Club Zero is a mercilessly sincere feature film, extremely rigorous in its mise-en-scene, which finds its ideal mood in a sharp irony. The image of society depicted here has the sharp, vivid colours of a world in which no half-measures are allowed. Just like in the cinema of Hausner, who has been minutely analysing every single aspect of this very world for years now. In competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
Meticulously detailed and quite original in its costumes, with an excellent cast and locations that almost seem to belong to enchanted dimensions, Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & I is definitely the most “feminist” version of all the feature films dedicated to Elisabeth of Austria. At the Berlinale 2023.
Penissimo is a cheerful and light-hearted, but also particularly meaningful documentary. Interviews, photographs of artworks, but also excerpts from the first erotic films made back in the silent era compose a lively and colourful fresco of “one of the two halves of the sky”.
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.
It is based on a real-life news story 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. In the film – which is divided into five chapters, each concerning a particular day – everything takes place from October 12 to December 23, 1993. Everything leads up to a single event in which all the characters will be involved in one way or another. But how important is the human being in this feature film by Michael Haneke?
The extreme realism of Northern Skirts gives way here to an impeccable elegance. And even if we are nostalgic for that suburbia so well depicted in the debut feature by the Viennese director, we have to admit that Mademoiselle Paradis shows a marked personality.
With In the Basement, Ulrich Seidl explores the inner self of the characters he filmed by entering their tidy, impeccable-looking homes, until he reaches their basements. And it is here that each of them finally reveals his or her true nature.
Although Aufschneider stands out immediately for its television-like writing and directorial approach, everything flows in an overall linear way. Every single event, every single story of the characters are somehow connected. Often, however, also in an excessively predictable manner.
Although Cappuccino Melange, in order to accentuate the differences between the two protagonists, plays a lot on clichés, often excessively caricaturing its characters and sometimes even seeming excessive and unbelievable, on the whole the adventures of the two bizarre protagonists work. And they do so especially in the details.