Christian Petzold (Barbara) boldly transforms Anna Seghers’ WW2 novel into a haunting period film set in an ambiguous present. A stirring melodrama of love during oppression, Transit is every bit as scintillating as Casablanca, thanks in part to the outstanding duo of Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer.
Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss are two of contemporary German cinema’s best talents, and before Phoenix they made Barbara: a character study driven by Hoss’s striking, subtle performance. A tense East Berlin-set political thriller that won Petzold the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Director.
Starring Nina Hoss, Jerichow is an elegantly crafted genre exercise that plays with the rules of the thriller. Partially adapting James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, this is an absorbing, noir-tinged tale of lust, envy and deceit, which offers a biting critique of capitalist ambition.
Sex, capitalism, German reunification, loneliness—this extraordinary thriller is haunted by all manner of thematic spectres. A dazzling reimagining of the subversive genre classic Carnival of Souls, Yella is one of Christian Petzold’s very best, with a monumental Nina Hoss front and center.
Christian Petzold displayed a rare gift for genre subversion from the very start. At once a coming-of-age tale and terrorists-on-the-run thriller, his debut feature uses the former to comment on the latter—its mutable young protagonist serving as a proxy for a nation surveying its traumatic past.
