Rainer Guldener Movies
Director Roland Emmerich takes a break from his long string of big-budget disaster films with Anonymous, a historical drama that suggests Shakespeare was a fraud. Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) is an aristocrat who yearns to write poetry and plays, but due to social and political constraints, he is forced to use a front for his political-minded works because they subtly encourage Queen Elizabeth to alter her plan for succession in a way that is in direct opposition to her most-trusted political advisers. When drunken, illiterate, fame-hungry actor William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) passes off the plays as his own, de Vere finds his man, but eventually he is blackmailed when the morally dubious thespian wants more and more. Anonymous screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
- Starring:
- Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, (more)
- 2004
- Add Heimat 3 - Chronik Einer Zeitenwende to QueueAdd Heimat 3 - Chronik Einer Zeitenwende to top of Queue
Director Edgar Reitz concludes his epic-length, tripartite chronicle of the Simon clan with the 11-hour (six episode) Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings. The omega and alpha of the title refer to the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, circa 1989 (an event that christens the opening of the film) and the outset of the new millennium (which marks the conclusion). In between, Reitz plunges into the world of the Simons - residents of the village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Germany - and investigates the myriad of ways in which events from their lives intersect with broader German sociopolitical shifts over the course of the 1990s. This installment begins with the youngest Simon son, Hermann, and his lover, Clarissa, renovating a centuries-old house on a cliff above the Rhine, not far from Lorelei. As time unfurls, Reitz cross-cuts between the experiences of the couple, their parents, their children, and the workmen assisting with the home renovation, and gradually reveals how a sense of national pride and unity at the beginning of the 1990s (coincident with German reunification) ultimately yielded to disillusionment, disappointment, and crushing awareness of mortality from individual to individual as the decade ended. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, (more)
