The Film Analysis

The accusation is made again and again: Film reviews are completely subjective. What is meant by this is: "Why listen to film critics? - After all, I have my own opinions. Many people believe that taste is a purely personal matter. But there are indeed criteria. Wolfgang M. Schmitt Jr. explains the difference between subjective and subjectivist film criticism.

Help! Unfortunately, this series has no end! Vin Diesel as Dom Toretto must once again defend the family, he is supported by many colleagues who also can not act. "Fast & Furious 10" ("Fast X") is a makeshift continuation of the fifth part: Dante (Jason Momoa) is the son of drug lord Hernan Reyes, who was once treated badly by the Torettos. Dante now wants to avenge his fat...

This time Denzel Washington as Robert McCall roams the alleys of an Italian coastal town to hunt down villains. The members of the Camorra seem like caricatures and at the same time like embodiments of absolute evil. Opposite them in Antoine Fuqua's "The Equalizer 3 - The Last Chapter" are the supposedly good people who have to be protected from the Mafia. Manicheism is not the only...

Stanley Kubrick is a solitaire in film history. His works are enigmatic, they stand on their own and elude any current references. With "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb" ( #DrStrangelove ), however, things are a bit different. The film is a direct response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, albeit a very artificial and bitterly nasty one. Peter Sellers slips into three roles...

Without a doubt, "Dirty Dancing" is one of the most popular films ever among a primarily female audience. But this success is based on a misconception. Even if female viewers hang languidly in front of the TV on girls' night out, only very few of them have really understood the radical nature of the film. For all its popularity, "Dirty Dancing" is at the same time a complet...

The Barbenheimer phenomenon is amazing: in fact, the cinemas are better attended than they have been for a long time. This is good news! "Barbie" has also been eagerly awaited by many moviegoers who didn't used to play with Barbie. The prospect of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling was just too good. Greta Gerwig does everything right in the first 30 minutes of the film, showing us a bri...

Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is not only one of the most important war films, it is also one of the most important films ever made. Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and Harrison Ford shine in their roles - although the filming itself may have resembled a war, there is little sign of it in this clearly structured and formally rigorous masterpiece. C...

Lars von Trier is one of the great exceptional directors of our time. His works cause controversy time and again. His person stands for scandal made flesh. It almost seems as if this media (re)presentation has settled over the work like a dark shadow, blocking the actual access to him. The director's misogynistic statements can only be followed by a misogynistic film, this was a basic thesis i...

Gordon Gecko was not the first to establish neoliberal ideology in cinema. It was Joel Goodsen, the main character played by Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" by Paul Brickman. In this 1983 film, a teenager becomes an entrepreneur (of himself) and unceremoniously opens a brothel in his parents' house - with success. Today, the film is largely forgotten; the only thing that can be rememb...

Two acting giants meet for the first time: Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino bring Michael Mann together on the screen in this neo-noir thriller - the first duel is talking, the second is shooting. "Heat" is one of the most important films of the 20th century, but it wasn't even nominated for an Oscar in 1995. The story is actually quite simple: a cop is chasing a gangster, but when the tw...

Is "Peal Harbor" by #MichaelBay primarily a #war movie or a #love movie? And if it is a love movie, we should also ask: Who actually loves whom here? With this blockbuster, Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer wanted to create a similarly opulent and successful film in 2001 as James Cameron had previously succeeded with "Titanic". There is no doubt that "Peal Harbor&...

David Lynch is the great maverick of U.S. cinema: His films are in some ways part of Hollywood's tradition, but at the same time they make a disturbing break with it. This is particularly visible in the 1986 classic "Blue Velvet" - with Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini and Denis Hopper. This work, situated between film noir and coming-of-age film, invokes common narra...

„Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark" was released in 1981. The material was developed by "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, but director Steven Spielberg implemented the idea, which said goodbye to New Hollywood and marked a return to Hollywood's studio system. The blockbuster does not thrive on the new, but on a remix of the old familiar: Thus in "Indiana Jones," w...

With "Oppenheimer", Christopher Nolan presents a biopic that sets standards. This film vibrates for 181 minutes to show the multi-faceted figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer from several perspectives. Nolan jumps wildly back and forth in time, an impressive star ensemble fits into the aesthetic, which consists mainly of close-ups. Nolan focuses on two themes in particular: 1. what responsibi...

"American Beauty" by Sam Mendes from 1999 is already a modern classic. The film drama, which won five Oscars, has even found its way into school lessons and is considered one of the best films. Wolfgang M. Schmitt takes a critical look at the debut film, which was the beginning of a furious career for Sam Mendes.

We have to think of Christopher Nolan as a lucky man, because he has achieved something tremendously rare in Hollywood: He has made himself independent of the whims and fashions of the culture industry, which primarily wants to systematically underchallenge the audience. Demand is considered an imposition today. "Tenet" stands in the way of this alarming development and relies on the thi...

Discussions about trigger warnings recur weekly. Is it paternalism? Well-intentioned? Or silly? There is a lot of confusion here: the trigger warning is actually a communicative tool to announce potentially stressful or traumatic content before it is presented. The aim of this advance notice is to give people who are vulnerable to emotional or psychological stress due to their individual experienc...

Conspiracy theories are currently more popular than ever, often based on a world view, as we can see in Peter Weir's cult film "The Truman Show": It is assumed that everything is controlled by one person - currently, various conspiracy theorists have settled on Bill Gates. They give him a role similar to that of the "Truman Show" director and creator Christof, who has the s...

Paul Thomas Anderson has asserted in various interviews that his great film "There Will Be Blood" is not a story about capitalism, but is instead about archaic forces, about man against man. The film is also not to be understood politically. Of course, if you watch the film, this is all nonsense. Either the director has not understood his film or he is using this misdirection to weaken t...

Alfred Hitchcock's film "Vertigo" is not just a masterpiece, it is the best film of all time. With a magnificent cast including Kim Novak and James Stewart, this thriller set in San Francisco is far more than just a suspenseful, mysterious crime film. It is also a complex work about the structure of our desires, about film as such and about seeing and watching as well as our own blin...