THE TOBACCONIST
The Tobacconist is undoubtedly an interesting feature film, but it gets lost in the many paths it decides to take. And not even the presence of Bruno Ganz or a cameo by the great Erni Mangold can do much.
Actor: Gerhard Liebmann
EISMAYER
Despite being a debut feature, Eismayer first and foremost denotes great directorial maturity and a never obvious ability to delve into the human soul, managing to capture every subtle nuance of the protagonists’ personalities. At the 79th Venice Film Festival, section Settimana della Critica.
MAN KANN NICHT ALLES HABEN
Man kann nicht alles haben is an entertaining, but often too predictable comedy of errors. Michael Kreihsl, for his part, just as planned in the ORF series, has made the beautiful city of Graz a further protagonist, spectator of many intrigues, but also of tender love stories.
LOURDES
Disenchanted, rational and appropriately satirical – with even a touch of subtle irony – Lourdes, by pointing the finger at a hypocritical and “respectable” society that lives only on illusions, shows us a very different reality from the one we imagine.
THE STATION
Climate change has, for several years now, become a rather topical issue. And what does cinema, for its part, do? Great witness of our times, the seventh art has also often had its say on the subject. One example is the feature film The Station – made by Marvin Kren in 2013 – a reinterpretation/tribute to John Carpenter’s famous The Thing (1982). An operation, this one, however, very risky.
MURER: ANATOMY OF A TRIAL
In Murer: Anatomy of a Trial, Christian Frosch, in staging the trial of the Nazi criminal Franz Murer with a composed and rightly balanced direction, openly points the finger at his own nation and at Austrian society of yesterday and today.
BREATHING
As the title itself suggests, in Breathing, Karl Markovics’ debut film, air is, after water, the second central element. Forced into a world that is not appropriate for his age and that doesn’t seem to belong to him at all, Roman feels he is suffocating and, although he doesn’t have gills, paradoxically it’ s underwater that he really breathes, finding his own, unusual dimension.
ERIK & ERIKA
It is a clumsy directorial approach that has made Reinhold Bilgeri’s Erik & Erika into a weak film with a TV character that, despite its interesting initial ideas, inevitably loses its edge even at key moments.