The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The dark knight rises one last time against the scourge of evil threatening Gotham City but "The Dark Knight Rises" actually falls behind quite a bit and doesn't rise above the two previous installments. Seven years ago with "Batman Begins" director Christopher Nolan revived a franchise that had been killed and buried by Joel Schumacher back in the late 1990s. Dark, realistic and fueled by stimulating ideas instead of a colorful orgy of special effects, the first film of the trilogy was almost closer to arthouse cinema than to hollywood's blockbusters; to the delight of most critics. Despite some weaknesses in the script the sequel "The Dark Knight" managed to surpass this success - not least because of Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, one of the most memorable screen characters of the last decade. And that is not a post mortem sympathy vote.

The Yellow Sea (2010)

"The Yellow Sea", the title refering to the sea between China and Korea, should actually be called The Red Sea. There is a lot of bloodshed in the second film by director Hong-jin Na that is following his promising debut "The Chaser".  After the cleverly constructed plot in his first film it is quite disappointing to see this one turn out to be a structural mess.

Another Heaven (2000)

Rarely in recent years has a film made me more angry than the Japanese horror movie "Another Heaven". Actually the last time I was similarily upset after a film was about half a year ago when I saw a horror film called "Session 9". But while that movie was just horribly written and staggeringly boring, it was the ludicrous story that made "Another Heaven" into a shockingly stupid experience. I am not exaggerating if I tell you that this is the dumbest, silliest, most preposterous plot I've seen in a long time.

Transfer (2010)

Just a few days ago I had a conversation with a friend and we both agreed that German cinema - at least German "mainstream productions" - has long been on the decline. We remembered the good old 1920s when great directors like Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau where big global players and German film still had quite wide influence. We both argued that today German cinema lost pretty much of its former relevance. There are of course still some amazing German directors out there; like Herzog, Haneke or Wenders for example. But aside of some autheurs or more unknown independent directors and those who have long migrated to Hollywood there is not much left in the national industry. Especially the mainstream, so we agreed, really lacks quality and inspiration.

I've just seen a quite recent German Sci-fi film called "Transfer" and it certainly had potential. It is a movie about ideas - which is not a matter of course in mainstream cinema these days - but yet it is not very inspiring at all as we have seen most of this stuff in other movies before - and we have seen it done better as well.