VENICE22 REVIEW: Aus meiner Haut [Skin Deep] [2023]

What is this place? What makes a person? Mind or body? Take that line of inquiry even further and ask what it is you love about your significant other. Is it how they look or who they are? The combination of answers to these questions are infinite because we as people are too. Maybe looks or humor or generosity got you through the door, but those things can’t stop you from leaving alone. At some point you must dig deeper to discover it’s the indefinable essence beneath their skin and…

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NYFF20 REVIEW: Undine [2020]

If you leave, you have to die. Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) laughs when Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) tells him he can’t leave her lest she be forced to kill him. He laughs because he’s read the myth of sea nymphs sharing her name and the fate those who love them suffer if they ever betray it. That’s not how the real world works, though. Couples fall in and out of love all the time. Men don’t walk to forest lakes and scream her name to satisfy the holes in their heart…

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REVIEW: Transit [2018]

I won’t be writing anymore school essays. It took until the end of Christian Petzold‘s Transit and my reading the press notes to realize Georg’s (Franz Rogowski) story unfolded in the present day. I felt off-balance from the start as far as what the historical context for these events were because he was a German man in France fleeing an impending fascist force, hopeful of escaping somewhere outside of its reach. Was he Jewish? It’s never said. Is this the lead-up to World War II? Aesthetics, architecture, and cellphones prove…

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