ankommen: Eine Kooperation mit dem Literaturbüro...
Arthena Foundation/Literaturbüro NRW crossover roundtable with artist Verena Issels and author & journalist Joachim Bessing, moderated by Maren Jungclaus, introduced by Ludwig Seyfarth. The Good:...
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Big Trouble in Little China by John Carpenter
Crossover of classical Hong Kong 1930/40s mystical kung fu and 1970s kung fu comedy, completely over the top as it should be. Hilarious barrage of intentional as-you-know-Bobs to catch up on China’s...
View ArticleNew Counterpoints | 20 Jahre musik21 e.V. Festival
Traces and Transformations Compositions by Johannes Sandberger, Erik Janson, Henry Mex, Pia Marel Hauser, and Theodor Pauß as electronic/improvised remixes for piano, synthesizer, live electronic, and...
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Resident Evil by Zach Cregger
Gamey. Gory. Goofy. Maybe a tad too strong on the comedic side for my taste, but Abrams’s perfect old-school-no-laugh-track timing is terrific. Resident Evil by Zach Cregger, 2026. Watched at the...
View ArticleNew Counterpoints |»20 Jahre Musik21 e.V.« | SEP 19, 2026
Excellent Neue Musik concert with Dixtuor by Miro Dobrowolny, Serendipity by Christoph Theiler, Espaces NRW – les silences de la ville by Erik Janson, all for ensemble, and the premiere of Bogolutu by...
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Gruppo di famiglia in un interno aka Conversation Piece by Luchino Visconti
Written for the screen but staged like a play, it works terrifically in its self-imposed limitations. Carried by superb acting and cinematography, the family portrait with its generational and social...
View Article辣手神探 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled by John Woo
Blu-ray 4K treatments alone, like for Face/Off in 2023, don’t count; remastered theatrical rereleases are what I’m interested in. I love the things I own that I collected in the past, like videos and...
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The End of Oak Street by David Robert Mitchell
It’s stumbling along on its characters’ relentless idiocy and irrational impulses, not driven forward by anything resembling dramatic development. Everything’s explained to death without making sense;...
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The Fast and the Furious by Rob Cohen
Guiltless snack. Crammed with hilarious clichés on the one hand, yet many of them freshly invented by it on the other. While coherence isn’t what the screenplay is ambitious about, some plot hookups...
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Mutiny by Jean-François Richet
Decent camera work, satisfying action choreography, excellent sound design. Screenplay isn’t top-notch, and the scene setups for boarding and the finale are eye roll-inducing. “The protagonist is a...
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8番出口 aka Exit 8 by Kawamura Genki
Fantastic script that takes the game’s mechanics and weaves them into an emotionally gripping story while still preserving the vibes of an indie video game. Its entwined loops, a universal...
View ArticleThe Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg
The screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth I attended last night was preceded by an event with guests and talks about David Bowie’s Berlin period, and there was a lot of sentiment that 2016 had been a...
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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun
The most ironically adorably nerdy queer movie I’ve ever seen. Einbinder. Anderson. Fix. A fantastically layered surreal meta-meta-rewrite and reconciliation of period slasher movie motifs that is...
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Ojczyzna/Vaterland aka Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski
Excellent direction, cinematography, acting, script, but not every dialogue line hits the mark. Some reviews call it a historical vignette, and indeed: brief, taut, coiled, and wired to unravel in the...
View ArticleOrgan Recital »Tempus fugit« by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen
Great organ recital by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen, a former student of Oscar Gottlieb Blarr’s (in attendance), with works by J.S. Bach, César Franck, and Norbert Laufer (also in attendance). Laufer’s »Tempus...
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Pahanhautoja aka Hatching by Hanna Bergholm
Perhaps one or two jump scares too many, but well done in all other horror departments. At times reminiscent of Lynch’s dread inside the mundane and Wes Anderson’s cinematography. Some script...
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Funeral Casino Blues by Roderick Warich
Character-driven, camera-driven, mysterious, stylish. Fantastical journey along the edges of the real, the hyperreal, and the unreal. It’s almost as if it were the delayed final part of a tetralogy,...
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Yön lapsi aka Nightborn by Hanna Bergholm
The Ents are evil. Cinematography and sound design are top. Not all assembled horror elements and motifs to support its theme fit together coherently. Dramatic structure and cut seem off but it’s the...
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Les musiciens by Grégory Magne
Bittersweet, fun, great music, passionate performances, lovingly executed. Almost no music-related as-you-know-Bobs so one remains fully immersed even as an (ex-)musician. At first, the...
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Ice Cream Man by Eli Roth
Knowing zilch about it except it was horror, I wasn’t prepared for relentless splatter, but hey. No dramatic structure beyond or between the occasional plot point, and every set location overstays its...
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