Claus Boje Movies

As written and directed by Detlev Buck, the inner-city character drama Tough Enough opens on 15-year-old Michael Polischka (David Kross), who lives with his single, white trash mom, Miriam (Jenny Elvers-Elbertzhagen and her wealthy physician lover, Klaus (Jan Henrik Stahlberg) in an affluent German suburb. After Miriam and Klaus have a bitter quarrel, mother and son are thrown out onto their ear, and must move to Neukoelln, a gritty ghetto in the eastern section of Berlin rife with illegal Turkish immigrants. Michael experiences a brush or two with the law by falling in with a pack of juvenile delinquents, including Crille (Arnel Taci) and his brother Matze (Kai Michael Mueller) , who (on a darkly humorous note) collectively gain revenge on Klaus by breaking into his home and robbing him blind. Circumstances take a decidedly nastier turn, however, when Michael falls prey to the wheedling of thug Hamal (Erhan Emre) and agrees to go to work as a drug runner. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Former theater director Leander Hausmann sets out to prove that the children of the Berlin Wall had more on their mind than politics in this bittersweet coming-of-age tale, set about a decade before the wall was dismantled. Hausmann's teens live along "Sun Alley," a street split in two by a checkpoint between East and West Berlin, and they occasionally talk of starting a resistance movement. Their revolutionary dreams are quickly dashed, however, in favor of dreaming about the opposite sex. Easterners Micha (Alexander Scheer) and Mario (Alexander Beyer) spend their days listening to bootlegged Rolling Stones records and endlessly scheming ways to lose their virginity. Meanwhile, Micha has to put up with his eccentric clan, including a mom (The Tin Drum's Katharina Thalbach) who's dreaming up disguises for escaping the country, a pop (Henry Huebchen) who bemoans the state of Eastern products, and a sis (Annika Kuhl) who throws herself at any available man in town. Nicknamed "The Eastie Boys," Sonnenallee certainly resonated with audiences in its homeland: Germans flocked to the film in record numbers, making it one of the country's most successful homegrown productions in years. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi

Most funny movies don't come across well in print, but with some the humor is almost impossible to discern in written form. This well-received German farce reportedly had its audiences in stitches. The clue, if there is one is in the performances of Joachim Król and Horst Krause as Rudi and Most Kipp, an ill-matched set of illiterate brothers on their way to investigate an inheritance from their grandmother in a formerly inacessible part of (east) Germany on the Russian border. While they are traveling there, they pick up Viktor (Konstantin Kotljarov), a hitchhiking Russian army deserter who is packing a large submachine gun and speaks not one word of German. When this odd trio drives into a confrontation with a batch or robbers, they fend them off a bit too enthusiastically, and soon they are being chased by the police. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi