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

Everyone wants to be loved

Martina Knoben: double burden? What! Ina (Anne Ratte-Polle) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown because everyone wants something from her and she tries to please everyone: the patients in her psychotherapy practice; the pubescent daughter who threatens to move in with her father; the egocentric mother who recruits Ina for various services; and her boyfriend, who tries to persuade her to move to Finland. No wonder Ina feels pressure on her chest. This is transferred to the audience, also thanks to the great actresses. Catherine Woll hunts with them through Ina’s day, but cinematically a bit too well-behaved and too arbitrary.

Can and Me

Joachim Hentschel: As a keyboard player in the titanic Cologne experimental group Can Irmin Schmidt became an alternative rock star in the 1970s. The curator and documentary filmmaker has written about his pre- and post-history and his musical life’s work Michael P Aust shot a portrait that shows us the world through the artist’s eyes, with lots of great anecdotes and original images. But also narrated chronologically. Great enlightenment: Schmidt’s agile wife Hildegard, who keeps the shop running as manager and head of the record company. It’s about her Movie at least as much as from him.

The oak – my home

Kathleen Hildebrand: The camera just goes everywhere in this stunning documentary by Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux: She hisses a hawk behind a jay between tree trunks, follows wood mice into their surprisingly spacious burrows and watches the larva of a borer beetle as it metamorphoses underground, at the foot of a 200-year-old French oak tree. None of the protagonist animals are harmed. As so often in contemporary animal documentaries, the predators get nothing.

The Fabelmans

Tobias Kniebe: The great Steven Spielberg tells about himself when he was young, his background and his vocation. This can easily be described as an autobiography and is even amazingly truthful: the childhood with the three sisters, the free-spirited artist mother (Michelle Williams) whose affair he discovers, the Super 8 films on the way to the cinema god. Ultimately, these even help against bullying anti-Semites at school, and against the anxiety after the parents’ divorce – the film brings them into the open. At its core, this story, like all good biographical stories, is about one idea: the power of filmmaking.

glacial tomb

Nicola’s friend: Climate change is causing a lot of problems. In Iceland, the Vatnajökull glacier is melting, an old Nazi plane emerges from the ice and with it some Hitler secret. The unsuspecting Kristín gets sucked into this robber gun. After car chases through tranquil Reykjavík and shootings on remote Icelandic farms, a history professor explains what it’s all about. Óskar Thór Axelsson’s film adaptation of the thriller of the same name is supposed to be an Icelandic “Indiana Jones” or “Tomb Raider”, but it is told much too schematically and carelessly for that. Wotan Wilke Möhring and the Icelandic landscape don’t help either.

Saint Omer

Philip Stadelmaier: In the first, highly decorated feature film by Alice Diop an author (Kayije Kagame) follows the trial of a young student (Guslagie Malanda) who drowned her child. Both are of Senegalese origin. A very theatrical film whose complex discourses never reveal the why of the deed. It’s worth seeing, but maybe it wants to be seen a little too much, too much to reach the hearts of the audience. Nevertheless, it is sensitized to the fate of the accused.

scream 6

Fritz Goettler: Ghostface now also has a pump shotgun. The nasty killer has left tranquil Woodsboro and followed the Carpenter sisters and Meeks siblings, the survivors of the previous part of the horror series, to New York. In the subway there, because it’s packed with people, you’re absolutely safe from his attacks… As a potential victim, you have to come up with that first. There is a lot of discussion about film again, about the new rules of horror cinema – now the heroines also have a dark side. And that a main character is immune to being murdered, you shouldn’t necessarily rely on that anymore. The new part, again directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillettis darker and more gruesome than the previous ones, more than just a game of cell phones and knives, this time there’s a lot of desperation, a lot of revenge at play.