28/10/2011

Tintin in 3D has some serious (and seriously funny) rivals for audience attention this week, starting with comedy drama Hotel Lux [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a film written and directed by man of the theatre Leander Haußmann who manages to poke fun at both the Nazi regime and Stalinism. Produced by Bavaria Film and launched on screens yesterday by Constantin, the film stars highly popular comedian Michael "Bully" Herbig (pictured). He plays a hilarious cabaret comic who is forced to flee the Nazi regime and ends up, not in Hollywood as he would have hoped, but at the Hotel Lux in Moscow. There, as he is mistaken for Hitler’s astrologer, he becomes Stalin’s astrologer and soon realises that he is under constant surveillance. When his Jewish show partner (Jürgen Vogel) bursts into the hotel, some new adventures begin.

This isn’t the only local comedy in this week’s line-up: Universum is releasing the new film by Markus Goller (Friendship! [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), Eine Ganz Heiße Nummer, a co-production between Tele Norm Film and Atrack Film. Faced with competition from a new supermarket, the film’s protagonists, three female friends who run a grocery shop in a small Bavarian village, must boost their turnover. So they decide to set up an erotic chat line company.

Meanwhile, Zorro is launching Munich-based Alexander Adolph’s horror film The Last Employee [+see also:
trailer
film profile], in which a lawyer (Christian Berkel), who is newly hired after a long spell of unemployment, is forced to liquidate a company and sack all its employees. But one furious employee (Bibiana Beglau) starts to hound him.

Numerous documentaries are hitting screens this week: Paul Morrissey and Bernd Boehm’s Verushka: A Life for the Camera is being released by missingFilms; Rüdiger Sünner’s Die Psychologie des C. G. Jung by W-Film; Marc Boettcher’s Sing! Inge, Sing! – The Shattered Dream of Inge Brandenburg by Salzgeber; and Sophie Fiennes’s UK/French/Dutch title Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow [+see also:
trailer
film profile]by mindjazz pictures.

Three German co-productions are now showing in theatres: Miranda July’s German/US co-production The Future [+see also:
trailer
film profile], selected at the latest Berlin Film Festival (distributed by: Alamode); Shinji Imaoka’s Japanese erotic comedy musical Underwater Love – A Pink Musical (distribution: Rapid Eye Movies); and French helmer Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (distribution: StudioCanal).

French cinema takes pride of place in German theatres this week: besides Tavernier’s film, audiences will get the chance to discover Maïwenn’s outstanding Poliss [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maïwenn
film profile](distributed by Wild Bunch); and Eva Ionesco’s My Little Princess [+see also:
trailer
interview: Anamaria Vartolomei
film profile], starring Isabelle Huppert (distribution: X Verleih).

(Translated from French)