The most recognizable member of the “New Berlin School,” Christian Petzold has, with his prior Yella and now with Jerichow, reconfigured classic American films into commentaries on modern capitalist Germany. Whereas the transparent Yella borrowed from 1962’s Carnival of Souls to condemn the means by which his native country’s free-market enterprise has engendered moral rot, the director’s latest recasts James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as a portrait of the fallout wrought by Germany’s new economic order. Going pulpy suits Petzold far more comfortably than did his previous effort’s foray into metaphysical mystery, as his measured, icy cinematographic style and diegetic soundscape (most frequently populated with the sounds of chirping birds) brings omnipresent unease to the proceedings. Marked by a mood of chilling foreboding, his story concerns a quiet, dishonorably discharged vet named Thomas (a disquietingly unreadable Benno Fürmann) who returns home from Afghanistan to the titular northeastern German town to tend to his mother’s funeral, is promptly cold-cocked by associates eager to collect on outstanding debts, and shortly thereafter finds his penniless circumstances improved by a chance encounter with a drunk driver named Ali (Jilmi Sözer) whom he generously helps home one afternoon.

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10. THE FLY (1986)



Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

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