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The title Giallo refers, generically, to a distinctive kind of Italian horror-thriller film, of which writer-director Dario Argento has been a leading exponent since his 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

As such, it’s a very self-referential title, akin to Pulp Fiction, and one which is also indicative of the film’s nature, that it is more for his fan-base in Italy and internationally than an attempt to reach a new audience.

The big question, even as far as this audience is concerned, is whether the film can live up to fan expectation. Or, insofar as Argento’s stock is currently at a low level in the wake of a string of poorly received films – 2004’s The Card Player, 2005’s Do You Like Hitchcock and 2007’s The Third Mother – whether it might actually surpass them for those sufficiently dedicated to find out.

Amongst mainstream critics, meanwhile, Argento’s reputation, such as it is, is that virtuoso stylist who is not particularly with narrative and characterisation, and whose work is often marred by its gratuitous violence and misogyny.

While he has tried to address these criticisms, the results as seen in the likes of 1993’s Trauma and 1996’s The Stendhal Syndrome, have ended up pleasing fewer fans whilst still failing to curry favour with the critics.

The one exception, at least as fans were concerned, was 2001’s Sleepless, a film widely perceived as a return to form, precisely because it presented a kind of retrospective ‘greatest hits’ package that looked back to Argento’s 1970s and early 1980s work. It also came in the wake of his idiosyncratic 1998 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, a film which few have anything positive to say about.

It’s at this point that I must declare my own position: I think that each and every one of Argento’s films has something to make them worthwhile, and that Sleepless is over-rated compared to Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome and The Card Player. I also think that, if taken as an intentional parody – always an awkward critical position to take, admittedly – The Phantom of the Opera actually works.

It is also in this way that I would argue Giallo’s apparent weak points may be taken as strengths, such that we can laugh with the film’s more awkward moments rather than at them.

Before accentuating the possible negatives, however, I would like first to address the positives. Like Sleepless, Giallo is a film that breaks little new ground. But whereas its predecessor made a somewhat selective survey of the high points of Argento’s past films, Giallo looks all around.

Thus, for example, while we get a nightmarish yet naturalistic re-imagining of Suspiria and Inferno’s taxi rides – the maniac here is a taxi driver – we also also have an exciting rooftop chase finale that recalls the less well regarded Cat o’ Nine Tails.

Argento also continues to explore his emergent interest in Japanese culture, as previously seen in The Third Mother’s Gothic Lolita / J-horror styled witch follower of the mother. Giallo’s maniac, himself given the name Giallo for a meaningful diegetic reason, draws inspiration from violent hentai manga and subjects his victims to sadistic tortures that wouldn’t be out of place in Takashi Miike’s Audition. Disconcertingly – but ultimately tellingly, via past traumas, involving their respective mothers, that define both men’s present situations – his police nemesis also buys a volume of Japanese pornographer / photographer Araki’s work.

Elsewhere we may note the name of the overarching production company, Hannibal Films, as in Lektor; the presence of Polanski veterans Adrian Brody and Emanuelle Seigner, also of course Mrs Polanski; and, in a more throwaway manner, the returning the favour presence of a poster for Juno.

The Thomas Harris reference serves to further highlight the Manhunter-esque relationship between cop and maniac and to explain away the rather unusual position the former occupies within the Turin police force.

The plot can be summarised as follows: Giallo’s modus operandi is to kidnap beautiful young women whose absence will not immediately be noticed. One such victim is Celine, a young fashion model; giallo fans will immediately notice the form’s long fascination with the world of glamour, dating all the way back to Mario Bava’s foundational 1964 entry Blood and Black Lace. Unfortunately for Giallo, and perhaps fortunately for Celine, her air-hostess sister Linda (Seigner) has just arrived in town to pay a visit. Concerned by Celine’s failure to show up for their rendezvous, Linda goes to the police station to file a missing person’s report and is there sent to see Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Brody) in the bowels of the building. He soon realises the “pattern killer” he is hunting has struck again and they embark on a desperate race against time to save Celine…

It provides a solid framework for plenty of classic Argento images, suspense, shocks and splatter.

In the case of the violence, however, it’s also important to note that as much is suggested as shown. Besides helping answer those who would argue Argento’s violence is only gratuitous, it’s an approach which proves beneficial insofar as it showcases what special effects man Sergio Stivaletti can do rather than what he perhaps might struggle at, namely convincing in-camera facial mutilation effects, and the desire of a portion of the audience to see such images.

The other thing Giallo has is a lot of humour. Humour is, of course, not alien to the horror film. But it is also something that is difficult to do well, as criticism of the comic relief moments in Argento’s films testifies. In Giallo, I think the key thing is that Brody, whose deadpan delivery of key lines relating to Enzo’s back-story elicited laughs from the audience I watched the film with, was also the film’s co-producer. As such, it seems unlikely that he and Argento had a disagreement about how to portray the character, as with a number of the director’s more fraught actor relationships, and that this was their intent.

In combination with Seigner’s involvement, the film thus emerges as something akin to Argento’s version of Polanski’s Bitter Moon, as something to be both taken seriously at times and as a self-parody at others in its commentary on past glories.

How less sympathetic audiences will get the joke is another matter entirely...

In 1966 Jean Luc Godard made Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a film about a Parisian housewife who prostituted herself in order to enjoy the fruits of consumer capitalism. Appearing on television to promote the film and further explain its message, that capitalism = prostitution, Godard would be accompanied by an actual prostitute.

I mention this by way of introduction not because of some desire to show off my knowledge of cinema – Two or Three Things is a hardly obscure – but because I think it provides something of a model for The Girlfriend Experience, as another film about capitalism and exploitation in its diegesis and in terms of the relationship between its two major players.

The first is director Steven Soderbergh, who has managed to accomplish in the 1990s and 2000s to do what Francis Ford Coppola had hoped he and his movie brat colleagues would in the 1970s, namely alternate between mainstream and personal projects.

The problem with more personal projects is, of course, precisely that: how to find an audience for a more experimental project, lacking big name stars, when you don’t have the resources of the Hollywood machine at your disposal.

This is where the second player, self-styled existential porn star cum performance artist Sasha Grey / Marina Ann Hantzis comes into the equation.

For she gives Soderbergh the necessary hook to hang The Girlfriend Experience upon, whilst in turn benefitting from the exposure it gives her as she aspires to move outside the porn demi-monde as into more legitimate realms.

Both, that is, are symbiotically exploiting one another. Both are also exploiting the audience. But this is to be expected – what film doesn’t, at some level, exploit our desires?

A problem, for me, the way in which The Girlfriend Experience fails as art, is that it is too calculated. Grey plays not a housewife like Marina Vlady in Two or Three Things but a high-class Manhattan call girl, Chelsea/Christine, whose clientele are Wall Street brokers, with the whole thing being set over an indeterminate, but brief, period around the run up to the US treasury bailout and the presidential elections last year. The issue is that in US cinema hookers are invariably crack whores or career women. As Samuel Goldwyn said, “we need some new clichés”.

Another, as Godard’s film also shows, is that it’s all been done before, and far better. There’s nothing particularly radical about what Soderbergh is doing here. Besides Godard, we can consider movie brat Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the former featuring Nancy Allen as a similar call girl, and the latter originally casting porn performer Annette Haven in the role eventually filled by Melanie Griffiths.

Nor am I convinced by the radicalism of what Grey does in her ‘own’ porn films. Note the bracketing of ‘own’. The producers of Anal Cavity Search 3 or Grand Theft Anal 11, and the vast majority of their consumers, do not care about Grey’s philosophy, they just want to make money off her and jerk-off to her respectively.

Basically, it’s hard to talk philosophy when you’re deep-throating someone. And while Grey can be applauded for her willingness to do so-called ‘interracial’ porn, these selfsame films surely reinforce racist stereotypes, fantasies and fetishisation rather than challenge them. This is also something which can be said of her appearances in so-called ‘lesbian’ porn, invariably addressed as it is to the male heterosexual spectator.

Then there is the issue of residual payments, something which porn performers, as workers for hire (like most of us under capitalism), do not receive. Though Grey has mentioned these – and that she is will get them from The Girlfriend Experience – there is little doubt in my mind that if she were to push the question with the porn producers and insist upon them she would quickly be persona non grata.

Porn producers are certainly happy to see someone move into the mainstream for the legitimation it helps provide their industry but not if that person then begins to question the legitimacy of their own business practices. (Not, of course, that Hollywood is unfamiliar with being adept as screwing its own talent over; yes, I do have an essentially sadomasochistic view of the universe whereby you are either one of those doing the fucking or one of those being fucked.)

The issue may be that Soderbergh’s film does not entirely provide the showcase Grey wants. Though she demonstrates that she has some acting ability, Soderbergh remains more interested in technique and technology, much of it alienating. There are almost no medium close-up or two-shots in which Grey and another performer are there actually acting and reacting to one another. Instead, we tend to get shot-reverse shot patterns – albeit as likely to focusing on the one who is listening than speaking – sides of mobile phone conversations; voice-off monologues, and figures either in shadow, behind objects or in soft focus. The actors, that is, are as often as not reduced to figural elements as those around which the film revolves, while much of the ‘experience’ looks to have been constructed in the editing and post-production.

The key thing which needs to be emphasised is that the film is not sexually explicit. There are a few seconds of naturalistic nudity but there is no actual sexual activity seen, with the result a safe R rating .

Having someone used to performing sexually on camera, I wish Soderbergh had taken the chance to bring the porn film out of its ghetto, to complete the work begun by Radley Metzger in the 1970s but left uncompleted with the rise of home video in the 1980s and of gonzo porn in the 1990s. (Tellingly, Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven, an imaginative retelling of Pygmalion, is the only porn film referenced within The Girlfriend Experience, via a modern-day Al Goldstein’s savage critique of Chelsea’s non-performance for him.)

In my ideal version, everything that is in there already would be retained, but would have been punctuated by alienating, deliberately non-eroticised scenes of Chelsea involved in actual sex work. He would have then fought a campaign against the MPAA and their undoubted refusal to certificate the film, won, and would then have released the film on DVD without any chapter stops or ability for the consumer only interested in porn to go straight to the action. He might then have directed a porn film with Grey whose soundtrack consisted of Grey – who asserts to be a fan of Godard, Breillat and other high-brow art cinema figures – reading excerpts from Histoire(s) du cinema or expounding her own personal philosophy, again without the opportunity for the consumer to fast forward or – if it were possible – turn the sound down.

Somehow, however, I don’t think such hybridisations it’s going to happen. There are too many vested interests for it to be otherwise, in both porn and mainstream cinemas.

As someone who grew up watching Hammer horror and who regretted that new British horror films were few and far between at the time, I never thought I’d find myself responding to a film like Salvage in a “what, another one?” kind of way.

Put it down to over-familiarity with the form, a sense of having seen it all long before, and done better.

Or, to itemise, if you’ve seen some or most of The Birds, Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Shivers, 28 Days Later, [Rec] and Diary of the Dead, you’ll find nothing new here.

We begin with a scene of suggested violence as a paperboy encounters something in the trees behind an ordinary suburban house. Santa and snowman decorations outside most of the houses on his route – significantly excluding the one the paperboy visited just before being offed; the one belonging to the brown skinned family – establish the season.

Following this we get a slice of social realist drama as a dad takes his reluctant teenage daughter, Jodie, to spend Christmas with her mother, during which they happen to catch a part of a radio broadcast about a metal container having been washed up on a nearby beach. It’s hardly the most subtle piece of information planting, but is at least generically conventional if we think of the likes of Night of the Living Dead’s returning space probe and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s reports of grave-robbing.

After being deposited Jodie accidentally catches her mother, Beth, having sex with a man and, already not being in the best of moods, responds predictably by running over to a neighbour’s house. Mum follows and attempts, without success, to explain things to her daughter.

Just when you start to wonder what is happening horror-wise – although the mise en scene is already suitably edgy, with good use being made of the widescreen space – all hell breaks loose as a group of soldiers in black combat gear appear, shoot the aforementioned brown-skinned neighbour, Mr Sharma, after he advances on them with a knife, and force everyone else back indoors at gunpoint.

A bit of social comment is then inserted as Beth’s one-night stand, Kieran, speculates that Mr Sharma must have been a terrorist, despite her remarking, in a more reasoned fashion, that he is a Hindu (i.e. the darker skinned non-terrorist, as unofficial ‘swarthology’ discourse might have it) rather than a Muslim (i.e. the darker skinned potential terrorist).

Not, however, that Beth is a perfect model of calm responses in other ways as, with all communications suspiciously closed off, she desperately tries to contact her daughter in the house opposite...

The problem I had with Salvage at this point was it really had nowhere left to go. It doesn’t get more intense but rather just continues at the same would-be fever pitch for the next hour or so, continuing to rely on the same well-worn techniques – the sudden noise, the sudden cut, the sudden appearance in the frame etc. It also has a monster which, when eventually revealed, is not that impressive, nor terribly convincingly explained away.

As ‘bad’ mother Beth Neve McIntosh is suitable frenetic, with the fact that the breakdown of her marriage was not due to alcoholism, drugs or infidelity – each of which the opening moments seems to invite us to presume – but that she put her legal career first, a nice subversion of expectation. But, at the same time, the strong female / weak male reversal of pre-feminist horror film has arguably become a new cliché in these post-feminist times.

Likewise, if the Muslim = Arab = terrorist equation has become a cliché in Hollywood productions, a more politically correct counter-treatment has become just as much of a norm in low-budgeted, somewhat more engaged British productions. They are, one suspects, fearful of offending the liberal establishment and its sensibilities.

Whereas, for example, neo-Nazi David Copeland’s bombing campaign in Soho inspired 2001’s Gas Attack, we’re still waiting for a similar treatment of Finsbury Park Mosque and the July 7 bombings.

Two real horrors thus emerge. First, British horror directors are playing it too safe at present. Second, anything they do that is grounded in reality – i.e. a 28 Days Later or Salvage rather than a Dog Soldiers – cannot match up to the horror of the reality we are actually in.

“It’s only a movie,” indeed...

This new documentary from Kirby Dick seeks to do for closeted Republican politicians what his earlier This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated did for the MPAA, namely expose hypocrisy and a self-serving agenda.

Until the mid-1970s the Republican and Democrat parties did not appreciably differ on their stance on gay issues. True, a reason for this was perhaps that before the Stonewall Riot and the birth of the gay liberation movement there probably weren’t any votes to actually be won around gay issues anyway.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 this changed. For Reagan saw the Republicans enter into an unholy alliance with Christian conservatives, leading to the emergence of the so-called “culture wars” between progressive/Democrat and reactionary/Republican elements.

As a consequence, it became all but impossible for Republican politicians to admit their sexual preferences to the wider world. The resultant divergence between their homosexual practices – as interviewees make clear the appellation gay can hardly be ascribed to many of these individuals – and their anti-gay preaching to the crowd is unsurprising, the usual hypocrisy to be expected from politicans.

What was far worse, however, was the way family values ideals often impacted on their voting within congress, not just on things like gay marriage and adoption but also funding to fight the AIDS crisis.

Equally disturbing is the silence of the mainstream – read straight – media on these issues, leaving the job of naming and shaming closeted Republicans to gay activists, press and bloggers.

Much like This Film..., Out Rage is successful in doing what it sets out to, in getting its serious point across adroitly and with considerable wit.

It proves more limited in its relevance and accessibility however. Whereas we in Europe are familiar with Hollywood product and, through it, are indirectly affected by MPAA decisions, what the US as a nation or at a state level decides to legislate for and against rights remains a domestic issue. Thus, for example, whilst under Reagan Republicans were voting against gay equality legislation and AIDS funding alike, under Thatcher Conservatives were voting against the former (i.e. Clause 28) but were devoting money towards the latter, even if this was perhaps motivated more by the fear of AIDS spreading beyond gays and drug addicts than any actual sense of compassion for those with 'deviant' lifestyles.

More serious criticisms are what is missing even in the US context. That the film is really about homosexual Republican men, rather than lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered individuals can at least be explained away by reference to the party’s male establishment bias, the likes of Sarah Palin notwithstanding. But, on the other side of the coin, one would thereby like to know more about the wives and girlfriends of homosexual Republican: What do they know? What is their understanding of the situation?

I also felt Dick might have done more to draw out possible parallels between past and present. One noticeable thing, again from a UK perspective, is the tell-tale nature of the names of many of those featured: that a James McGreevey is Irish-American, a Barney Frank or Larry Kramer Jewish-American. What’s evident is thus how in other respects Americans have overcome old prejudices and no longer feel the need to misrepresent themselves in terms of one – i.e. the WASP – ideal, and the possibility that the self-hating Republican gay is something of a contemporary analogue to the old cliché of the self-hating Jew.

Imagine a darker version of Walk the Line, perhaps as directed by David Lynch, and you begin to get an idea of what to expect from this imaginary biopic.

Its subject, Jesco White is from a similar kind of southern white rural background to Johnny Cash, but less well known and far more troubled in terms of drugs, drink, depression, and the devil alike.

White’s youth was spent looking for whatever kicks he could find, beginning with self-asphyxiation around the age of six before quickly moving onto “huffing” lighter fluid and petrol, drinking whatever he could lay his hands on, injecting crystal meth, and developing a penchant for tattooing and wounding himself.

As far as his father and mother were concerned, Jesco had the devil in him. Unfortunately, Jesco himself believed this – in his environment, full of fire-and-brimstone preachers it would be hard not to – and lived up / down to it.

His sole release was another D, dance, specifically the distinctive form of Appalachian mountain dancing or clogging of which his father, D Ray, was a leading exponent.

Unfortunately, Jesco could never quite keep his devils at bay and wound up in a juvenile detention centre, which he went in and out of for the rest of his adolescence, before being sent to the state mental hospital. The constant on each occasion was a lack of effective therapeutic interventions, the sense that he and the other inmates/patients – the label really made no difference – were individuals who did not matter.

Eventually Jesco was released, albeit into a world of trouble. Most significantly his father had been murdered whilst he was institutionalised.

This fuelled both the positive aspects of Jesco’s being, in his desire to keep his father’s dancing legacy alive, and the negative, in his “eye for an eye” understanding of the Bible.

The conflict between the good and the bad Jesco, or the straight and the intoxicated, is at the core of the remainder of the story, clouding his relationship with his older girlfriend Priscilla and leading inexorably to tragedy.

White Lightnin’ is well directed. Though there are some moments where it feels like technique for the sake of it, most of the tricks within helmer Dominic Murphy’s bag contribute to the overall effect in a more poetic form-is-content way: the black screens between scenes and their suggestion that an indeterminate amount of time has passed, either subjectively or objectively, for Jesco; the bleached out, processed visuals the sickness and poverty of his (un)natural environment.

It is also nicely acted. As Jesco, Edward Hogg delivering a bold, primal performance. As Priscilla, Carrie Fisher bravely takes on the kind of older woman role that many performers more concerned with their image would likely have declined.

The main problem I had with the film was thus its writing, its treatment of the facts.

On the positive side, White Lightnin’ did encourage me to find out more about Jesco White. It is also true that it is a highly subjective portrait, with many scenes which deliberately confuse real and the imagined situations and experiences.

But – and it is a big but – screenwriters Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith play rather too fast and loose with things on occasion. Most notably, the most significant moment in Jesco’s life, the murder of his father, happened when he was in his late 20s, rather than his teens as presented here.

Indeed in general the film-makers seem more comfortable creating a sense of place than they do time. Perhaps the intention is to suggest that nothing really changes in this part of the USA – we may, after all, wonder why D Ray’s success as a dancer didn’t lift his family out of poverty – but a more 1950s or 1960s rather than 1990s feel to the details of trucks, motorcycles and tattoo designs might have helped cement this idea.

If the film’s dark subject matter means it needs to be approached with some caution, it’s also important to emphasise it’s not as bad as it could be. For that, interested parties are recommended to check out Todd Phillips documentary about outlaw rocker G G Allin, a self-destructive damage case whose train-wreck of a life makes even White look lucky and well-adjusted.

Does the world really need another blaxploitation spoof?

After all, the original 1970s films were often barely above self-parody and were ideologically suspect even at the time as far as many within the African-American community were concerned.

Reflecting this political aspect, many contemporary African-American film-makers have also had an uneasy relationship with the form, as epitomised by the debate between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino over the latter’s appropriation of blaxploitation and the N-word in Jackie Brown.

And then there are the Wayans Brothers affectionate and intermittently effective parodies I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking your Juice in the Hood, along with Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas, with its intriguing juxtaposition of 70s heroes and 90s ghetto.

It is, in total, a challenging arena to seek to make a contribution to. Happily the team of director Scott Sanders and co-writer/star Michael Jai White, who had earlier collaborated on the under-rated Thick as Thieves – in which White plays a black drug dealer who aspires to a white country club lifestyle – prove more than up to this challenge.

The key to Black Dynamite’s success is that the film-makers know the difference between a good-bad movie and a bad-bad movie.

They beautifully bring out all the clichés and weaknesses of the classic blaxploitation film – dodgy camera work, continuity and process shots; bad dialogue and even worse delivery; sentimentality; Vietnam flashbacks; the on-going fight against the man and his evil plans; and improbably dressed, coiffured and named characters, including the likes of Cream Corn, Chocolate Giddy Up, and Tasty Freeze.

But they also know when to get serious, most notably in well-choreographed and performed martial arts and action scenes that owe more to Enter the Dragon’s Jim Kelly than Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite, along with a truly excellent KPM library and retro style funk soundtrack that channels the spirits of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and company.

The key difference between White and Kelly is that he can actually act; that between him and Moore is that his character and schtick should appeal to just about everyone.

Indeed, the only people I can’t imagine being won over by Black Dynamite are white power types who wouldn’t dream of going to see a black super-cool, super-stud super-hero kicking ass anyways.

A joy from start to finish, Black Dynamite has the potential to do for Blaxploitation what Austin Powers did for the 1960s superspy film.

First things first: I must confess to being a fan of Christian Petzold’s work, such that the semi-annual appearance of his latest film usually represents one of the highlights of the EIFF for me.

For the uninitiated, the German director specialises in well-crafted, slow-burn thrillers. They demand a higher degree of viewer involvement than most comparable Hollywood product, but are not as hermetic as those of, say, Michael Haneke.

Petzold’s clinical, restrained mise-en-scene, all the better to accentuate the moments of sudden violence, does recall Michael Haneke somewhat. But there also is no question that Petzold is his own film-maker. This is particularly signalled by that issues around German identity that Fateh Akin would foreground here being a bit more subtextual.

The title refers to the location in North-Eastern Germany, near Rostock on the Baltic Sea coast, where the action, centring round a triangle of characters, takes place.

The first, Thomas, is an ex-soldier. He’s someone we can infer grew up in the DDR and to whom life has not been particularly kind. He was dishonourably discharged from the army after serving in Afghanistan – a stain on his character that’s deliberately left underexplored.  After failing to keep his savings from a creditor now has no money with which to do up the family home, now his after the death of his mother.

The second, Ali, is a Turkish-German businessman. He came to the BDR when he was two years old and has established a chain of 45 fast food places in the area. Perhaps through the pressures of his job – his employees, many of them fellow migrants, cannot be trusted – he has a tendency to drink too much.

A chance encounter when Ali, drunk again, drives his Range Rover into a ditch, leads to Thomas being hired by Ali as his driver and, after the ex-soldier demonstrates that knows how to handle himself and when to keep quiet, general trusted right-hand.

It would be a perfect relationship but for the third point in the triangle, Ali’s wife Laura. Theirs is a curious relationship. She’s younger and considerably more attractive than Ali, yet she works hard for his business rather than taking things easy in the trophy wife manner that might be expected. She’s also, of course, a ‘true’ German like Thomas.

One day the three of them head to the coast for a picnic, during which the drunken Ali encourages Thomas and Laura to dance together. Ali then goes up a cliff, which collapses beneath him. After a highly significant moment of hesitation and exchange of reaction shots between Thomas and Laura, Thomas rushes to Ali’s aid and hauls him back to safety.

As Thomas and Laura embark on an affair under the always suspicious Ali’s nose, they begin to hatch a murderous scheme…

At this point it becomes clear, if the viewer had not realised it earlier, that Jerichow is a interpretation of James M. Cain’s oft-filmed novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Crucially, however, Petzold again makes some interventions of his own, as we begin to wonder whether it is not so much that the postman always rings twice as that sometimes he doesn’t ring at all or perhaps only once – and even then, maybe not in the manner anticipated…

Another of Petzold’s strengths is his ability to draw the best from his actors. Jerichow proves no exception, with Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss and Hilmi Sözer delivering nuanced, credible performances and playing off one another well.

Technically the film is accomplished, with good cinematography and sound design in particular.

In sum, strongly recommended.