Claudia Michelsen Movies

A precocious girl turns sleuth to recover a missing diary and uncovers more than she bargained for in this family-friendly comedy-drama. Eleven-year-old Paula (Thelma Heintzelmann) is a smart girl who has been forced to be more self-reliant than she'd wish thanks to the busy lives of her folks. Paula's most prized possession is her diary, in which she spins tales from her rich fantasy life about romantic adventures with a handsome young hero. Paula runs afoul of a pair of youthful thieves who take a knife to her backpack and make off with its contents, including her diary. Tobi (Paul Vincent de Wall), one of Paula's classmates who has a secret infatuation with her, hears about the missing diary, and he offers to help her find it. Before long, Paula and Tobi are playing detective on a grander scale than expected, and they buy more time to search for the diary by sending her younger sister Jenny (Constanze Spranger) to summer camp in Paula's place. However, when Paula and Tobi learn the truth about the thieves, they find they've uncovered a crime ring with ties to trafficking in kidnapped children. Paulas Geheimnis (Paula's Secret) also stars Albert Berisa, Claudia Michelsen and Juide Girisken. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

One of the Third Reich's sinister plans for training a legion of strong and obedient young men to do their bidding is exposed in this historical drama, inspired by true-life events. In 1942, Friedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt) is a 16-year-old amateur fighter who is spotted while working out at a boxing club by Heinrich Vogler (Devid Striesow). Vogler is a recruiter for the National-Political Institutes of Learning (called "NAPOLA" for short), where promising young men with various talents will be taught to hone their strength, cunning, and fearlessness to a fine point, with the ultimate goal of using NAPOLA graduates to help rule the territories Nazis will overtake once they've won the war. Vogler invites Weimer to join the NAPOLA training facility in Allenstein, and he accepts, despite the strong misgivings of his family. Weimer is at first enthusiastic and committed to his new regimen, and becomes friendly with a fellow student, Albrecht Stein (Tom Schilling), an aspiring writer whose father, a important man in the German military, would like to see him join the SS. Stein does not embrace the training with the same enthusiasm as many of his fellows, and in time he and Weimer develop feelings for one another that go beyond friendship. In time, Weimer begins to lose his enthusiasm for NAPOLA, especially after a mission to find escaped Russian prisoners leads to the death of unarmed teenagers, and he looks for a way to rebel against the repressive system. Filmmaker Dennis Gansel dedicated Before the Fall to his grandfather, Peter Fritz Gansel, a NAPOLA veteran whose stories of the school's brutality inspired the movie. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A man has to make the body of his late girlfriend disappear, which he finds is not especially easy in this black comedy from Germany. Paul (Boris Aljinovic) is a straight-laced architect who lands a lucrative design contract and treats himself to a night on the town with his friend Max (Jurgen Tarrach), a pathologist, and his business partner Rike (Claudia Michelsen). During the course of the evening, however, someone doses Paul's drink with a heavy-duty hallucinogen, and the severely stoned Paul arrives at his flat entirely unaware that his girlfriend is dead on the floor of his living room, her neck having been broken during a sexual escapade gone wrong with her boss. The next morning, Paul, who has no memories of the previous night's activities, discovers the dead woman in his apartment; realizing he has no way to explain his innocence to the police, he calls on Max, who warily agrees to help him get rid of the body. But when a neighbor sees Paul and Max trying to drag a corpse out of the flat, they decide that some subterfuge is in order; thus, they try to reduce the bulk of the body in a variety of ways, using an array of household appliances (including a blender and a food processor), with a suitably disgusted Rike eventually called in to help. 3 Chinesen Mit Dem Kontrabass was the debut feature from writer and director Klaus Kraemer. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In this taut contemporary thriller, a group of vacationers who find a can of valuable gems must figure out why they're dying one by one in the wilderness. Five German friends travel to South Africa for a rugged 11-day wilderness vacation without cell phones or any other contact with civilization. One of them befriends a stranger and invites him along as they take a chartered plane to a region near the Namibian border. Their hiking and camping expedition goes smoothly until the second day, when they find a dead parachutist with a can of uncut diamonds worth around six million dollars. They decide to bury the man and debate whether they should inform the authorities when they reach civilization. Then someone dies suddenly from an apparent accident. The deaths continue as tensions and suspicions mount. Before it's too late, the survivors have to figure out if the victims died by accident, were killed by an outsider who appears to be stalking them, or were murdered by one or more members of their own group. ~ Todd Kristel, Rovi

Germany Year Nine Zero follows an old spy's journey back to France from the east. Since the Cold War has ended the spy is unclear about who his enemies are, and he doesn't know what to do with himself. Jean-Luc Godard's film is a series of scenes that present his thoughts on European unification and the fall of Communism. The title harkens back to Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, a film made in the immediate aftermath of World War II that, like Godard's film, considered the fate of the world in changing political conditions. As his use of Rossellini's title suggests, Godard is concerned with the fate of cinema as well as the fate of the world. He is concerned that as borders are erased, and as the world comes more and more under the sway of corporate power, the cinema will become more and more homogenized and commercial. ~ Louis Schwartz, Rovi