Sixty Minutes (60 Minuten)

 Octavio (Emilio Sakraya) has done fucked up again. He's gone and booked a big MMA fight on the same day of his estranged daughter's birthday... and made things worse by promising that he'll be there with an amazing cake and gift.

 He reckons he can grab both on his way to the party at his ex-wife's once the fight is done, but he's cutting it close. And you know how it goes: First he has to have an awesome mini-training montage with his cool MMA friends, then get to the fight venue, then have several stops to meet and greet some shady friends of the co-owner of his gym (always a bad sign, when obvious thug types act all nice and mention how much they've got riding on your fight). Before you know it, the kid's party is almost done and his ex-wife, fed up with all his deadbeat dad bullshit, threatens with taking sole custody of their daughter unless Octavio makes good on his promises and gets to the party before it ends.

 The ultimatum arrives just as he's about to enter the ring, and it gives him exactly sixty minutes to buy the cake, retrieve the kitty from the animal shelter, and get to his ex-wife's house... which happens to be on the other side of Berlin. So he chooses the honorable option, of course: to drop everything and run a mad dash across town to try and get to his little girl.

 And there's an added (obvious) twist: Octavio's fight was, unbeknownst to him, rigged, and there was a lot of illegal gambling going in the background from some very shady types. So it's a Run, Lola Run situation of traversing a city against the clock while being chased by all sorts of unsavory characters (and a few asshole cops)... except that in this instance Lola knows martial arts. This is the sort of writing they should give Nobel prizes out for; It is fucking great. 

 As and added treat, the chase starts fifteen or twenty minutes into an hour and a half movie, so it has the beauty of being nearly real-time, something the movie graciously refuses to emphasize except for the odd on-screen rendition of Octavio's clock running a timer, or a map of the city showing our pilgrim's progress.

 I normally hate shitty, manipulative "this is your third strike and you need to do X by Y or we're out of your life or whatever" premises (see: Dayshift); It works here because the protagonist is likeable, but credibly flawed. The film provides an actual context for Octavio's history of poor parenting, so his ex's frustration comes off as more genuine than just some rote stakes-setting, and it makes his grand gesture feels like more than just a gesture.

 The script by Director Oliver Kienle and Philip Koch juggles its elements very well - a lot of action, of course, but it's leavened by a sense of humour that keeps cropping up unexpectedly; The jokes are low-key and character-based, but some of them are still pretty funny. Most characters are given just a little more depth than you'd expect in a film like this and while minimalistic, there's enough to the central drama to give some welcome heft and weight to the story.

 The action is varied and teeters between tensie chases and satisfying fights where Octavio is sometimes joined by a buddy or two - the most noteworthy being Cosima (Marie Mouroum), a statuesque hellion in a tracksuit whose single-minded pursuit of a pay rise throughout the movie is both relatable and pretty amusing.
 Kienle gives his fights and chases room to breathe - there's a little frame skipping but it's not too bad, the handheld cameras track the well-blocked action with ease, and even add some flourishes when they follow through with some of the moves to give them a little more oomph. The choreography is a little too grounded, less crazy than I'd prefer, but there are still plenty of cool moves to enjoy. Sakraya's not an actual MMA fighter but he does have some background in martial arts, and he acquits himself nicely (as do the rest of the cast and stuntmen) both in and out of the fights.

 Ignore the red N of death, this is a really good one. Well done Germany.

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes

 Half psychodrama, half 60's/early 70's sleazy euro-horror, half surrealist, psychedelic freakout... Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes is a movie of many, many halves, most of them good, all fused together with a huge amount of style.

 Eva (Luisa Taraz) and Dieter (Frederik von Lüttichau) are an unhappily wedded couple. They're visiting a castle Eva inherited from her rich family, with Dieter complaining bitterly about how they never get any real money from them; Eva is the artistic, pensive one while Dieter is brash, whiny and resentful. They talk at each other, not to each other, unwilling to engage.

 As their mutual loathing becomes more and more apparent, both of them have separate, seemingly supernatural experiences with other people in the castle. Things come to a head with a gleefully over-the top bit of gore which literalizes some of the movie's themes, and then the film suddenly pulls out the rug out from you, introducing a separate couple played by Anna Platen and Jeff Wilbusch, and a load more characters besides (which never get to be more than background color).

 It's an intoxicatingly rich movie, with gorgeous visuals and a well-written script that might not cohere narratively but weaves its themes tightly. Director (and co-writer, along with Lilli Villányi) Kevin Kopacka is not nearly as worried about plot as he is by texture and about examining his characters' relationship from multiple angles, something he achieves by repeatedly switching tacks as reality is seemingly rewritten.
 Where he arrives is not ultimately important, though the 'explanation', when it arrives, is more coherent and satisfying than I thought it'd be. Interpretation is key here, and the script seems uninterested in providing any clear answers. Ultimately it's not so much a horror movie as a supernatural puzzle we're not meant to solve, just to poke at.

 For all its memorable imagery, there's just one bright red punctuation mark of a gore scene which is quickly recontextualized, and all the genre elements are more surreal than true horror. It's an easy movie to recommend to anyone who's watched any, say, Mario Bava but it's harder to say what someone who's unfamiliar with its influences might say. I'd recommend it anyways if you're feeling adventurous: It's only seventy-something minutes long, it oozes effortless cool, and it's got the most fun end credits I've seen in a long time.

Blood & Gold

 It's starting to get crowded here in the final days of World War: The Sequel. Joining Sisu and (the most crowd-pleasing part of) the latest Indiana Jones, we've now got a new contender from Germany: Blood & Gold, a stylized, violent pulp yarn about greed and murder in a small town in the middle of soon-to-stop-being-Nazi Germany.

 Heinrich (Robert Masser), a young disillusioned soldier with a face so chiselled it looks like a natural rock formation, is rescued from being hanged for desertion by Elsa (Marie Hacke), a young local farmer with no sympathies for the Nazi party. Between Sisu and this, the fascists might want to look into alternative execution arrangements.

 Meanwhile, the Nazis that failed to follow through  with Heinrich's hanging arrive at the nearby village, looking for a cache of gold bars left behind by the only Jew family in town. They're not just Nazi soldiers - they're SS, Himmler's own Nazier-than-thou zealots, and you know they're especially dastardly because they're led by a sociopath in a phantom of the opera-style leather mask (Alexander Scheer).

 While they search for the gold they take over the village inn as a center of operations, and send some soldiers to a nearby farm to look for supplies. Can you guess whose farm they go to raid?

 Elsa manages to hide Heinrich from the plundering soldiers, but all bets are off when things get rapey. Soon Heinrich, Elsa and her brother have to leave behind a farm full of dead Nazis; And then Elsa's brother goes and gets himself captured, they need to go to the village to rescue him.

 The backstory for the gold gets filled in, adding the complication that there's a group of people in town willing to murder for the money; and so the rest of the film ably spins these plates, weaving its characters between them in a series of confrontations and narrow escapes that always end up involving some gnarly violence.
 It's a gleefully pulpy story with a relatively low body count but a few memorable demises; Add a soundtrack composed of oldie German numbers and Morricone-style spaghetti western music, a heavy debt to Quentin Tarantino, and a sense of humor but no overt jokes...

 Good fun, in other words. It's a brisk, well-made, entertaining film punctuated by blood-red gouts of gore and some exploitation... A bit sleazy, but never too much so. The script doesn't always deliver the goods in a satisfying way, but it's pretty lean and it throws a few fun left turns and unexpected details.

 Director Peter Thorwarth does a good job with the action, keeping it varied and brutal, and manages suspense well in the scenes that need it. This is a huge improvement over his previous movie, Blood Red Skies (in case you were wondering). I doubt I'll remember much of this in a year's time but yeah, I enjoyed it.