The English-language German movie “Final Contract: Death on Delivery” (aka “Dark Ride”) reminds me of the English-language French movie “Riders” (aka “Steal”). The two films have very much in common, including a lack of ambition when it comes to storytelling,...

The plot is set in Berlin, where a maniac is preying upon people with intricate tattoos, harvesting their skin and leaving them for dead. The detective assigned to the case, Minks (Christian Redl) is a brutal, uncompromising thug who blackmails fresh-faced rookie Schrader (August Diehl, also in the German...

Despite everything you may have heard, “Anatomy 2″ is not a Teen Slasher film — and in this case, that’s a bad thing. Not having seen the original, I can’t tell if the whole point of the “Anatomy” series is to be goofy and not to be taken seriously. The biggest...

I knew I was in trouble when the first 12 minutes of “Demonium”, an Italian horror film, involved these scenes: a very unattractive woman having sex with her lover over the opening credits, then the lover exchanging silly greetings with people in business suits at his “office”,...

“The Pool” joins the recent spate of German-made Teen Slasher movies to go international. Although the film is made by Germans and set in Prague, and most of the actors are German, the film’s American pedigree makes its classification as a German film somewhat irrelevant. You have to...

I’m reasonably certain that Caroline Link’s “Nowhere in Africa” will strike a cord with a lot of people. After all, it did when the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2002, although how a movie made in 2001 qualifies for the 2002 Oscars, given out in 2003, is just one more mystery...

The predicament for German filmmakers who want to tackle World War II is this: how do you make a movie, with heroes and such, about a historical period when your country was out slaughtering anyone and everyone who wasn’t part of their “great white race”? The movie “Stalingrad”...

I am told German Wolfgang Petersen’s movie “Das Boot” is the submarine movie by which all submarine movies are measured. It just so happens that the submarine in question is a German one, and in a movie set during World War II, this is quite an anomaly. Then again, I’m sure the...

“Heaven” is the latest film from German Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”), and stars Cate Blanchette (“Bandits”) as Philippa, an Englishwoman in Italy who plants a bomb in a man’s office, only to have fate intervene and move the bomb to another location where it kills...

Writer/director Tykwer’s follow-up to his breakthrough hit, 1998’s Run Lola Run, is 2000’s The Princess and the Warrior, a film that is not about a princess, a warrior, or a magical fantasyland. The movie is set in contemporary Germany, and concerns Sissi (Franka Potente), a young woman...

Bandits is a German movie about a rock band made up of 4 different women with only one thing in common — they’re all currently serving sentences in prison. The band is led by vocalist and anti-social Luna, a gifted magician and songwriter with aspirations of becoming a rock star; Angel, the...

“Run Lola Run,” if nothing else, certainly lives up to its billing. Our heroine, played by a orange-haired Franka Potente as the titular character, certainly does a lot of running. I’ve never seen a movie by Tykwer before, but he’s certainly someone to watch out for. There is...