Category: Film Review

Berlin Hero (2025) Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstasse

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 52 m, rated 6.3 by 389 cinematizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: Deutschland.

Verdict: All too true. 

Tagline: Believe it or not!

Bear runs a bankrupt video store in Berlin of 2020.  It is more like a derelict museum than a business.  When a cheque-book journalist in search of a story offers him Euros to tell his tale, he obliges for the geld.  Since there was no story to tell he makes one up to jack up the price.  He is surprised when that works, but Euros are Euros.  

Once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own, and then it takes over his life.  It cannot be un-lied for now he has something to lose – money and respect.

He may have been unhappy in his squalid store before the journalist disturbed the cobwebs, but now he is miserable, living and lying up to the expectations his story has ignited. The Euros are important but it isn’t just them. The respect, the civility, the admiration that the lie has brought him, starting with own adult daughter, are heady and addictive.  

The fact that it is all lies does not phase the journalist at all who is eager to keep riding the wave as long as it lasts, and later when it does crash, he switches to another without missing a beat. He is an accomplished lie surfer.  

Some comments on the IMDb suggest it is unrealistic. Oh hum. Watch Fox News for five minutes. Lies are swallowed whole everyday.  

I enjoyed seeing some Berlin sites, though most of filming was done in Leipzig, including the Friedrichstasse station which when I went through it in 1994 still bore the marks of East Germany with a kind of internal Berlin Wall. I also noticed the chain link fence with the posters of the Wall martyrs on it.  When I examined it in 1994 the last one to be killed in the Death Zone was a 25-year-old student two weeks before the Wall fell. Several hundred were killed in the Death Strip. Regrettably most of my photographs from that visit got lost somewhere along the way.  

The Bear is played beautifully on this emotional roller coaster.  

But the best line is dipped in acid when the retired, reptilian, repugnant, and rapacious Stasi officer says, ‘The mother of fools is always pregnant.’ It is from an Italian proverb: ‘La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.’ Ergo in German: ‘Die Mutter der Idioten ist immer schwanger.’  Words to live by these days.  

The director died before the final shoot and the editing, and it was finished by another with some re-shooting to patch it up. That may explain why the reconciliation in the lavatory seemed too quick and easy.  Time to get it done and out the door.  

We saw it as part of the German Film Festival.

The Greatest Lie (2026) on DUST.

Runtime of 21m, listed on IMDb without meta-data.

DNA: USA. 

Verdict: Ripped from today’s headlines! 

Tagline: Amos 8:11-12.  

Heavily armed and armoured police assault children and murder mothers for the crime of reading!  Is it Florida or Texas? Can’t decide which. It depicts bleak future dominated by illiterate bullies. Or maybe that is today. You be the judge.

To those who know.  

C’était mieux demain (2025) Cycle of Time

IMDb meta-data 1h and 43m, rated 6.0 by 566 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy Comedy.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Diverting.

Tagline: ‘It was better tomorrow!’

In a stolid petit bourgeois neighbourhood time travel occurs, by accident.  A couple from 1958 are inexplicably hurled forward in time to 2025 where they are fish out of water socially and technically.  While the emphasis is on all the tech toys there is an undertone that the future is not all golden. There are homeless people on the streets and women are still victimised.  

There are plenty of laughs as the couple comes to terms with the brave new world of cell phones, Siri, self-driving cars, streaming media, tell-all television, an untamed Roomba, and more, and socially with racial integration, social media, sexual liberation, and the price of cigarettes!  

He is so firmly set in his 1958 ways that adjustment is nearly impossible, but she, long used to going along to get along, adapts better than he does to contemporary expectations, wardrobe, norms, and so on. Her talents for  organisation, solicitude, and encouragement pay off at work. She is willing to try. And she succeeds little by little. Her maternal care at the office, so unusual in contemporary business, leads to commercial success, an inexplicable result to her manager who manages by McKinsey’s veiled management threats: ‘We have a KPI for you!’

While his skill to say ‘No’ leads to nothing, per Lear.  So he stays at home. Role reversal follows. He has one shock after another, and becomes a changed man, though we wonder how long that will last once he is back in 1958.  

We saw it on Wednesday at the Palace in Leichhardt as part of the Alliance Française film festival; one of the three we chose to see. I didn’t know what to make of the third with its immaculate conception, Nun in the City (2025) Doux Jésus and haven’t written it up.  It is another fish out of water tale with some high points but, well….   

Maigret et le mort amoureux (2026) Maigret et les vieillards (Maigret in Society)

IMDb runtime is 1h and 20m, rated 6.0 by 97 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Diverting.

Tagline: Living in past is passé. 

Eternal Maigret plods on. This incarnation has neither the bulk nor the patience of the original, but he is persistent and competent. His team, though often pictured, does little, and, well, Lucas is a schoolboy!  Lucas!  

The maid stole the show in a tour de force performance of inner pain.  All that was undermined by the gratuitous twist at the end, which is not in the book.  Once again it seemed to me that the writer and director did not understand their own work and undercut it. 

Spoiler.

I found the plot resolution inadequate in the book, and it is faithfully reproduced in the film, though other liberties were taken as in the coda.  The maid I can understand.  But the count, no?  Hypochondria is mentioned but not developed.  Nor does the hearsay remark, ‘They won’t let me!’ have any explanation at all. None.  

I couldn’t find any opinionators on Good Reads to set me straight. 

As to the maid’s piety, I thought the point was that a secular man like Maigret would miss the signs of that, or seeing them, would not fully grasp their significance as a motivation. I liked that. Simenon sometimes did have Maigret err.  

But would monsieur le count have committed suicide while sitting at his desk editing his memoirs, having given no earlier indication of his emotions? 

The variations the title noted above indicate something. The French is explicit: Maigret and the Old Ones and indicates the theme that these persons who live in the past of an ever decreasing circle.  Neither the lovers nor society hits that nail on the head. But Penguin has always been free with translations, despite its pious claims to the contrary.

I was pleased with myself for recognising Olivier Rabourdin as the prosecutor. Although this character has no place in the book. He has been added to give Maigret a sounding board. for his internal musings. Also missing from the film is the opening paean to Paris in the springtime when Maigret goes to work riding on an open-air bus platform.  That would have made a nice travelogue. 

***

We saw it at the Palace in Leichhardt on a Wednesday late morning as part of the Alliance Française film festival. We selected three items from the many on offer and this was one of them. Of late I have been watching other French films on TV5Monde+ from New Brunswick, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland, and Senegal as well as France. 

Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels featuring Jules Maigret along with 28 short stories between 1931 and 1972.  That means he completed 2 or more titles each year. (In addition, Simenon was also publishing other novels at about the same clip!)  Maigret has worked on the radio, podcasts, audiobooks, paperback, hardcovers, and celluloid.  

One internet pundit declares that 34 actors have embodied Maigret. He has been German, Dutch, English, Russian, Czech, Mexican, Japanese, as well as Italian in the actors who have played him: Harry Baur, Boris Tenin, Richard Harris, Rupert Davies, Charles Laughton, Michael Gambon, Gino Cervi, Benjamin Wainwright, Rowan Atkinson, Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Gerar Depardieu, Denis Podalydès, and — best for last — Bruno Cremer.  M 2

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2hr and 2m, rated 6.4 by 2,400 cinematizens.

DNA: China, PR.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: More fun than Solaris.  (But then so is root canal.)

Tagline: The world ends in 2033.  Let’s dance! 

A romantic comedy about the end of the world.  That about sums it up.  

To save the world, a lunar outpost is hard at work, but things move too fast and the 300 soldiers, engineers, and scientists have to evacuate, toute suite.  Off 299 of them go, leaving behind one inept nerd who missed the memo, the alarms, the door knocks, the PA announcements, the sirens, the flashing red lights, and more.   

He is now alone in the vast moon base with a year of supplies for 300 personnel.  From this redoubt he watches a large asteroid strike the Earth.  

Wallop! Darkness fell!  

Curtain.

Two things follow.  Turns out he is not quite alone, and the world has not quite ended.  

There is plenty of slapstick as nerd reacts to his abandonment and solitude.  And even more when he has company. (Too much of the latter.)

Mission Control on earth re-established a feed from the Moon base but cannot communicate but only watch nerd and his antics along with us in the audience.  

Many of the gags are repetitive and it could be cut by 30m without loss.  The vainglorious ending was inconsistent but it gave the nerd redemption.  It sledgehammers home the communist message of the prophet Jeremiah that the individual must find his good in the good of the whole.  If only the Bible basher read the book.  

It is virtually a one-man show and the lead undergoes many change from a gormless nerd to a determined achiever wth several intervening steps.  

The quality of the effects is superb, if at times, repetitive and boring.

IMDb metadata is a runtime of 1h and 10m, but no raters or ratings.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: Uganda.

Verdict: Now I can say I saw it.  

Tagline: Exotic.

IMDb summary: In the year 2056, a young Ugandan astronaut is diverted on return from her deep space mission to investigate a mysterious communication breakdown on the distant planet Xylara, only to discover a deadly alien threat.

After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up.  It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.  

When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.

After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up.  It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.  

When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 27m, rated 6.8 by18,000 cinematizens.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: The word is ‘integrity.’

Tagline:  Who you gonna call?  

When a flying saucer crash lands in his backyard azalea patch codger Milt does what any citizen would do.  He calls the police.  For his trouble he is threatened with arrest for a prank call.  Evidently they don’t want to know.  No one can be bothered to do a site visit for a sight of the craft so it isn’t cited for a traffic violation. Sigh. 

He is rather forgetful and Milt sort of forgets it until he sees the alien lying inert on his garden path.  This, too, he sort of forgets, but not quite.  Soon he befriends the silent alien as one might a persistent dog at the back door.  

Unlike the few people he knows the alien is a good listener and accomodating companion. Then two other senior citizens get into the conspiracy of silence, including the evergreen Jane Curtin from The Librarian trilogy with Bob Newhart. All hail!

What follows is a meditation on the social isolation and frailties of aging. That is made all the more poignant by some of the condescending reviews I noticed linked to the IMDb entry.  The soulless ones are not all in the White House. 

Though Milt called in the crash, the Men in Black scouring the countryside for the crash seem not to have noticed this. That incompetence is a touch of realism.  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m, rated 5.8 by 1,900 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: krimi.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Oh hum.

Tagline: The dog did not bark, at all.

Odd couple plods get in way other their heads and call in all their favours.  Every trope in the book is thrown into this soup in the hope some of it resonants.  And speaking of resonating the soundtrack is loud enough to put the Gay Mardi Gras to shame.  If noise, bloody corpses, angry words, pistol waving, impossible car chases, mass murder, rat-a-tat of toy guns, and coloured lights are entertainment then this is entertainment.

It’s Paris sometime in the near future where AI rules and all the micro gizmos work.  Well, it is fiction – the tech works.

There is more fiction. The docile Parisians have allowed the city to be divided in three Berlin Wall zones, policed by nameless zombies aided by AI controlled lethal drones. See, fiction – docile Parisians.

Zone Three is a refuge the Calais Jungle which is routinely raided by the forces of disorder to maintain the illusion that they are doing something.  Zone Two is home to the middling ones like you and me, while Zone One is so exclusive that only conspirators like live there. In typical Parisian fashion the rest of the country is ignored.  

Decision-making in policing has been surrendered to AI called Alma which predicts and prevents murders. Well, that is said, but in the nearly two hours of strobe-light confusion that follows no one notices that Alma never does that once.  There are plenty of murders, keeping the special effects crew busy, and none are prevented. The low-bid contractor strikes again: Alma offers  promise, but no performance, a typical app.

The odd couple are endowed with boring backstories to explain their commitments to the investigation.  To a filmmaker professional commitment is never enough.  There has to be a personal motivation to connect to the audience since the foreground story is so trite. The actors inhabit their characters but that cannot compensate for shallow script or video game direction.  

It is supposed to be an examination of the reliance on AIma, but that is lost in the disco glitter ball distractions.  Try The Forbin Project (1970) for a thoughtful and quieter prediction and depiction of that. Or an even earlier cautionary tale on technological solutions to human problems in Robert Sheckley’s short story ‘Watchbird’ (1953).  I will comment on the latter soon to stimulate interest in it.

Oh, and the title has nothing to do with the film.  There is not even one dog, let alone fifty more.  

It was screened as part of the Alliance Française film festival Sydney 2026.  I went to it in Leichhardt one rainy afternoon because of the science fiction tag.  My mistake.