Title: (500) Days of Summer

Country: USA (2009)

Genre: Romance, Comedy

Director: Marc Webb

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Chloe Moretz

Plot

500 Days: that’s how long the story of Tom (Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Deschanel) lasts – at least for Tom. For Summer, who is doesn’t believe in love and labels their relationship as “friendship” the whole time, the story ends much earlier. Fort Tom, who is a romantic, this is a catastrophe, as he thought to have found his true love. Reminiscing the good days, weeks and months with Summer, he trys to continue his life without her..

Review

“This is not a love story – this is a story about love..” Already in the beginning a narrator makes clear what this movie is all about. The movie tells a simple story about a couple who falls in love and illustrates all the up and downs of their relationship.

Title: Hundstage

Country: Austria (2001)

Genre: Drama

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Cast: Maria Hofstätter, Georg Friedrich, Alfred Mrva

Plot

A suburb of Vienna during the hottest days of the year: too many people at too narrow space. In six episodes this movie shows how and why people make things very unpleasant for each other. Amongs others there is a very importunate hitchhiker, a private detective on the run for some car vandals, a couple with a serious marriage problem, an old man, whose wife died long before, on the search for some sexual entertainment and further strange people…

Review

I planned to watch this movie since a very long time. After reading about it I became curious. Recently I had the chance to watch it and I must say I was blown away. This movie is one of the most atmospheric and oppressive ones I’ve seen in years. As already sated in the plot it doesn’t have an ongoing story but consists of different episodes which

Title: Revanche

Country: Austria (2008)

Genre: Thriller

Director: Götz Spielmann

Cast: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust

Plot

Ex-prisoner Alex (Johannes Krisch) works in an whorehouse. There he has a secret affair with the prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko). When both decide to start a new life somewhere else, they develope the plan to rob a bank in order to get the money to start all over. Unfortunately the robbery ends unluckyly as a police officer suddenly appears and accidentially shoots Tamara. Alex, who is able to escape, then hides at the farm of his father. There he discovers that the police officer who shot his girlfrind lives near by…

Review

This movie is one more proof that Austria produces many great and extraordinary movies. As the title indicates, the movie is about revenge. However it is not another self-administrated justice movies like the famous Death Wish with

Title: Love Exposure

Country: Japan (2008)

Genre: ?

Director: Shion Sono

Cast: Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsumisha, Sakura Andô

Plot

Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is the perfect son who does nothing wrong. Since the death of his wife, his father works as a priest. He gets along very good with his son unless he has a short relationship with the wild Kaori. After the breakup everything changes. As his father gets more and more embittered he becomes fanatic and forces his son repeatedly to confess. As Yu has no sins to confess he starts committing sins in order to satisfy his father. One day he meets a group of juveniles. Together they are trained by a weird master in the art of photographing under girl’s skirts. This becomes Yus life-task. However, one day, he meets the beautiful Yoko and immediately falls in love with her. Unfortunately Yoko (who hates men except of Jesus and Kurt Cobain) thinks he’s a jerk. Instead of Yu, Sasori, a mysterious woman in black wins Yoko’s heart. In reality the women who helped her out in a fight with some thugs, is Yu dressed as a women due to a lost bet. Those thugs act act as the behest of Koike who recruits members for a sect and therefore planned the meeting of Yu and Yoko for a long time as she follows a diabolic plan…

Review

Cinema is great because everything is possible. Cinema has so many different genres. Japanese director Shion Sono, however, wants more. He doesn’t want to make a movie in a certain genre.  That’s why he made Love Exposure, a 237 minutes long monumental artwork which contains everything you could think of… religious fanaticism, sexual

Title: Same Same But Different

Country: Germany, Cambodia (2009)

Genre: Romance, Drama

Director: Detlev Buck

Cast: David Kross, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Anatole Taubman

Plot

After finishing school, Ben (David Kross) and his friend travel to Cambodia not only for the country and its people but also for parties, drugs and sex. One night he meets Sreykeo (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk), a young cambodian girl. After spending the night with her it turns out that Sreykeo, like many others, is a prositute. Although they separate the next morning, Sreykeo returns some days later and so they start seeing each other more often. Ben more and more gets introduced to the cambodian life, meets Sreykeo’s family and starts paying for food and medicine. However at some point Ben has to return to Germany. But both try to maintain their relationship via telephone or internet. Ben even sends Sreykeo money so that she doens’t have to work as prostitute anymore. The situation changes when Sreykeo receives the news that she is HIV positive.She immediately tells Ben who takes the situation much more serious and travels back to Asia in order to organize a therapy for her. In the course of the time he learns that the cambodian system works differently from the german one and that he finally has to decide between love and duty…

Review

Director Detlev Buck intended to make a romantic movie, however not one of those cheesy romantic comedies which you find in cinemas in great numbers. He wanted to create a story about a real, tangible love. So he decided to film the

Title: Black Book

Country: Germany, UK, Netherlands (2006)

Genre: War, Thriller, Drama

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Christian Berkel

Plot

Holland at the end of World War II: After the hideout of young jewish singer Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) got destroyed by a bomb, she joins a group of other jews trying to escape to the south of Holland, which was already liberated. However their ship gets caught by a German patrol and all jews are killed. Only Rachel survives.
Now, that she has nothing to lose, she joins the dutch resistance. As “Ellis de Vries” she starts flirting with German officer Müntze (Sebastian Koch). As a result of this flir she gets a job offered as secretary. Due to this stroke of luck, the resistance group developes a plan to free imprisoned resistance members. Unexpectedly Rachel falls in love with Müntze and therefore maneuvers herself into a life-threatening situation, as she gets suspected by the resistance group to be a traitor.

Review

The thrilling story about spying, trust and betrayal concenctrates on true experiences of different people in only few distinctive personalities. The fictional story is less about historical events, but analyzes the confusing structures of

Title: Layer Cake

Country: UK (2004)

Genre: Thriller

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, George Harris

Plot

A nameless drug dealer (Daniel Craig) from London is sick of the drug business and therefore plans his retirement. However his long-time boss Jimmy Price wants him two accomplish two more assignments. The one assignment leads him to London’s junkie scene where he’s supposed to find a missing girl. The other one brings him together with the choleric gangster Duke for whom he is to sell a huge amount of ecstasy pills. Duke, however, stole the pills from a group of criminal serbs, who therefore assing the brutal killer Dragan to bring back the pills…
Review

Most people tend to compare this movie witch Snatch or Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. This has several reasons. On the one hand director Matthew Vaughn was the producer of the above mentioned movies, on the other hand

Title: Pan’s Labyrinth

Country: Mexico, Spain, USA (2006)

Genre: Fantasy, Drama

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú

Plot

In the fascist Spain of 1944, the bookish Ofelia and her pregnant mother move to the mountains of North Spain because her stepfather,a sadistic army officer wants the child to be born at his place. While her stepfather is pursuing the rebels with very cruel methods, Ofelia escapes into an eerie but captivating fantasy world…

Review

Director Guillermo del Toro wanted to create a farytale for adults. Actually this movie is not suitable for children but nevertheless terrific. Del Toro places its horror-farytale two years after the end of the Spanish civil war. Del Toro

Title: Bronson

Country: UK (2009)

Genre: Thriller-Biopic

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Tom Hardy, Matt King, Kelly Adams

Plot

In 1974, 19 year old Michael Peterson decided that he wants to make a name for himself and so he attempted to rob a post office. He quickly gets caught and originally gets sentenced to 7 years in jail. In the end he has spend 34 years behind bars, 30 of which in solitary confinement. During that time he more and more became “Charles Bronson”, his ultra-violent alter ego. Due to his violent temper, the comitted hostage-takings and especially the fact that he was imprisoned in more than 120 prisons he soon receives the title of “Britain’s most violent prisoner”.

Review

This is not a movie for the mass-market but for friends of special movies. If you expect a conventional prison or gangster movie you will be disappointed. It is neither a profound social drama. Rather than anything else this biopic

Title: Slumming

Country: Austria (2006)

Genre: Drama

Director: Michael Glawogger

Cast: August Diehl, Paulus Manker, Pia Hierzegger

Plot

Sebastian (August Diehl) and Alex, two Austrian students, are rich but bored. In order to kill time they do “Slumming”, meaning that they hang around in shabby bars, investigate the social underclass and tease the people they meet there. One of their later victims is the alcoholic Kallmann (Paulus Manker) who finances his daily intoxication by selling self-made poems in a pretty aggressive way. One night he spends the night totally drunk on a park bench in front of Vienna’s train station when Sebastian and Alex find him. They put him into their car, drive him beyond the boarder of Czeck Republic right into a small Czeck city, where they leave them in front of the local station without any ID. However this short encounter will not only have impact on Kallmann, who desperately tries to get back to Vienna, but especially on Sebastian who experiences a change in life.

Review

This movie starts with one of the most fascinating openings I’ve ever seen (I put it on the end of the article)! You immediately get captured by it and won’t get released until the end of the movie. “Slumming” mainly is a character