Katharina Thalbach Movies

In an extended, two-hour, black-and-white record of the mental disintegration of theatrical-star Lisa (Katharina Thalbach), director (Thomas Brasch) follows her life through a successful performance, a breakdown during another performance, the death of a director friend, constant intrusions into her apartment home, and domino games played against herself -- with her mother cast as her imaginary opponent cast. Lisa's world and the real world mix and mingle, tangled together as stability wanes. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The subject of this historical drama is a splintering Berlin in the years of 1948 and 1949. Played against the backdrop of social upheaval, the characters in the drama come to epitomize the best and worst of each pole of the political sphere. A 17-year-old hoodlum by the name of Gladow (Ullrich Wesselmann) works hand-in-glove with a local white-collar criminal to rob and pillage every day and night, defying capture. While he and his gang of thugs are terrorizing the people of Berlin, the Soviets are trying to make the blockade of their region of control impermeable. The future casts long shadows over the drama, as Berlin's problems take the shape of times to come. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The West German The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das Zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages) stars Tina Engel in the title role. Unable to pay the rent on the day care center that she operates, Christa steals the money from a bank, then tries to cover up her crime by passing the money off as a church donation. When the priest will have none of this, Christa and her accomplice, Werner (Marius Muller-Westerhagen), go into hiding. Werner is killed in a police ambush, whereupon Christa moves to Lisbon in a vain effort to start her life anew. Broke and dispirited, Christa returns to Germany, where she is promptly arrested, but that is far from the end of her story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was the author of Werther, the romantic novel that was transformed into a play during Goethe's lifetime and which initiated the whole German romantic movement. The book's story tells of young love and suicide. In this East German film, based on a book by Thomas Mann, Lotte (Lilli Palmer) was the woman who served as the model for the heroine in the novel Werther. She comes to Goethe's hometown for a visit, and her experiences there eerily re-create episodes from the book. Goethe comes across as a pompous old bore, and his friends as pandering sycophants, in this very proper communist party-sponsored, anti-heroic movie. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide