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Jason Statham in "Operation Fortune": Anyone here doubting who's in charge?
Photo: Leonine / dpa
In cinemas since January 5:
"Operation Fortune"
The film is about a wild group of agents and villains fighting for the smartest artificial intelligence on earth.
The dialogues and the screenplay seem as if they were written by an already commercially available, not quite so clever artificial intelligence.
Otherwise, Guy Ritchie's action and secret agent film »Operation Fortune« is a pleasure in many moments.
Jason Statham plays a special ops hitman in the service of the British Crown named Orson Fortune, Aubrey Plaza is his most important comrade-in-arms as a highly gifted computer specialist - and Hugh Grant is a super villain with a luxury yacht and her main antagonist.
The director Ritchie has been characterized by a very British whimsy enthusiasm since his beginnings with »Jack, Dame, König Gras« from 1998.
Here it is lived out in beautiful locations in Morocco and in Spain, in Turkey and in Qatar.
Because the billionaire gunrunner played by Grant has a thing for Hollywood actors, Fortune's troupe of heroes recruits American movie star Danny Francesco (happily slouched by Josh Hartnett) to get at the villain.
Ritchie bangs out many nice gag ideas just as cheerfully as a large arsenal of helicopter rockets and blank cartridges, the chases are staged with great attention to surprising detail.
But the greatest advantage of the film is the foolish ecstasy with which practically all the actors see the cinema as a nicely entertaining,
Wolfgang Hoebel
"Operation Fortune" ("Ruse de Guerre").
USA 2023. Director: Guy Ritchie, script: Ritchie, Marn Davies, Ivan Atkinson.
Starring Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Hugh Grant.
114 minutes.
»Passengers of the Night«
While in Germany at the beginning of the 1980s the rather dreary and conservative »spiritual-moral turn« of the Kohl era was dawning, France was intoxicated by a utopian-progressive idea: In May 1981, on the night of the electoral success of the socialist François Mitterrand and his performance of a more supportive French society, also begins the new film by director Mikhaël Hers.
It reflects Mitterrand's "changement" policy in a family that is also caught up in major changes - with all the challenges that this entails.
On election night, Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) cheers on the streets of Paris with other supporters of the Parti Socialiste, but soon after she has just recovered from breast cancer, her husband leaves her for a younger woman.
In her chic high-rise apartment in the futuristic Beaugrenelle building complex on the Seine, she has to rearrange her life as sole breadwinner for two teenage children during the decade of new beginnings.
Timidly she makes contact with the non-bourgeois outside world.
She works in a library and applies to her favorite radio station and a nightly talk show where the tough Vanda Dorval (Emmanuelle Béart) is a kind of French domian.
Initially hired as a telephone operator, Elisabeth discovers her heart for the young, very beautiful, but also very drug-addicted homeless woman Talulah (Noée Abita), who was a live guest on the show - and invites her into her apartment as a subtenant.
There, Talulah turns Elisabeth's son Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter) and Elisabeth herself faces a new love.
Gradually, the possibility of a patchwork family that overcomes class differences and social resentments forms.
Director Hers (»Amanda«), born in 1975, is a specialist in nostalgic family dramas who is already much celebrated in his homeland and at festivals.
»Passengers of the Night« premiered in 2022 in the Berlinale Competition.
The calm, deliberately undramatic flow of his film is reminiscent of the old master Eric Rohmer, whose 1984 film »Full Moon Nights« is lovingly quoted here.
However, Hers seems more in love with the details of his 1980s setting than with his ever-airy unraveling story.
But Charlotte Gainsbourg's intense and stirring portrayal of the fragile pastor of a nervous nation is a comfort to be had.
Andrew Borcholte
»Passengers of the night« (»Les passagers de la nuit«).
France 2022. Director: Mikhaël Hers.
Book: Maud Ameline, Mariette Désert, Mikhaël Hers.
With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Noée Abita, Emmanuelle Béart, Quito Rayon-Richter, Megan Northam.
111 minutes.
»balance«
Time, money, power: where better to study the triad of capitalism than in ultra-rich Switzerland?
In his highly acclaimed debut film »Dene wos guet geit« from 2017, Cyril Schäublin examined the socio-economic forces at work in his home country with a remarkable mixture of distance and obsession with detail.
In the Berlinale success »Unruh«, for which he won a director's prize, his gaze is even sharper.
In a village in the Swiss Jura, he shows how Taylorism and anarchism collided at the end of the 1870s and, so to speak, set the course for the great ideological struggles of the 20th century.
Alongside historical circumstances, Schäublin follows the Russian geographer and later anarchist pioneer Pjotr Kropotkin (Alexej Jewstratow) as he stops off in a watchmaking village during a mapping project and thereby comes into contact with the anarchist labor movement.
Kropotkin witnesses how those who produce the world-famous Swiss watches with the finest craftsmanship become victims of their own art: Accurate clockwork also means accurate recording of productivity.
Those who do not meet the factory owners' harsh standards are fired - and those who resist exploitation, for example by supporting the anarchists, even more so.
With curious snapshots of everyday village and factory life, Schäublin assembles a film in which the size of the themes contrasts with the subtle staging.
This includes Silvan Hillmann's outstanding image design, which challenges viewing habits anew with each tableau.
»Unruh« lets you marvel at how different history can look.
Hannah Pilarczyk
"Unrest."
Switzerland 2022. Written and directed by Cyril Schäublin.
With: Alexei Jewstratow, Clara Gostynski, Monika Stalder.
93 minutes.
»The Banshees of Inisherin«
For what completely insignificant reasons are people willing to refuse to raise a glass to one another, burn down one another's house, and smash one another's heads in?
Martin McDonagh's comedy »The Banshees of Inisherin« revolves around this question.
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play two middle-aged residents of an Irish island in 1923. From just unlikely friends, they are suddenly divorced.
The friendly, unassuming and somewhat fidgety bachelor Padraic (Farrell) knocks on the window of the gnarly coot Colm (Gleeson) on his way to the pub, as he does almost every day.
But the old man, who lives in a picturesque cluttered house, never wants to drink with him again.
If the younger man speaks to him in the future, Colm soon threatens in front of witnesses at the counter that he will mutilate himself.
For each of Padraic's advances, he wants to cut off a finger with a pair of rusty sheep shears.
Often hilariously funny, The Banshees of Inisherin is a lesson in the banality of wickedness.
"It's about a bore leaving someone else alone," Colm justifies his stubbornness.
It's a pleasure to watch Farrell as Padraic's helplessness gradually turns into the panic of being existentially alone - and then even into murderous lust.
The magic of the film comes from the elegance and composure with which McDonagh demonstrates the artistry of his leading actors.
Farrell and Gleeson boldly plunge into rounds and rounds of a fight that neither can win.
McDonagh made a film about the art and stupidity of war.
At the same time, his work is an advertising clip for Ireland.
The rugged landscape, the sea and the pubs are celebrated here with an enthusiasm that many probably immediately dream of traveling there after seeing the cinema.
Wolfgang Hoebel
»The Banshees of Inisherin«.
Ireland/Great Britain/USA 2022. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh.
Starring: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson.
114 minutes.
In streaming:
»The Pale Blue Eyes« (Netflix)
On paper, this story sounds as lame as the recent Agatha Christie hack »Glass Onion«: In 1830, a detective investigates a ritual murder at the venerable West Point Academy military school and is assisted by cadet Edgar Allan Poe, one of the greatest American poet in general and incidentally inventor of the detective genre.
But similar to »Glass Onion«, »The Memorable Case of Mr. Poe«, which in the American original bears the much more beautiful title »The Pale Blue Eye«, works thanks to a great performance by its director, here Scott Cooper.
At least almost, in the end the murder mystery doesn't come together as compellingly as Poe's own classic »The Double Murder in the Rue Morgue«.
But before that you see a dark, atmospheric thriller with crystalline, ice-cold snowy images and dialogues that sound wonderfully authentic after 1830.
Christian Bale, who is working with Cooper here for the third time (among other things, the epochal western drama »Enemies - Hostiles« was created), gives an amusingly creaky leading role, but is almost played against the wall by the young British up-and-coming actor Herry Melling.
As a young Poe, he is so eloquent, exalted and melancholic that the film is worth watching for this achievement alone.
Oliver Kaever
»The Pale Blue Eye«.
USA 2022. Written and directed by Scott Cooper.
Starring: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Charlotte Gainsbourg.
128 minutes.