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In cinemas from May 5th
»Navalny«
When Alexej Navalny sat down in front of Daniel Roher's camera in the winter of 2020/21, the Canadian director was certain: "This will be the last interview that Alexej will give in the long term.
Maybe even the very last.« At least in part, Roher was right: at the end of his documentary about Russia's most famous opposition figure, he was arrested and locked away, and in March 2022 he received a nine-year prison sentence.
But will it be Navalny's very last interview?
Like the person portrayed, Roher does not shy away from escalation - which makes his film extremely exciting and at the same time sufficiently distanced.
As Navalny says, he is allowed to brush off criticism of his strategic alliances with nationalists and right-wing extremists.
Roher doesn't even bother to speak against her.
Who should also be able to take on the mad media professional?
Beyond politics, it has always been more difficult to keep Alexei Navalny and his fate emotionally at a distance.
Under the impression of the Russian war of aggression and in view of the first pictures from prison, which show him shaved bald and emaciated, it is now almost impossible.
And then there is also this story that Roher's film captures (and DER SPIEGEL researched and documented with it): the attempt on his life with the nerve agent Novichok.
Roher has the pictures of Navalny's wife Julia, how she is not allowed to go to her seriously ill husband's sickbed in Omsk.
How she arranges Navalny's transport to Germany.
How he recovers in the Black Forest.
And how he finally gets on the trail of his own assassins and gets their confession in a kind of telephone prank: Yes, the Russian secret service FSB is behind everything.
It is a moment of triumph, staged by Roher and Navalny with full media power and yet fleeting.
Hopefully Navalny will soon be able to tell what happened next.
In the next interview.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»Nawalny« USA 2022. Written and directed by Daniel Roher.
98 minutes
»Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness«
There are people who get the creeps just by hearing the word »Marvel movie«, they are so overwhelmed and exhausted by the multitude of superhero characters that the US comic giant and its parent company Disneys regularly go to the cinema sent there to embark on spectacular – and commercially very successful – adventures.
All of those should be said: In the second film with Benedict Cumberbatch as the mega-magician Doctor Strange, everything will be even busier.
On the one hand.
On the other hand, »Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness« is actually the first horror film of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Zombie splatter veteran Sam Raimi (»Evil Dead«, »Army of Darkness«), who had actually sworn off comic blockbusters after his »Spider-Man« trilogy in the noughties, surprisingly found himself at short notice and as a director .
Now he has taken over from the ousted Scott Derrickson, director of the first part, the sovereignty over a content-wise hopelessly overloaded monster spectacle.
Raimi can't get a grip on that at first, just like the new, queer Latina character in the MCU, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), her super ability to jump back and forth between parallel worlds, i.e. across the so-called multiverse, in which Spider- You got tangled.
The teenager is pursued by the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who is morally corrupt after »Wandavision«;
therefore she seeks the help of the wizard Stephen Strange in this and other worlds.
Sound complicated?
It is.
But before you think about it too long, you lose yourself in the constant fire of action, fan service, visual and personal wow effects.
Until Raimi then in the last act, when all the MCU threads are sufficiently linked, unpacks some crappy-beautiful (sometimes really scary) horror quotes - and stages Doctor Strange as his own zombie: a not too subtle, but funny comment from the old master to the franchise hell of eternally undead superheroes he was sucked back into.
Andrew Borcholte
»Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness«: USA 2022. Director: Sam Raimi.
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong.
126 minutes
In streaming
»Memory«
Not between heaven and hell, but you find yourself in a kind of limbo as soon as you get into a film by Thai master director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The award-winning works are located between contemporary history and private obsessions, combining topics such as the consequences of the Thai military dictatorship with homoerotic explorations - and are the opposite of cerebral: they are only accessible through the senses, in the case of "Memoria" through hearing.
The British Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is visiting her sister in Bogotá when she hears an explosion-like noise, which apparently only she hears and is possibly a symptom of unresolved mental stress.
The search for its causes culminates in a journey that leads equally through Colombia and Jessica's mental cinema: Discoveries about the violent history of the country always refer to her personal situation.
At the end of »Memoria« there is a fantastic explanation for the noise.
Once you have listened to the film and felt it, you don't really want to know it anymore.
It's better to stay in their ecstatic in-between state with Swinton and Weerasethakul forever.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»Memoria« COL/F/THA.
Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Jeanne Balibar.
136 minutes
»Rumspringa« (Netflix)
A young man from a strict religious community in the USA comes to Berlin and finds a life of freedom and joy in the German capital.
Wait - wasn't that a young woman in the Netflix miniseries "Unorthodox"?
Yes, but because the successful four-part series based on Deborah Feldman's bestseller could not be continued, the streaming service is now launching the film »Rumspringa«: the story of Jacobs (Jonas Holdenrieder), a young Amish boy who met his uncle in the German capital visited and before the wedding and a future chaste life is allowed to go overboard again.
Just
rumspringa
, as this rite of passage is called by the Amish, the religious community that trundles around in horse-drawn carriages, especially in Pennsylvania, and speaks a guttural Palatine dialect with an American twist.
However, »Rumspringa« has nothing more to offer than a decal of these people, who in touching ignorance confront the customs of woker city dwellers.
Not even the dialect is right, and the scenes supposedly set in the USA were obviously also shot in Germany.
What makes this film really annoying, however, are the all-too-obvious contrasts: here the cute, helpless Jacob, who doesn't know how to flirt but can chop down trees;
because the cocky city zampano (Timur Bartels), who races through Berlin in a convertible, but secretly feels lost without an inner compass.
"Unorthodox" showed what it means when an unworldly religious community takes your breath away, but also how difficult it is to breathe freely.
»Rumspringa« does not want to be more than material for the vain self-reflection of an audience that considers itself incredibly enlightened.
Oliver Kaever
»Rumspringa«, Germany 2022. Written and directed by: Mira Thiel.
With Jonas Holdenrieder, Timur Bartels.
101 minutes.
»You deserve a love« (Arte-Mediathek)
How annoying friends with lovesickness can be!
They are self-centered, manic, tearful, unfair to their ex-partner - and so lost that you are happy to be there for them.
In her directorial debut from 2019, the French actress Hafsia Herzi (»Couscous with Fish«) does not omit any facet of heartbreak and sometimes lets her main character Lila, played by Herzi herself, be an impertinence.
At some point, even her best friends can no longer understand why she is still attached to her unfaithful ex Rémi (Jérémie Laheurte).
The corridor in which films with such stories and characters succeed is narrow.
On the one hand, the German relationship comedy, which likes to exaggerate women into hysterics, is narrowing.
The French love film, which cannot find its way out of the white bourgeoisie of Paris, remains on the other side.
Herzi cleverly meanders past the clichés and achieves a naturalism that makes the urban present of Paris and Berlin appear unusually close.
At the latest with her second film »Bonne mère« from 2021 about a patchwork family that is only held together by an overworked mother, Herzi has established herself as an important voice in post-migrant cinema in France.
It can now also be discovered in Germany in the Arte media library.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»You deserve a love« F 2019. Written and directed by Hafsia Herzi.
With: Hafsia Herzi, Jérémie Laheurte, Djanis Bouzyani, Myriam Djeljeli.
102 minutes