Alternative Film Guide

Dave Graham reports in Reuters that later this year what appears to be the first biography of silent-film actor Max Schreck, in my view the most effective movie vampire of them all, will be published in Germany.
Schreck starred in F.W. Murnau’s excellent 1922 horror drama Nosferatu, presumably the first feature film based on Bram Stoker’s [...]

German Film Academy Awards - Lola 2007-2008
2007-2008 German Film Academy Award nominations: March 28, 2008.
2007-2008 German Film Academy Award winners: Palais am Funkturm in Berlin on April 25, 2008.
(”*” denotes the winner in each category)
 

The big winner of the 2008 Lola Awards was writer-director Fatih Akin’s cross-cultural drama Auf der anderen Seite / The [...]

World Film Clips: The story of a courtesan turned circus performer, Max Ophüls‘ Lola Montès (1955) — the most expensive (part-)French production to date — was a resounding commercial flop. The film was taken away from Ophüls and drastically recut by the producers. That only made matters worse.
A restored — apparently complete — version [...]

Woyzeck (1979)
Direction: Werner Herzog. Screenplay: Werner Herzog; from a play by Georg Büchner. Cast: Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann, Willy Semmelrogge, Josef Bierbichler
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
One of the signs of a great artist is that even when not at the top of his game said artist is still capable of flashes of utter [...]

The 26th Pordenone Silent Film Festival took off today with screenings of Hans Behrendt’s 1927 social comedy Die Hose / A Royal Scandal, starring Werner Krauss and Jenny Jugo, and D. W. Griffith’s 1921 melodrama Dream Street, a poor return to the setting of his 1919 success Broken Blossoms. In the cast, the bland Carol [...]

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
Direction and screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cast: Dieter Dengler
 

 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Little Dieter Needs to Fly is another in the remarkable body of Werner Herzog’s film work, one that is without peer. Having recently rewatched it on DVD, nearly a decade after its initial US release in 1997, it has [...]

Stage, film, and television actor Ulrich Mühe, winner of last year’s European Film Award for best actor, died of stomach cancer at his home in Walbeck, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, on July 22. He was 54.
Mühe’s European Film Award was recognition for his excellent performance as a Stasi agent who, while spying on a [...]

In late August, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hugh M. Hefner Classic American Film Program will present "Billy Wilder’s Europe," a seven-film series showcasing samples of the director’s movies with an European setting. The screenings will take place between Aug. 18-29 at the appropriately named Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.
In the 1930 [...]

This evening, Friday, June 29, Turner Classic Movies will screen three creepies: The Unholy Three (1925), West of Zanzibar (1928), and Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey / The Adventures of David Grey / Castle of Doom. The first two are silent Lon Chaney vehicles directed by Tod Browning at MGM; the third one [...]

In the last few months Kino International — one of the essential DVD distributors — has released numerous quality DVDs of movies that until fairly recently were just about impossible to find.
Among the rarities I’ve had the pleasure of getting my hands on is "Lubitsch in Berlin," which includes two Ernst Lubitsch comedies of [...]

Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman’s documentary short subject God Sleeps in Rwanda and Hubert Sauper’s documentary feature Darwin’s Nightmare, which both earned Oscar nominations in 2005, will be screened on Wednesday, June 6, as the final installment in the 2006–2007 Contemporary Documentaries series, presented by the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]

57th German Film Academy Awards - Lola 2006-2007
The 57th German Film Academy’s Lola Award nominees were announced on March 16, 2007.
The 57th German Film Academy’s Lola Award winners were announced at the Palais am Funkturm in Berlin on May 4, 2007.
† Qualifying films were released in Germany between Mar. 1, 2006 and Feb. 28, 2007. [...]

I’m not a big fan of most of the film’s found in film historian Kevin Brownlow’s list of "essential silents" — The Crowd and The Wind are the two I like best; I haven’t seen Varieté, yet — even though Brownlow certainly included 10 of the most renowned silent ever made.
Now, if I were [...]

Marking the 60th death anniversary of Berlin-born film genius Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), Berlin’s Kino Babylon Mitte is holding a month-long retrospective (March 1-27) of the director’s films, "Lubitsch from Berlin." The schedule consists of 23 silents (including at least one in which Lubitsch worked only as an actor) and 17 talkies, ranging from his early [...]

Is Sandra Hüller possessed by the devil, or is she suffering from a bad case of indigestion? The Catholic priests, of course, are ready to believe in the worst.
The association of German film critics has announced their list of 2006 winners.
Surprisingly, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others [...]

Photo: Elaine Mae Woo
As part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, on March 18 the Castro Theatre will screen the 1929 silent Anglo-German drama Grossstadtschmetterling / Pavement Butterfly, directed by Richard Eichberg, and starring Anna May Wong as Princess Butterfly, an exotic Parisian fan dancer who flees her show after a [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
No filmmaker’s career has been more defined and structured by the musical choices he has made than German film director Werner Herzog. This claim is evident from his first full-length feature, Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life (1968), which he made when he was twenty-four three years after having written the screenplay. [...]

Sure, the 2007 Berlinale, which has kicked off this evening, will offer a number of good — hopefully even a few great — new films. But for my money, the most interesting section this year is the Retrospective covering the roles of women in silent films of the 1910s and 1920s.
I’ve mentioned the Retrospective [...]

Penélope Cruz told Academy members to vote for her — or else. Pedro Almodóvar should have applied the same vote-getting technique.
 
"There’s so many Mexicans!" exclaimed Mexican actress Salma Hayek, too excited to conjugate her verbs properly, upon announcing — along with Academy president Sid Ganis — some of the nominees for the 79th Academy Awards.
Indeed. [...]

© Christian Hartmann / Roxy Film
The winners of the 2006 Bavarian Film Awards — the most important German film prize after the German Academy’s Lolas — were announced yesterday at a gala ceremony in Munich.
The best film — or best production — Porcelain Pierrot (worth €200,000) went to a local product, Marcus H. Rosenmüller’s feel-good [...]

The Palm Springs International Film Festival announced its jury and audience winners this past Sunday, Jan. 14.
The New Voices New Visions Grand Jury Prize was given to Rafi Pitts’s Iranian drama Zemestan / It’s Winter, the story of a woman left behind in a small Iranian town after her husband travels abroad looking for work.

The [...]

The American Cinematheque and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will present all five foreign-language films nominated for the 2006 Golden Globe Awards at The Aero’s Max Palevsky Theatre in Santa Monica.
The five nominees are: Apocalypto (U.S.), El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (Spain / Mexico / U.S.), Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives [...]

The first six films have been chosen for the international competition section of the 57th Berlin Film Festival, which will be held between Feb. 8-18.
I’m unfamiliar with the works of director Christian Petzold and Park Chan-wook, but I found it curious that Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd and Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German got picked [...]

The 6th edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival came to a close last night, Dec. 9.
Dominik Graf’s German drama Der Rote Kakadu / The Red Cockatoo, a love story set in 1961 Dresden, starring Max Riemelt and Jessica Schwarz, won the Etoile d’Or for Best Film. Riemelt, for his part, received the Best [...]

"The nugget of the idea behind [Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of] Others came to the writer[-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck] in 1997 when he was a desperate first-year student at Munich Film School. The deadline was looming to deliver his 12th proposal to his film professor, who demanded that his pupils hand [...]