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

Creed III – Rocky’s Legacy

Sofia Glasl: After all, there is still popcorn cinema beyond the mind-blowing show of multiverses, spin-offs and sequels that Hollywood’s money printing machine loves to lure its audience into. Hardly anyone would have guessed it in the almost fifty-year Rocky film series, the “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler since 2016 about the boxer Adonis Creed. Paradoxically, that’s exactly what succeeds in “Creed III”, the directorial debut of the main actor Michael B Jordan. That is above all Jonathan Majors who, as Creed’s antagonist, sizzles with personal disappointment and self-righteousness, beating the glittering world of sports-entertainment at its own game.

Lucy is now a gangster

Lilian Koehler: Lucy’s parents’ ice cream makes the world a better place. When the ice machine suddenly breaks down, the entire city is turned upside down. It’s good that the elementary school student has a plan: to save the ice cream parlor from ruin, she wants to rob a bank. For this she wants to become a gangster, but that doesn’t correspond to her nature at all. The family comedy takes off with a lot of humor Til Endemann helpful messages for children. A few hackneyed clichés less would have done the story good.

Project Wolf Hunting

Carlotta Wald: You can watch this South Korean horror film by Kim Hong Sun look without looking. The hissing of knife blades, cracking bones and spattering blood tells everything that the Movie has to say — quite little overall. Exorbitantly dangerous prison inmates are to be transported from the Philippines to Korea on a cargo ship. they break out But her desire to kill is disturbed and excessively exceeded by a bestial being. So one unfathomable evil chases the next, accompanied by expected details. The tension runs away like blood over the railing. The thrill stays away.

Return to Dust

Fritz Goettler: Another nice little film that gives a lot of space to a donkey, after “EO” and “The Banshees of Inisherin”. The animal patiently accompanies the lives of Ma, the poor farmer, and Guiying, who is thought to be retarded, incontinent and barren, in northern China’s Gansu province. An arranged marriage, which develops into a relaxed, sometimes even devout community: planting and harvesting corn, making mud bricks for building your own house, donating special blood, “panda blood”! Then suddenly the government made the absurd offer to move into an apartment in a high-rise in the city. Li Ruijun had his actors live in his home province for preparation, where the film was shot, his film ran at the Berlinale in 2022 and was later banned from cinemas and streaming platforms in China and censored. His materialism includes transcendence, people burn paper money for the dead so that they also have something to splurge on.

sun and concrete

Annett Scheffel: Berlin, Gropiusstadt, record summer 2003: Four boys navigate between hashish and truancy, brutality and family abysses through everyday life in the large housing estate. Despite the social hardship, the story is told with a lot of wit and touching vulnerability. Light and depressing at the same time. “Sonne und Beton” is the film adaptation of the comedian’s autobiographically colored novel Felix Lobrecht. Also director David Wendt has experience with sensitive coming-of-age material. His film is like a German “Kids”, with an empathetic view of being young, or like “Tschick”, only without a road trip, but with crass milieu language.

Tar

Suzanne Vahabzadeh: A crime-free psychological thriller: Cate Blanchett stars in Todd Fields Drama Lydia Tár, the first woman to make it to the top of the Berlin Philharmonic – a perfect, highly talented conductor who is accused of abusing her power at the height of her career. Did she arrogantly scold a student of color, exploit young musicians for affairs, and later hinder their careers, resulting in suicide? Cate Blanchett is risking a lot here and is in top form, she has a very good chance of winning an Oscar, and “Tár” has five other nominations, including best picture and best director. A great, complex filmwho asks lots of smart questions and doesn’t give stupid answers.

The witness

Anna Steinbauer: The director Bernd Michael Lade is also the main actor in his court drama, in which he reveals the atrocities of the Nazis as key witness Carl Schrade. The former jeweler spent eleven years in various concentration camps – as a green kapo, as one of the prison guards installed by the SS. Arranged in a strictly dialectical manner, the very reduced, almost documentary film effectively raises the question of complicity and perpetrators in an inhuman system, but is not for the impatient: Only visually everything is unfortunately very monotonous and bulky – which is not least due to the fact that the process is conducted in two languages ​​and the statements are translated directly from English into German and vice versa.