Film Reviews

Combining his trademark wit and self-deprecating humor with original music, Bo Burnham offers up his unique twist on life in this stand-up special about life, death, sexuality, hypocrisy, mental illness and Pringles cans.

The second of Trier's films known collectively as the Europa trilogy. The other two films in the trilogy are The Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991). Co-written by Niels Vørsel, the film focuses on the screenwriting process. Vørsel and von Trier play themselves, coming up with a last-minute script for a producer. This story is intercut with scenes from the film they write, in which von Trier plays a renegade doctor trying to cure a modern-day epidemic. In an ironic twist, the doctor discovers that he himself has been spreading the virus.

Schtonk! is a farce of the actual events of 1983, when Germany's Stern magazine published, with great fanfare, 60 volumes of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler – which two weeks later turned out to be entirely fake. Fritz Knobel (based on real-life forger Konrad Kujau) supports himself by faking and selling Nazi memorabilia. When Knobel writes and sells a volume of Hitler's (nonexistent) diaries, he thinks it's just another job. When sleazy journalist Hermann Willié learns of the diaries, however, he quickly realizes their potential value... and Knobel is quickly in over his head. As the pressure builds and Knobel is forced to deliver more and more volumes of the fake diaries, he finds himself acting increasingly like the man whose life he is rewriting. The film is a romping and hilarious satire, poking fun not only at the events and characters involved in the hoax (who are only thinly disguised in the film), but at the discomfort Germany has with its difficult past.

Shy, a small-town butch with a nagging messiah complex, heads to the big city to immerse herself in a life of crime. On her journey, she meets her match in Valentine, a wise-acre adoptee who is searching for her birth-mother. The two lonely grifters join forces and embark on a journey through the skid-row streets of San Francisco and learn the true meaning of poise under pressure and the importance of friendship.

At a college in Rome, a professor, nicknamed "Dodo" is in a deep depression. His stunningly beautiful wife has just left him for another man. Dodo wants her back very badly and has erotic daydreams about her. A beautiful young student in his class asks him for a ride home and seduces the lucky man, but still he wonders about his wife and her lover.

After a mixup at the check-in, Aimo Niemi boards a charter plane bound for the sunny island of Rhodes, Greece, instead of the Innsbruck Winter Olympics he's packed for. It's the early days of package tourism, and he is too shy and clueless to really sort out any of his problems — a suitcase filled with women's clothes, a flirtatious female roommate, and no money to buy food since he was prepared for full room & board in Austria.

A single mom and her child are carjacked by a bank robber who has no intention of letting them go.

A phobic con artist and his protege are on the verge of pulling off a lucrative swindle when the con artist's teenage daughter arrives unexpectedly.

When her rather explicit copy is rejected, magazine journalist Kate is asked by her editor to come up with an article on loving relationships instead, and to do so by the end of the day. This gets Kate thinking back over her own various experiences, and to wondering if she is in much of a position to write on the subject.

Seven British children bury their mother and hide her death, until their long-lost father (Dirk Bogarde) returns.

Interview film with German director Werner Herzog revisiting the films he made up to ca. 1977.

A woman tries to mend the broken pieces of her last life, as she is now involved with a new sexual relationship with a man.

The story of a famously lavish five-day party held by the Shah of Iran in 1971 to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. The event was held at a specially constructed oasis surrounded by a city of tents and attended by 60 world leaders, who enjoyed a five-course banquet and a pageant featuring thousands of soldiers dressed in historical costume. However, the decadence on display had far-reaching consequences, breeding resentment of the Shah's regime among the Iranian people.

A famous opera singer, Giorgio Fini, loses his voice during an American tour. He goes to a female throat specialist, Pamela Taylor, whom he falls in love with.

Babies are hardly monster-like, unless you're a toy. After escaping a drooling baby, Tinny realizes that he wants to be played with after all. But in the amount of time it takes him to discover this, the baby's attention moves on to other things only an infant could find interesting.