
In this film that wavers unsteadily between a comedy and a tragedy, Murtaza (Mujdat Gezen) is a deluded security guard whose fanatical reverence for “duty” verges on the psychotic. He is incapable of seeing himself for what he is – and as a consequence he is often the unwitting and unknowing brunt of jokes. His wife and daughters are painfully aware of his shortcomings, but they generally suffer in silence.
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Tag Archives: Germany
The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (1971) León Klimovsky, Paul Naschy, Gaby Fuchs, Barbara Capell, Horror

Elvira is travelling through the French countryside with her friend Genevieve, searching for the lost tomb of a medieval murderess and possible vampire, Countess Wandessa. They find a likely site in the castle of Waldemar Daninsky, who invites the women to stay as long as they like.
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Dark Summer (2000) Gregory Marquette, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Keith David, Kent Allen, Thriller

A traveling cellist gets involved with two disturbed sisters on their way to Seattle to tell their mom that their dad has just passed away. On the way, the two kill a judge and a few others unknown to the cellist. Eventually he gets pinned for the crimes and is forced to defend himself.
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Das Eskimobaby / The Eskimo Baby (1916) Heinz Schall, Asta Nielsen, Freddy Wingardh, Comedy

Young Polar Explorar brings Eskimo Ivigtut to his parents in Berlin. After experiencing Western culture, she finds herself pregnant but the explorer comes to her rescue.
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The White Ribbon / Das weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (2009) Michael Haneke, Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch, Drama, Mystery

From July, 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents take place in a German village. A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron’s son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear. A callow teacher, who courts a nanny in the baron’s household, narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold.
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Blind Justice / Unter Ausschluß der Öffentlichkeit (1961) Harald Philipp, Peter van Eyck, Marianne Koch, Eva Bartok, Drama

This tale of courtroom drama, espionage, and Peter van Eyck being super cool as usual casts our lead as a District Attorney becomes deeply involved in a murder case after the suspect produces a surprise witness.
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Der Henker von London / The Mad Executioners (1963) Edwin Zbonek, Hansjörg Felmy, Maria Perschy, Dieter Borsche, Crime, Horror

A band of hooded men have formed a court and they are exacting justice upon the criminals who have escaped the reach of the law. The sentence they exact is death by hanging. Using the hangman’s rope from the Scotland Yard Museum they leave their victims hanging from various locations with a file detailing the case against them pinned to the body. Scotland Yard is stumped and have assigned their best man to break the case. Meanwhile another fiend is on the loose, one who is neatly severing the heads of young women. The bodies are found the heads are not.
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The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) Ken Loach, Cillian Murphy, Pádraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, Drama, History, War

In 1920, rural Ireland is the vicious battlefield of republican rebels against the British security forces and Irish Unionist population who oppose them, a recipe for mutual cruelty. Medical graduate Damien O’Donovan always gave priority to his socialist ideals and simply helping people in need. Just when he’s leaving Ireland to work in a highly reputed London hospital, witnessing gross abuse of commoners changes his mind. He returns and joins the local IRA brigade, commanded by his brother Teddy, and adopts the merciless logic of civil war, while Teddy mellows by experiencing first-hand endless suffering. When IRA leaders negotiate an autonomous Free State under the British crown, Teddy defends the pragmatic best possible deal at this stage. Damien however joins the large seceding faction which holds nothing less than a socialist republic will do. The result is another civil war, bloodily opposing former Irish comrades in arms, even the brothers.
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Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979) Volker Schlöndorff, David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Drama, War

Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II. So he refuses the society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighborhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time. However, (almost) nobody listens to him, so the catastrophe goes on…
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Dora oder Die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern / Dora or The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents (2015) Stina Werenfels, Victoria Schulz, Jenny Schily, Lars Eidinger, Drama, Family, Romance

After her mother decides that eighteen-year-old mentally disabled Dora no longer has to take sedating drugs, the young woman begins to blossom. But when pleasure-loving Dora discovers her sexuality her strive for independence becomes increasingly risky. Her mother struggles to protect her: the family is threatened to fall apart.
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