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Actor Wilson in »Moonfall«: Hell, don't add space junk too!
Photo: Leonine
»Moonfall«
When something very big comes crashing down from space, you can react like most of the characters in Adam McKay's satire Don't Look Up and just do nothing.
The heroes in Roland Emmerich's films, on the other hand, have always been defined by the fact that they face every catastrophe and bravely defy it - including the moon, which in the director's new spectacle gets out of orbit and threatens to fall to earth.
»Moonfall« is a sometimes pathetic, sometimes ironic hymn to energy and team spirit.
Male and female astronauts (Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson) and a supposed oddball (John Bradley) team up to prevent the end of the world.
In no time at all, a long-disused space shuttle is taken out of the museum, made afloat and shot into space.
technical check?
The moon doesn't wait!
The film sheds logic and credibility like ballast in order to leave reality behind as quickly as possible and stage an over-the-top journey into the interior of the moon.
Emmerich is once again doing roller coaster cinema and doesn't care that it keeps taking him out of the curve.
Much is so grotesque and exaggerated that at some point one has the feeling that, unlike on Earth, this type of cinema could possibly be coming to an end.
In the cinema.
Lars Olav Beier
»Moonfall«, USA/Canada/China 2022. Director: Roland Emmerich.
Book: Harald Kloser, Spenser Cohen, Emmerich.
With Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland.
130 minutes.
»Cow« (on Mubi)
The acclaimed feature film director Andrea Arnold ("American Honey") said about her first documentary "Cow" that she was concerned with capturing the reality of life of a dairy cow and recognizing the services she renders to us humans.
The film not only meets these sober claims, it even surpasses them by far.
Most feature films don't succeed in generating such great sympathy with a protagonist as Arnold does with the dairy cow Luma.
Whether Luma calls for the boy after the birth of a calf, who was taken from her immediately, or she storms into a green meadow with her fellow females and lets her legs kick as if liberated: It is the fullness of an intensively lived life that Arnold and her camerawoman Capture Magda Kowalczyk in extraordinary images.
There is actually nothing unusual about the black and white spotted cow with the pretty spot below the left eye.
Luma lives neither on an idyllic organic farm nor in industrial factory farming, but in a medium-sized family business in Kent, England, where she is well looked after, there is fresh food and the veterinarian comes regularly.
The extraordinary thing about her existence is just how much she is at the service of others, how every action on her only serves to put milk in the coffee and cheese on the table.
Whether that's appropriate, Arnold leaves to the judgment of her audience.
Your film doesn't argue, but lets you feel - as only great cinema can.
From February 11th on Mubi.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»Cow«, Great Britain 2021. Written and directed by Andrea Arnold.
94 minutes.
"What happened to bus 670?"
The story of an odyssey on the border between Mexico and the USA: A mother (Mercedes Hernández) roams through the sprawling, deserted landscape on the Mexican side and is looking for her son with increasing despair, who wanted to travel illegally to the USA and has disappeared.
She asks her way through, she begs, cries and is angry.
»What Happened to Bus 670?«, the award-winning debut work by Mexican director Fernanda Valadez, doesn't have much more to offer in terms of plot.
In fact, what sets the film apart is that it attempts to transform the shock that the loss of a loved one brings to most people into images of paralysis and magical necromancy.
The prodigal son that the film's heroine is chasing is called Jesús and is alive in memories, played by a child actor (Juan Jesús Varelavin).
The tirelessly investigating mother meets the boy Miguel (David Illescas), a companion in fate of the disappeared, who was arrested in the USA and rudely deported.
From a radically subjective point of view, director Valadez portrays the cruelty of a merciless border regime largely dictated by US politics and the apathy of those Mexican killer troops who make a profit from the flow of migrants heading north.
Her film is a social indictment and a crime thriller.
Above all, however, it is the evocation of a nightmare that cinema audiences cannot easily let go of.
In the cinema.
Wolfgang Hoebel
»What Happened to Bus 670?«, Mexico/Spain 2021. Director: Fernanda Valadez.
Book: Astrid Rondero, Valadez.
Starring Mercedes Hernandez, Juan Jesús Varela, David Illescas.
99 minutes.
"Death on the Nile"
It's a glitzy old-fashioned society of moneyed nobility and pretentious grandeur, gathered on a Nile steamer for a luxury honeymoon – and right in the middle is Kenneth Branagh in the role of master detective Hercule Poirot.
As in Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Branagh, who is also directing, brings a glamorous ensemble to the starting line.
Gal Gadot, best known as "Wonder Woman," plays Linnet Ridgeway, a beautiful, wealthy American who married a have-not named Simon Doyle (played by actor Armie Hammer, who recently faced sexual abuse charges).
On their honeymoon in Egypt, the couple is being pursued and threatened by a former friend named Jackie (Emma Mackey).
Linnet got the guy from Jackie.
So she asks the detective Poirot for protection from her rival.
The good Poirot, who is seen in a dark prologue as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, soon has to sort out various violent deaths.
Of course he proves his phenomenal power of deduction.
But behind Poirot's wit and his revelational frenzy there always shimmers a sensitive spirit.
Saddened, enraptured and amused, he observes a decadent world of luxury and its unhappy, murderous inhabitants - and in the best moments his detective work also puts the cinema audience in a champagne mood.
In the cinema.
Wolfgang Hoebel
A longer review of the film can be found here.
»Death on the Nile«, USA 2022. Director: Kenneth Branagh.
Book: Michael Green.
Starring Gal Gadot, Annette Benning, Armie Hammer.
126 minutes.