The colours of Greece, together with breathtaking landscapes, are treated in Griechenland almost as co-protagonists. Johannes runs from one side of the island to the other in order to understand what is really going on. But, perhaps, only a chat with a fisherman, while stargazing at night, can make one really understand the true meaning of life.
Dark atmospheres, bleak landscapes and interpersonal relationships full of burning secrets are the absolute protagonists in Dunkle Wasser. The Riahi brothers, for their part, have mastered an impeccable and multifaceted screenplay, the highlight of which is the two detectives. At the Diagonale’23.
It’s immediately clear that O Palmenbaum is not an ambitious feature film. Its main purpose is to stage the bizarre adventures of the Treichl/Moor families, which the audience loved so much in Single Bells. And this, considered from this point of view, works, especially if one thinks that, compared to numerous other sequels, the structure of the previous feature film is never taken up, in order to create a sort of “carbon copy” of it.
Dinner for two – made for television by Xaver Schwarzenberger, the long-time cinematographer of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder – aims above all to be a fresco of Viennese society – and, more generally, of the world in which we live – without taking itself too seriously. A long journey through Vienna where anything can happen.
Although it presents quite a few problems, Single Bells – directed by Xaver Schwarzenberger in 1997 and co-produced by Austria and Germany – skilfully avoids all the rhetoric and cheap feel-goodism into which situations of this kind can easily fall. And it also does so without being afraid to “play dirty “.
In Little Big Voice – a television film directed by Wolfgang Murnberger in 2015 – good feelings, in the end – and as one can well imagine – always triumph. And they do so, again and again, in an almost forced way, with overly abrupt narrative twists. So abrupt that they almost lose credibility.
Lilly the Witch: The Dragon and the Magic Book – directed by Oscar-winner Stefan Ruzowitzky, as well as the film adaptation of the famous homonymous short story written by Knister – despite its linear development and its good and dynamic direction, is not as incisive as previous similar works.
Fully following the canons of the mainstream television film that we all too often come across in German productions, North Face, co-produced by Germany, Austria and Switzerland and directed by German director Philipp Stölzl, doesn’t know how to exploit its opportunities (first and foremost, the climb undertaken by the four protagonists), making the whole thing excessively flat and rhythmless.
Die Wunderübung is a light and pleasant comedy, but as it approaches the end, its essential narrative twists inevitably turn out to be too weak, and it progressively runs out of steam.