This brilliant Caviar – Elena Tikhonova’s second feature – boasts rhythms that are well marked both by an expert and self-conscious direction – complete with short animation inserts and Tarantino-like titling – and by an appropriate, lively and distinctive, but never over the top, musical score.
There is apparently no way of salvation for the protagonists of Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (as in any other work by the Austrian director). This implicit cosmic pessimism – filled, in its own way, with a subtle religiousness – assumes immediately a universal connotation concerning every historical period.
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.
With a sophisticated black and white that recalls the cinematography of Katzelmacher (Fassbinder’s first film, 1969), The Pacific Ocean – the first feature by Xaver Schwarzenberger, Fassbinder’s long-time assistant – is a work that, in its own way, has become a milestone in Austrian and German cinema of the 1980s.
Inland is a documentary that plays on ambivalence, on inner conflict, on the juxtaposition of different realities within a European capital that, since time immemorial, has always been a crossroads of many cultures, due to its particular geographical position.
If we think that Anja Salomonowitz made It happened just before twelve years ago, we sadly realise how intelligently prophetic it was and how incredibly topical it still is today.
Watching a film like Exit…but no Panic, Franz Novotny’s first feature film, can be compared to a rollercoaster ride. Irreverent, shocking, surprising, funny and amusing, this work has become a real cult in Austrian cinema.
The first chapter of the Heimatfilm-Trilogie (which also includes Farewell, 2014, and Heimatfilm, 2016), My Father’s House, dedicated to the director’s recently deceased parents, stages – like the author’s other films – an important inner change and can rightfully be classified as his most intimate and personal work.
The discovery of one’s homosexuality and, at the same time, the progressive knowledge of one’s body, are the main protagonists of Nevrland, in which Gregor Schmidinger has opted for a completely unconventional and, at times, highly experimental staging.
Leaving aside any controversial issue of purely historical and productive nature, the beauty of a film like Werner Hochbaum’s Suburban Cabaret must be acknowledged, since it bears precious witness to a key era for film and beyond.