Watched in the ZDF Media Library
An alcoholic, a drag queen and a runaway meet on Christmas Eve. What looks like the beginning of a bad joke is actually the starting point of Satoshi Kon's third and penultimate feature film "Tokyo Godfathers". Driven into homelessness, the three of them form an alternative family and, through the miracle of Christmas, also become parents. An abandoned baby becomes the starting point for a desperate rescue mission, in the course of which the…
Watched in the cinema (194th visit in 2024)
Over 300 million for "Sonic the Hedgehog" and over 400 million for the sequel "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" two years later: the box office figures for Sega's golden hedgehog are certainly impressive, which is why this series about the blue hedgehog who whizzes around at a monkey's pace is constantly being expanded. There was a mini-series on streaming TV this year with "Knuckles" to tide us over (which I haven't seen), and…
Watched in the cinema (188th visit in 2024)
Fans of "The Lord of the Rings" can't really complain about a lack of new content. The second season of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" has just been released, which conjured up the fantasy world created by J. R. R. Tolkien on home screens at great expense. Two new live-action cinema films are currently in the works and are scheduled for release from 2026. Until then, "The Lord…
Watched on Amazon Prime Video
Schocktober 2024 #5
The presenter of a TV station struggling to survive is leaked a snuff video showing the torture and murder of a young woman. Together with her reporting team, she sets out in search of a story that could be behind the brutal murder. They arrive at a disused industrial plant that can be seen on the video, unaware of the creepy abysses that open up in the abandoned building. First they meet…
Watched on Netflix
"I died on September 21, 1945."
Garishly colorful, completely over-the-top superhero stories for children - according to an old cliché, this is what most anime looks like. "Grave of the Fireflies" is none of these things. Although the animated film is theoretically rated for ages six and up, the dark war story is not really suitable for a younger audience. How could it be, when the main character dies right at the beginning of the film? A…
Watched in the cinema (118th visit in 2024)
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Kathryn Bigelow had a directorial hand that was one of the most confident in its class, especially in the action genre. She delivered films one after the other that are revered today as classics for good reason. Whether it was her melancholy vampire demystification "Near Dark", the cop thriller "Blue Steel" or the visionary dystopia "Strange Days", Bigelow once again proved to have more balls than…
Watched in the cinema (73rd visit in 2024)
In "Evil Does Not Exist", Ryūsuke Hamaguchi does what he does best: finding poetry in the small and inconspicuous. "Evil Does Not Exist" is a film that tries to get the maximum out of as little as possible in order to bring one thing to the fore: Atmosphere. Long takes, crisp images and, above all, a lot of silence. In concrete terms, this means that you can watch the main character Takumi…
Watched in the cinema (54th visit in 2024)
"The Castle of Cagliostro" was originally "just" another cinematic adventure in a successful anime series. However, this film also marked the feature film debut of animation filmmaker Hayao Myazaki in 1979. Myazaki's last film to date, "The Boy and the Heron", won an Oscar in 2024. Now Piece of Magic Entertainment brought "Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro" back to the big screen yesterday as a cinema event in a restored version…
Watched in the cinema (41st visit in 2024)
In his films, Hirokazu Kore-eda usually tells heart-rending stories about actually very tragic family relationships or special family constellations. Despite the precarious circumstances that prevail in each case and arouse pity, especially with regard to the innocent children, Kore-eda lends his stories a certain light-heartedness. He often finds this in very simple moments of happiness that happen to his characters and seem incredibly authentic.
As the atypical title of Kore-eda's latest work…
Watched on Blu-Ray
"Akira" must be the most legendary classic anime film in the field of science fiction, as it clearly helped to shape this sub-genre, even though, unlike many of its successors, it does without the themes of cyborgs and artificial intelligence. Its subject matter is almost more in the realm of fantasy, so it oscillates somewhere between the two genres, while it also draws on the realm of action cinema and is first and foremost, logically, an animated…
Watched on YouTube
My first encounter with Kenji Mizoguchi's very special style struck me as a mature melodrama. The tender look at art, love and women has finally managed to transcend the strict framework of the narrative.
Not knowing Mizoguchi's career as a whole, nor his affinity with the militaristic regime of the time, I was still very surprised at this sophistication, which relates to a subject far removed from the geopolitical issues that characterised 1939. "Zangiku monogatari" is a…
Watched in the Arte Media Library (available until April 29th 2024)
Part 10/10 of a Yasujirõ Ozu retrospective
Before his death in 1963, Yasujirõ Ozu made one of his best and most famous films, "An Autumn Afternoon". Although, as with many of Ozu's works, the translation of the title refers to the seasons, the original title alludes to a particular type of fish (sanma) that is enjoyed by ordinary citizens and workers. It has always been these ordinary people, their…