Movie starts of the week with "Ambulance", "C'mon C'mon": An ambulance. You're welcome!

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Hysterical exchanges of words, wandering tracking shots: Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in »Ambulance«

Photo: Universal Studios

In cinemas from March 24th

»ambulance«

An ambulance was decoratively parked in front of the Berlin cinema where the premiere of Michael Bay's new film took place.

After the first thirty minutes of »Ambulance« it seemed not unlikely that he would still be called upon to transport the odd viewer or two.

Because this action cracker races at full steam and without regard to losses on its audience.

Bay (»Armageddon«, »Transformers«) seems to want to roll over us with absurd chases, hysterical exchanges of words, stray tracking shots and noisy sound montages.

»Ambulance« is based on Laurits Munch-Petersen's 2005 Danish film »Ambulances« and tells the story of two adoptive brothers, Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who want to pull off a bank robbery in Los Angeles.

Danny is a professional criminal, Will needs the money to pay for his wife's vital surgery.

When the coup fails and the two manage to escape after a wild shootout, they hijack an ambulance in which a paramedic (Eiza González) is caring for a seriously injured police officer.

This could have been a fast-paced, dirty thriller, a chamber play on wheels, a movie like "Speed" in which a bus roars through LA without stopping, just a little smaller.

But Bay can only think big.

Helicopters are constantly thundering over the scenery, and police cars, driven by apparently very incompetent drivers, roll over every minute.

For Bay, it makes no difference if sheet metal gets smashed or bones break: whatever he films, it's just material to him.

That's why everything that makes a good film falls by the wayside.

»Ambulance«, USA 2022. Director: Michael Bay.

Screenplay: Chris Fedak.

Starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jake Gyllenhaal, Eiza Gonzalez.

136 minutes.

"C'mon C'mon"

The grace and charm of the two main actors enchant the film »Come on, Come on«.

Joaquin Phoenix and child actor Woody Norman are a comical duo forced together by evil circumstances in this film from director Mike Mills.

Phoenix plays a radio journalist who, as an uncle, hasn't really taken care of his sister's son - is now tasked with babysitting precocious nine-year-old Jesse (Norman) for a few days due to an emergency.

The days turn into weeks, and because the minder uncle also has to work, he takes his nephew with him to New York and New Orleans.

In clear black-and-white images, a kind of family-psychological test arrangement is presented here, in which Jesse's grandmother is also involved in memories.

The slouchy misfit played by Phoenix engages his nephew in sly, mundane, funny dialogues about the meaning of life and suffering.

What are you afraid of?

How do you want your future?

Why are you sad?

These are simple, obvious, essential questions that a child and an adult ask each other here.

In addition, the two deliver small educational power struggles, as most parents know them.

Sometimes the film by Mills, who since »Beginners« (2010) has been regarded as the innovator of American auteur films, is pathetically stoned with Mozart music and sometimes a touch too enthusiastic about its two heroes.

But a hauntingly beautiful, almost meditative work about the pains and delights that come from almost all family entanglements, C'mon, C'mon is from beginning to end.

»C'mon C'mon«, USA 2022. Director and screenplay: Mike Mills.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffman, Woody Norman.

108 minutes.

»Silence Breakers«

Since 2004, the Israeli NGO »Breaking the Silence« (BtS) has been collecting voices from soldiers who were deployed in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Their belief is that since the Israeli army's mission in the occupied territories is immoral, any attempts to fulfill that mission will also result in committing immoral acts.

The members of "Breaking the Silence" have also served -- and have confessed to assaults and abuses against Palestinians.

However, their way of reconnaissance is highly controversial in Israel, as Silvina Landesman's documentary »Silence Breakers« impressively shows.

Anyone who thinks that online discussion behavior would become brutal has not yet been on a »Breaking the Silence« tour through Hebron: Soldiers block approved routes, settlers physically harass the tour guides, continuous honking disturbs the explanations on site.

Landesman captures these situations of pure stress directly.

But she is also there when the leading heads of the NGO meet for a strategy meeting or have to switch to crisis management mode because a BtS employee gave the impression of having acted like a spy in the army.

So »Silence Breakers« doesn't draw an embellished picture.

»Silence Breakers«, ISR/F/D 2021. Written and directed by Silvina Landesman.

87 minutes

"This Rain Will Never Stop"

From a great height, the camera looks at the earth, which looks like a devastated planet in the black and white images.

As far as the eye can see there is only rock and sand.

Life, it seems, has not been possible here for a long time.

Then the horizon comes into view.

Smoking factory chimneys can be seen in the haze.

They are the first signs of human civilization.

Right at the beginning of her documentary »This Rain Will Never Stop«, the Ukrainian director Alina Gorlova gives her viewers the feeling of having stepped into a post-apocalyptic world.

Her impressive film, which premiered in 2020, is about 20-year-old Kurd Andriy Suleyman, who fled Syria to eastern Ukraine, where his mother comes from.

He works for the Red Cross and distributes relief supplies to the population.

You don't see any acts of war, but you hear shots ringing out.

Gorlova shows military parades of the Ukrainian army and films them in such a way that the soldiers fill the screen and appear as a united front.

You can see bridges that have been bombed and provisionally repaired.

Streams of people move across them.

Icons of a tremendously fragile society.

There are no overlays of place names that would give away where you are.

The people Suleyman encounters are not introduced or explained.

You feel a little like the hero who has to make his way through a strange, confusing world.

The fact that he remains a stranger to the viewer until the end is part of the concept and has to do with the fact that the film observes him from a distance.

His eyes reflect what is happening around him: how people are trying to save what is left of their civil life.

»This Rain Will Never Stop«, Ukraine/Latvia/Germany/Qatar, 2020. Director: Alina Gorlova.

104 minutes.

Read the detailed review here.

And streaming:

»My War« (including Amazon Prime Video, iTunes)

The war in Ukraine is depressingly close, and the images of destruction, of the wounded and those fleeing get to the kidneys.

But the war itself, and with it the acts of mass, machine killing, remains invisible.

In 1989, the German documentary film director and producer Thomas Kufus tried to get closer to the war in the Soviet Union in 1941.

He edited amateur film material that Wehrmacht soldiers had taken back then, and in conversations confronted the men with the images and experiences from back then.

Now the film is being seen again, digitally restored, and the encounter in these renewed times of war is a striking experience.

One is witnessing a war of aggression that is intimately linked to the war of aggression of the present day through the suffering and pain it caused.

This film makes a historical line of development clear.

Even more impressively, however, he documents the enormous efficiency of human repression mechanisms.

One sees laughing soldiers greeting the camera, military drills, and later also the victims of atrocities and the injured.

But in the stories of most ex-soldiers, a barbaric war turns into a boy scout excursion with good comrades.

"I would have liked to have traveled to western Europe as well," says one of them unperturbed.

"Even under war conditions?" asks Kufus incredulously.

“Of course, why not?” the man replies.

The war, this is the impression one gets here, becomes invisible even to those who took part in it.

»Mein Krieg«, D 1989. Director: Harriet Eder, Thomas Kufus