Perfume – The Story of a Murderer shouldn’t work. For so many reasons, it shouldn’t work.

Reason #1. Character Formation-101 tells you that your lead should either be someone your audience can relate to, root for or like. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume is none of those things. He doesn’t even fulfil the criteria for the villain of the piece – he’s not inherently evil even though he does evil things, and your feelings for him remain ambiguous – you don’t know whether to fear him..

The Reader is a complex film in many ways. Films of this genre often find it formidable to capture the essence of the story, characters and events in a manner that stay with you much after you’ve watched them. It is no surprise really that sensitive stories are hard to tell and sell. And it doesn’t help the case of The Reader, since the events it attempts to chronicle raise more controversies than sympathies. The film revolves around an unusual and brief love affair between a 15 year old boy, and a much older woman..

Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run is a film that bursts off the screen, a frantic exercise in style. There is not a single boring moment in this film which pushes forward with the kinetic energy of a videogame. It doesn’t delve deeply into the lives of its characters, but it does have a very real message at its core: life can only be lived in the present. The outcome of any given event is never certain; much is up to chance - of course, it’s impossible to get as many chances as Lola does. It begins with a phone call…

German master Werner Herzog has made more than 50 feature films and he is as intriguing as ever. His films, though he has requested people not to read too much into them, have made us raise so many questions about the world we live in. His first feature film Signs Of Life (1967) holds as many questions for us as does his recent Oscar nominated documentary Encounters At The End Of The World. Signs of Life followed a group of soldiers trying to take down a bunch of non-extant enemies.

The prolific career of German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been marked by decidedly minimal and vital films that have almost single-handedly defined German cinema during that period, with no credits taken away from Schlöndorff and Herzog. His mastery over the melodrama genre and understanding of the medium have consistently placed him on par with world cinema giants. But Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) forms the core of his cinematic achievements with the sheer length of the film capable of accommodating ten of his other films.

Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a journey of hearts as they first struggle to get over their homes, and later, fall in love with their adopted home - an alien country of semi-clad men and women, mystifying customs, different languages and personal conflicts…A country that they seek refuge in, driven away from their home land to hold on their most valuable possessions – their lives. A vicarious experience for someone like me, who practically got transported to a land called Africa, and into the minds of three characters struggling…

Werner Herzog takes us through the journey, both physical and mental, of Aguirre - a man dominated and eaten up by his own ambitions, objectives and self-glorification. Striking meditation on impact of greed on human minds and the consequences of the same. Aguirre: the Wrath of God is more of a psychological study of progressive insanity than an event oriented film. Its measured pace and direction induce a kind of trance into the involved viewer that one finds difficult to detach from.

When cinema was in its infancy during the teens and the twenties, many pioneers sought to provide it a definite shape and even assemble various tools and benchmarks for the decades of filmmakers to come. This led to the formation of various cinematic and narrative techniques, characteristic to their country of origin, which were later used by tens of directors from that country. One such trait, expressionism, was extensively used by the filmmakers of Germany such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

Wings of Desire (1987) takes off with a dedication to cinema’s three great stalwarts – Truffaut, Ozu and Tarkovsky. Indeed, elements of all the three directors’ works are present in the film. However, Wim Wender’s decidedly mood piece, released months after the Tarkovsky’s demise, is a film that is to be felt and not seen, much like the latter’s films. To quote Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) – “Your eyes, your ears, your senses, will be overwhelmed”. The movie also inspired Brad Silberling to make “City of Angels”…

Director: Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck
If you have watched Equilibrium, V for Vendetta, or read 1984 by George Orwell, you may have a good idea already of where I am going with this. But only an idea, mind you! There are similarities in theme, (we still haven’t stopped making movies on authoritarian societies, especially those built [...]