New in cinema & streaming: which films are worthwhile – and which are not – culture

Champions

Fritz Goettler: “Nope,” says Darius, the young basketball player, when he sees the new coach – he has no intention of playing for him and he has his reasons. The man’s name is Marcus, played in all grittiness by Woody Harrelson, he bumped into a police car while drunk, now has ninety days of community service with a team of disabled basketball players. “Friends” is the name of the team, here a hothead can learn what friendship means and that you can’t just manipulate the others. The Movie is a remake of the Spanish film of the same name, 2018, but with disabilities and their social prejudices Bobby Farrelly already busy, mostly together with his brother Peter. An emotional little ensemble film that also evokes the stuffiness of the changing rooms and gymnasium familiar from youth.

The illusionist

Peter Richter: Helge Achenbach, that was this flamboyant art broker from the Rhineland, who added a few hidden surcharges to the bill of an Aldi heir, whom he found too stingy, for which he had to go to prison, worse still: was expelled from Düsseldorf society. In the documentation of Birgit Schulz he now appears as Robin Hood as well as a PR person in his own right – and after an hour and a half he actually manages not to appear as the most unsympathetic character in the film.

The Lost Train

Anna Steinbauer: A Russian sniper, a young Hitler admirer and a Dutch Jew from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp meet shortly before the end of World War II in a small East German town. Very sensitively told Saskia This in this war drama about a fateful encounter from a female perspective rarely seen in this context – about a special friendship between distrust and despair, about solidarity among women, set in the turmoil of a long-awaited and strangely lawless time shortly before the surrender of the Germans .

The trade unionist

Annett Scheffel: Isabelle Huppert once again shows her grandiose versatility as an uncomfortable union representative at a nuclear power plant, who single-handedly uncovers shady dealings and becomes the victim of sexual assault in her own home. It’s worth it for her alone Jean Paul Salomes Movie. Based on a true story, he throws up interesting aspects between economic crime, political thriller, court drama and psychodrama – without bringing them together in a coherent way. In return, he unmasks sexism in the workplace and in society in many scenes. And that, as long as it is a reality, cannot be denounced enough.

A good person

Fritz Goettler: A little drama about a painful new beginning, intoned by one Velvet underground-Song: “If you close the door, the night could last forever…” Allison causes an accident with a terrible outcome, she breaks up with the man she wanted to marry, becomes dependent on painkillers, joins an addiction support group, there she meets Daniel, who is also affected by the accident. Florence Pugh is Allison, rough and vulnerable, Morgan Freeman is Daniel, he wants to help her, but: he is the good personselfless and understanding? Zach Braff is the filmmaker of young New Jersey, he was in the hit series “Scrubs” at the beginning of the century and enchanted critics and audiences with his first film “Garden State”. Now he pulls through a strong melodrama, between hope and disaster, with an old man who can play god with his model railway and a young woman who roars through the crises on a bicycle.

Evil Dead Rise

Philip Riessenberger: The fifth film in the series shifts the action from the remote woods to the city: Beth (Lily Sullivan) visits her sister (Alyssa Sutherland) and her children in Los Angeles. The family reunion does not go entirely smoothly, a parasitic demon that takes over the bodies of mortals clouds the familiar togetherness. Director Lee Cronin (“The Hole in the Ground”) and his team have made an absurdly brutal horror film that develops a macabre humor in the intoxication of fake blood.

daisies

Annett Scheffel: In the key work of the great Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilová from 1966, two bored young women indulge in the pleasure of eating and cheeky idleness. Structures of reality, social norms and porcelain are smashed to pieces here. What is appropriate, what is not? The grotesquely bizarre comedy is like a constant violation of rules, galloping happily through stillness, images and colours. A wonderfully playful, subversive lesson about the impossibility of living the right life in the wrong – created on the eve of Prague Spring.

The Whale

David Steinitz: An obesity play in cinema format. The severely overweight Charlie is on the verge of cardiac death and can no longer leave his apartment, but receives a few final visitors to reflect on the meaning of his life and life in general. Brendan Fraser didn’t quite deserve an Oscar for this role. Director Darren Aronofsky but once again overdoes it with his metaphysical cinema of salvation and pumps a little too much morality into the story’.

Vamos a la playa

Josef Gruebl: Of course, this tropical road movie about three traveling twenty-somethings also goes to the beach, anything else would be false labeling. The two women and the man actually traveled to Cuba to look for a missing family member – but that’s not so important after all. Rather, it’s about their own sensitivities, about the search for parties, confirmation, fast sex. Dramaturgically depends Bettina Blumners Film rather through, but as a generational portrait it works quite well.