Collaborating once more with Harun Farocki and lead actor Nina Hoss, Christian Petzold (Barbara) carefully crafts this cleverly plotted, smotheringly suspenseful post-WW2 drama. An especially impressive combination of throwback thriller and genre elements with substantial thematic weight.

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.