Angela Winkler Movies

A husband and wife are both tempted into infidelity, but they have more in common than they'd imagine in this comedy drama from German filmmaker Tom Tykwer. Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) are a married couple in their early forties; she's the host of a television talk show and he's an engineer. Though Hanna and Simon get along well, the spark has clearly gone out of their relationship and both find themselves casually fantasizing about other people. When Hanna meets Adam (Devid Striesow), a handsome scientist with a background in genetics, she finds herself powerfully attracted to him, and they begin having an affair. This happens as Simon is struggling with the death of his mother and the news that he has testicular cancer. After surgery returns him to health, Simon is enjoying a swim at a public pool when he meets Adam; while Simon has never been attracted to men before, something about Adam strikes a connection within him, and before long the two are involved with one another. Adam has no idea that Hanna and Simon are married, and neither Simon nor Hanna realize that their spouse is also being unfaithful, but how long can this go on before the three parties all understand what's happening? Drei (aka Three) received its North American premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A relaxing vacation becomes an impromptu family reunion when a family of three takes a sun soaked trip to their summer cottage, only to find the entire extended family unexpectedly showing up on their doorstep. Anna, Robert, and their adolescent son Max were looking forward to a quiet retreat to the Uckermark region of Germany, but their peace is soon shattered by the arrival of children, parents, siblings, and grandchildren. At first everyone does their best just to get along, though it doesn't take long for old wounds to fester and buried secrets to surface. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

For 14-year-old Benny, anything recorded on videotape is inherently better and more real than what he can see with his naked eyes. He is barely noticed by his professional parents and spends most of his time either viewing wild and violent films or looking at the view outside his window through his video camera. One day, on a whim, he invites a girl to his house and coolly murders her while his video camera is rolling. Then he hides the body temporarily in his closet and goes off to a party. The calm and unexcited way his parents discuss the situation when he explains it to him, using his video film to demonstrate, makes it clear that his own psychopathology has a long background in that of his parents. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Director Leon de Winter has taken a thriller with political and psychological overtones, and scrambled it into a series of vignettes that are mixed-up in time and in location, thereby dashing any hope of following the story. A journalist goes to a southern European country to interview a well-known terrorist who has refused to stop his activities even though the revolution he fought for ended successfully five years earlier. Questions are raised about adopting violence as a way of life without at first realizing it and about the seeming impossibility of raising the consciousness of backwater cultures. Perhaps because of the way the story has been filleted into fragments, characters like the journalist and terrorist do not have enough continuous screen time to build up their individuality, a second factor that makes it difficult to become involved in the drama. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this documentary on the filming of director Andrzej Wajda's movie Danton, Polish director Tomasz Pobog-Malinowski went to France and documented the filming of the confrontation between Robespierre and Danton in the French National Assembly and the guillotine scenes (both men were guillotined a few months apart, in 1794). In focus is how director Wajda intensely involves himself in all details of the action: cameras, actors, and technical support, yet he never loses respect for anyone. On a more subtle level, a Polish actor plays the violent Robespierre who promoted the infamous "Reign of Terror" when thousands were guillotined, and a Frenchman plays the moderate Danton, who wished to curb the bloodletting. Other subtle parallels are drawn between the French Revolution of the 1790s and the Polish upheavals led by Solidarity in the early 1980s. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Edith runs a left-wing journal and when her marriage starts to fall apart (her husband is unfaithful), she can find no solace in her son who is more of a problem than an asset. On top of heading toward a divorce and being unable to handle her son's asocial tendencies, her neurotic uncle moves in, demanding personalized care. Just to keep her sanity intact, Edith starts writing in her diary to vent her own feelings and ambitions. As her son goes from bad to worse over a five-year period, it turns out that Edith's diary may be of more benefit than she could have ever imagined. In this adaptation of Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith, director and writer Hans W. Geissendoerfer has maintained Highsmith's psychologically tormented characters while changing the location and time of her story from the U.S. of the 1960s to Germany in the early 1980s. Perhaps because of the shift, the attempt to handle the five-year span of changes after the story's traumatic beginning ends up with some discontinuity. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this drama, a provincial girl goes to Paris in search of her fortune. Although she finds the City of Light to be quite different from what she'd imagined it to be, the girl manages to retain her dignity. It is only after she is thoroughly disillusioned by her experiences there that she returns to her country life. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Despite the film's English title Knife in the Head, Hoffman (Bruno Ganz), a scientist, is shot in the head by the police while he is trying to pick up his wife from a political rally. Upon awakening, Hoffman finds that he has lost all memory of who he is and why the police were after him. At first, he is also paralyzed, unable to move or care for himself. As he recovers the use of his faculties, his search to discover what was really at stake during the rally leads him to take some harsh measures of his own. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Mourning for a lost relationship can be every bit as devastating as mourning for someone who has died. In this drama based on the director's own novel, a couple with an unhappy marriage agree to a trial separation. They try to patch things up, and at the same time other relationships begin to develop for them. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

A German bisexual male suffers the indignities of prejudice in a small town. After taking up with the town floozie -- who tries to trap him into marriage and claims he has impregnated her -- the people of the town turn from teasing to cruelty, and the young man decides to leave. When he gives a local boy a ride on his bicycle, the act of kindness is misconstrued to be a sexual advance. The boy's mother is livid and fears her mentally challenged son may have been molested. The floozie continues to pressure the young man into marrying her, until the weight of it all becomes too much; he snaps and kills her. Soon the entire town conspires to hunt down the young man like an animal in this disturbing story of prejudice and intolerance. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi