Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Soul Kitchen (Germany 2009, 99 min, dir: Fatih Akin, cast: Adam Bousdoukos, Mortiz Bleibtreu).

A Turkish director makes a film about a Greek restaurateur in Hamburg, Germany. Soul Kitchen is no Euro Pudding: the derogatory name given to coproductions that pluck money from several countries and weave a mix of actors, locations, and crew to take advantage of money-saving treaties.

The mystery here is not why anyone would make this very lively and pleasant film, but why Fatih Aikin made it? His more soulful films include Head On and The Edge of Heaven (MovieWithMe). In contrast, Soul Kitchen is a bouncy stories about an ambitious young business hustler (Adam Bousdoukos),who manages to overcome a temperamental chef (Morirz Bleibtreu), an absentee girlfriend, and a host of other characters and crazies: All to make a success of his soulful little eatery.

Fatih Akin grew up in the Turkish community of Hamburg. The Germans invited thousands of Turks to become guest workers in the auto plants in the 1970′s when business was booming and their was a labor shortage. They never dreamed that forty years later the Turks would still be there. It is now common to see women on the streets with chadors over their faces. The Kruetzburg district of Berlin has the best Turkish food west of Istanbul and east of New York.

It’s not easy growing up in a foreign culture that is your culture. Especially when the “foreign” and “your” are forever confused. If only the Germans would see you as one of them rather “them.” Some of Aikin’s acclaimed films offer glimpses of what this cultural confusion is like.

But Soul Kitchen is the froth on a cappuccino by comparison. Maybe he took a break from deep melodrama to make it. Maybe the burden of telling the Turkish story is lifting.

And maybe it was time to make a film that was just good entertainment. Take your pick of motives. The watchable result is all that matters.

The White Ribbon (Germany 2009, 144 min. dir: Michael Heneke, cast:Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi,Lionie Benesch, Susanne Lothar, Urlich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Detlev Buck).

Director Michael Heneke is not good on conclusions. The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, and Cache are fascinating to watch but frustrating. So it is with The White Ribbon.

A small German town witnesses a horse and riser felled by a cruel trip wire, a woman falling to her death on a rotten plank, a man hanged upside down in the mill. What does it all mean? God’s warning about the war to come that will change life here forever? The scenes are brilliant, the intellectual postulations lofty. I only wish Michael Heneke would bevel his story with a finer corner at the end.

His trademark has become the fade out and credits while his audience is left to puzzle the meaning. You can’t but be caught up in the story, the setting, the characters and fine performances by all. As if to emphasize the small rooms and camped world of the story, Heneke rarely moves the camera. Take a look at the scene where Eva’s father (Detlev Buck) grills the school teacher (Christian Friedel) about his intentions to marry his daughter. We rarely cut between faces and reactions, but the charged emotions fly around the room.

Shooting in black and white adds to the period feel, as does the weary voice of the teacher as an old man (Ernst Jacobi) telling us his recollections of the events we witness.

I’d love to put Heneke in a room with a writer and see who comes out alive. It might be another hanging or garroting by trip wire.

Cloud 9 (Germany 2008, 98 min. dir: Andreas Dresen, cast: Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal, Steffi Kuhnert).

Cloud 9 explores all the feelings, all the love, all the passion, all the nudity we think of as the province of young love. Only these lovers are in their late sixties and seventies.

Urula Werner plays Inge, the woman who leaves. She’s been a film actress since 1960 but it takes more than courage to take off all our clothes and do nude love scenes at the age of (approx)64.

She lives a quiet life with her husband, Werner (Horst Rehberg). She sings in the church choir, entertains her grand children, and takes in sewing. The sewing is her undoing. Taking a pair of altered trousers to Karl’s (Horst Westphal’s) apartment for a fitting, she finds her self in a passionate kiss. In a minute she’s slipped of her own panties and is heaving away in bed with him.

The scene is one we’ve seen in countless young love movies. Two lovers impetuously drawn to each other by animal magnetism who toss away all caution with their clothes. But watching it with sixty and seventy year olds is, at first, shocking. They have lust on their faces but their bodies don’ give that satisfying voyeurism we’ve come to expect of young skin.

The ringmaster of this tender, personal film is Andreas Dresen. His interest in character stories and intimate relationship is his brand. Grill Point (2002) is another good example. Dresen is an Ossi, or “Easterner.” This is the derogatory German term for people who came from Eastern Germany before unification. In the eyes of a Wessi they are a less polished, less sophisticated.

So it is with Dresen’s wonderful characters. In Grill Point they were married couples having affairs with each other’s spouses. The action was set in a small East German town where nightlife centers around the snack bar set up in the town park. Cloud 9 seems to be set in a Berlin suburb. We can see the red and yellow cars of the S-Bahn commuter trains whirr past Inge’s back yard; we catch a glimpse or two of a vertical city in the distance. But the Berlin of Cloud 9 is a small town of railway backyards, tree-lined streets of apartments, church socials and family picnics.

Cloud 9 doesn’t have a silver lining. The consequences of elder love are different from those of young love. There is no time lift for heart mending. When Inge moves out, Werner is left with no future. Her happiness with Karl is short-lived. Or is it? The movie takes us only as far as her new life and new pain. Dresen should do a follow up with Cloud 10.

Storm ( Germany 2009, 105 min. dir: Hans-Christian Schmid, cast: Kerry Fox (Hannah), Anamaria Marinca (Mira), Stephen Dillane, Rolf Lassgard)

What do Sudan, Israel and the United States all have in common? They are the only three countries in the world not members of the International Criminal Court. Next question: what is the International Criminal Court?

It is a UN sponsored investigative and judicial system headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and charged with judging crimes against humanity such as genocide. It gets tricky for a country like the US and Israel that build Holocaust museums and where Jews urge “Never Forget.” They won’t join because they might be prosecuted for trifles like Guantanamo and Gaza. Sudan can be excused because no one there probably knows what a court is anyway.

The brilliance of Storm is in using the International Criminal Court as the setting for a first rate murder mystery. Hannah (Kerry Fox) is a prosecutor sent from ICC in The Hague to try a former Serbian commander accused of genocide. She manages to ferret out the real truth about the crime only to see European Union politics present a barrier to justice.

Though Storm is a German production, the language is English, and the narrative resembles some of the best of courtroom/mystery dramas. It’s intelligent and suspenseful. More over it is original in trying to examine how the ICC works, and how politics can derail the highest of motives.

Most Americans don’t know there is an ICC, or that is has the power to try politicians like Slobodan Milosevic. Or that the UN maintains a secure prison in The Hague where sentences are served. The UN attempt at international justice is far from American shores because we refuse to support it. The irony of the US refusing to support justice for all because it would mean justice for us too, is a further reason to see and consider the story told in Storm. Who amongst our politicians or generals might be in the defendant box?

Head-On (Germany 2004, 128 min, Fatih Akin, cast: Birol Unel, Sibel Kekilli).

Cahit crashes his car head on into a wall and wakes up in recovery to meet a suicidal girl who says she’s going to marry him. That’s just the first ten minutes of writer/director Fatih Akin’s pretty amazing maze that leads from Hamburg to Istanbul.

To know the characters, you’ve got to know the history. In the boom days of German car companies they needed more workers than the country could supply. So Turks were imported as guest workers. To the everlasting regret of proper Germans: they stayed. Today the major cities of Germany have big Turkish communities. German’s have had a hard time adjusting to head scarves, but an easier time snacking on doner kebab and curry wurst (supposedly invented at Konnopke’s Imbiss, a Turkish snack bar in Berlin).

Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) is needy for love in all the wrong places and targets Cahit (Birol Unel). He’s a druggie who won’t talk about his first wife’s death. She’s tried to slit her wrists and is now captive of her family. Both share a Turkish lineage and both have turned away from their roots. They speak German when together.

He agrees to a marriage of convenience so she can escape her parents’ home; but even on their wedding night his violence erupts and he throws her out of his apartment. She drinks at a bar in her wedding dress and seduces the bartender for a place to stay.

The film walks a tortuous path towards self-identity: Capit and Sibel yearn for love but are blocked by fear and violence. Capit kills a man in a bar fight and goes to jail. Sibel taunts a gang to beat her to death and they nearly do. It sounds grizzly but this is all subtext. What keeps us interested is our belief that these two really want to share love for each other, and somehow will find a way.

Like Akin’s later, superb film, The Edge of Heaven (MovieWithMe), these strangers in a strange land must return from Hamburg to Turkey to find themselves, and in this case, understand their love. (Sibel Kekilli also stars in When We Leave, a 2010 German/Turkish film is which displacement in an alien culture has tragic consequences).

In Akin’s films Turkey is a mystical place where modernism is mixed with a gathering sense of self. It is the homeland where truth, blotted out by Western European life, reappears. In The Edge of Heaven it is Nejat’s road trip to the village of his father. For Capit, just released from prison, it is the pilgrimage to a place he doesn’t know with a language he doesn’t speak in search of the girl he never let himself love.

What makes Aikin so brilliant are stories that border on pathos but always manage to hold the line. In less skilled hands, they would be soap operas. Head-On is only the second of many full-length films by a now-acclaimed brilliant filmmaker. But it needs no excuses for being an early work.

Gloomy Sunday (Hungary, 1999, 112 min. Rolf Schubel, cast: Erika Marozsan, Joachim Krol, Ben Becker, Stefano Dionisi)

A love triangle ends in suicide over a song. Or is it resentment of the Nazi general who can order the piano player to play his favorite tune? The most amazing thing about Gloomy Sunday is how well it plays as a three-course melodrama in a restaurant that serves too much schmaltz.

The Jewish owner of a successful Budapest restaurant, Szabos, keeps them coming back for his special beef roll dish and his gifted piano player who composes the theme everybody wants to hear with their dessert. He’s in love with his beautiful waitress, and she’s in love with the new piano player. The two men decide to share her. A German businessman is in love with both the food and the waitress. He gets big portions but no love. Later he becomes a Nazi commander, stationed in Budapest. He sneaks off to the Jewish-owned restaurant for a good meal, a couple of tunes, and schnapps with his old friends.

Hans (Ben Becker) promises Lazlo (Joachim Krol) that he will spare him deportation. Just in case, Lazlo puts the restaurant in Ilona’s (Erika Marozsan’s) name. Hans reneges, Lazlo is rounded up, and Ilona sleeps with Hans to save Lazlo. It doesn’t work, Hans sends Lazlo to the camps anyway.

The peculiar, and endearing part of Gloomy Sunday is that everyone, save the piano player, seems to make an interesting life accommodation to time and circumstances. The two men understand they are rivals but Ilona won’t choose, so they share her. She becomes the helpmate to both. Lazlo insinuates himself in her love for the piano player by becoming his career manager and insuring the success of his song. The girl sleeps with the Nazi when she must, and the Nazi tries to shows, in his dying moment, that his betrayal was over love.

In the end, Ilona is left with the son she bore from her long ago liaison with the piano player. They toast to the past in the restaurant she now runs. If this isn’t the stuff of grand opera it should be. It’s from a novel by Nick Barkow, called A Song of Love and Death. This is a much better title than Gloomy Sunday and a hint that great melodrama awaits. Nothing wrong with melodrama if you are expecting it, and this is Gloomy Sunday’s real strength.

Walk on Water (Israel 2004, 103 min, dir: Eytan Fox, cast: Loir Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters).

This Israeli film asks whether there is really a purpose anymore in the Israeli final solution of killing old Nazis. Museums are being built everywhere to chronicle the Nazi’s “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews, but what about the Israeli’s state sanctioned retribution?

Trained as a hit man whose life is measured in assassinations, Israeli agent Eyal (Loir Ashkenazi, also in Late Marriage on MovieWithMe.com) is ordered to kill an elderly ex Nazi mass murderer “before God does.”

The way to flush this old Black Shirt out of hiding is to get close to his granddaughter and grandson. Pia (Caroline Peters) lives in Israel as a kibbutz worker and maintains close contact with her gay brother, Axel (Knut Berger). Eyal manages to befriend them both. Although his purpose is information, he finds himself drawn into their picnics on the sand and running barefoot.

For I guy who doesn’t even take his socks off between killings, this is a major life change. Little by little, he learns their view of humanity. It offers a reboot of history by seeing a bigger picture than Jews versus Germans.

A song by Esther Ofarim that Axel plays on the car radio while driving Eyal to the family home in Wansee, outside Berlin (coincidentally, the town where the Final Solution was hatched back in 1942), underscores the point of the movie. Ofarim is an Israeli who sings in German. She’s built up a huge following in Germany where her music symbolizes the improbable bond between the two cultures.

He doesn’t know they’re driving to attend Axel’s grandfather’s birthday party, where Eyal will get the chance to give the old man a final present from the Mossad: death.

The strength of this movie (mainly in English, with some subtitles for the Hebrew and the German) is two cultures pushed to confrontation: the diabolic Nazi killer and the new assassin under the same roof. The former is a feeble old man. The latter has to confront the question of why he is doing what he is about to do.

Eyal faces a moral quandary he can’t answer. So he drives back into Berlin to talk to his boss. The way back form the western suburbs takes him on Hitler’s first autobahn. (You can’ t make a film in Berlin without running on or over a lot of history). His boss, the Mossad chief, is calling the shots form his hotel room. Eyal suggest they capture the old man and smuggle him to Israel for trial (like the Israeli’s did with Adolf Eichmann decades before). He argues that that it makes no sense to kill an old man who is near death anyway.

“Terminate him before God does,” is the boss’s answer. It is the logic of the efficient and practical assassin with no room for the questions of why. Eyal drives back to Wansee. “Why” is the question on his brain, and then “how”? While he is pondering, Axel takes the moral high ground and frees Eyal from his dilemma. Meanwhile sister Pia gives the promise throughout the movie that sex is so much better without moral confusion.

Easy for me to see the lighter side of Eytan Fox’s film very rich and thought provoking film; but this doesn’t take away from it being an extremely intelligent, effective, and watchable movie.

Go For Zucker (Germany 2004, 95 min, dir: Dani Levy, cast: Henry Hubchen, Udo Samel)

Dani Levy has tried many comedies before (and his Hitler one after) but this is so far his funniest. How can you top a man who fakes a heart attack falling into his mother’s grave in order to make his game time at a pool tournament?

Zucker (“sugar,” his real name is Zuckerman), is a German Jewish pool hustler and whorehouse entrepreneur who works the bar rooms of Berlin pretending to be drunk. His con: get the suckers to bet on a game with him. Despite his proficiency as a pool shark, Zucker is steps from foreclosure and divorce when his mother dies in Frankfort.

Her will stipulates that he and his long estranged brother need to sit shiva together (morn for the dead) for seven days to qualify for her inheritance. The brother is an orthodox Jew.

Zucker is an Ostie; cut off by the Wall around East Berlin most of his younger years. When the Wall went down, he quickly moved his con schemes to the West.

The best comedies come from characters with a soul for larceny who gets tripped up by self-deception. Add a Jewish family with all the quirky differences and rivalries that keep it in a perpetual state of resentment, envy, and jealousy; and you have a pretty potent brew.

This comedy would be expected in Israel but is surprising in Germany. A Jewish comedy? But why not? Ernst Lubitch learned about comedy there, and so did Billy Wilder. They brought their laughs to Hollywood while Hitler stayed and made himself into such a self-parody that everyone from Charlie Chaplain to Dani Levy had to take a shot (see Levy’s film, My Fuhrer, but don’t expect it to be Mel Brooks’ The Producers)

Rosenstrasse (Germany 2003, 136 min, dir: Margarethe von Trotta, cast: Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Jutte Lampe)

You open your morning newspaper in 1943 and read, “Gestapo Frees Jews.” You take a gulp of coffee. This is startling but you also remember a headline back in 1938, “Goebbels cancels annual anti-Jewish Kristallnacht: glassmakers protest.” If you were a German citizen at the time and could still afford coffee, both stories were true.

Americans view of the Nazi era, propagandized by the franchising of Holocaust museums and Quentin Tarantino movies; is of relentless, depraved evil. We make no allowance for what historian Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

What happened at Number 2-4 Rosenstrasse (Rose Street) has never been forgotten among Berliners, but it took the bravery of director Margarethe von Trotta to finally film it 60 years later. Starting in January 1943, the Gestapo rounded up all the remaining 6000 Berlin Jews for deportation and death. The rumor was that Joseph Goebbels, head of propaganda, wanted to have them all gone by Hitler’s birthday in April. (This kind of sentimentality is exactly what made Goebbels such a highly paid PR exec.)

At first they spared Jewish men married to Christians (called: geltungsjuden). The Nuremburg laws of 1935, outlawing marriages to Jews, also exempted existing marriages. Therefore the husbands could not be counted as Jews for deportation. But in March 1700 geltungsjuden were arrested and housed in the Jewish Community Hall at 2-4 Rossenstrasse to await deportation. It was a convenient place to store them since Gestapo headquarters was nearby.

As soon as word got out about where the men were imprisoned, their wives began to gather in the street below. For a week the women stood, their numbers growing to over 1000. They were threatened by the Gestapo. Police aimed guns at them. Sometimes they would run and disperse for a few minutes, only to return in stronger numbers. The wives called out the names of their husbands, hoping for a yell back from the windows above.

At the end of a week, Goebbels realized he had created a public relations nightmare.Good Aryan German women were standing in the street defying threats, pistols, and machine guns in solidarity with their husbands imprisoned inside. It confirmed the suspicions of more and more law-abiding citizens that the government respected no laws.

This was not the first time. Kristallnacht was a big blowout in 1937 that had also backfired. On the pretext of retaliation for a German diplomat’s assassination in Paris, Goebbels had ordered his thugs to go out and beat up Jews, break windows in Jewish businesses (Kristall=glass), and trash property. You can see pictures of it in any of the dozens of Holocaust museums. It’s chapter one in the time-line for the Holocaust.

So if it was such a big success, why didn’t Goebbels make it an annual event? There were no more Kristallnachts because a large segment of the German public, especially the more educated, disapproved of it. It gave them an uneasy feeling that the Nazi government was capable of going beyond the law. In ’37 this was enough to call off future Kristallnachts celebrations. In 1943, the war was going badly. The Battle of Stalingrad was lost, people were on rations, Army generals were questioning tactics and strategy. What the Nazis didn’t need was more tsuris (Yiddish=aggravation) on the streets of Berlin.

Over a thousand women were standing day and night, shoulder to shoulder. If Kris Kristofferson had been born they would have been singing: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” (he didn’t write that until 1969). Inside Gestapo headquarters something had to give. After a week, Goebbels ordered the men released. They poured out of the building into the arms of their wives.

This is a powerful film detailing the complex relationship of several generations of women, ending in a moment of joy and tears. But don’t look in the Holocaust museums for references to Rosenstrasse or to references to historians like Tzvetan Todorov who noted the negative impact of Kristallnacht. It doesn’t go along with the neatly packaged mythology of doom. If evil is banal, there are always good people who see a way to challenge it: and sometimes they win.

Mostly Martha (Germany 2002, 106 min, dir: Sandra Nettelbeck, cast: Martina Gedeck, August Zirner). No Reservations (USA 2007, 104 min, dir: Scott Hicks, cast Katherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart Bob Balaban)

An expensive meal in a posh restaurant leaves you full and poorer. Next morning, can you remember what you ate? These two films are a mash-up of good cooking and elegant service. So why does one delight and the other push us away from the table?

Let’s cut the cute talk. Mostly Martha is mostly director Sandra Nettelbeck coaxing a charming performance out of Martina Gedeck. If you think Gedeck is just another breezy actress who is a natural for this part, take a look at her in The Lives of Others and The Baader Meinhof Complex. From neurotic chef who never has a hair out of place to brooding terrorist, she’s got an amazing range.

Then try Katherine Zeta-Jones in the same role, directed by Scott Hicks. It’s an easy comparison because both films have the same story almost scene for scene. Didn’t anybody say, “wait a minute, do we really need to copy even the song by Paolo Conte (Via con Me)? Martha is the lonely perfectionist who rules over a chic restaurant kitchen. Everything changes when her niece is suddenly orphaned and must come to live with her. Complications mean a sous chef needs to help her cook. Enter August Zirner (German version) and Aaron Eckhart (USA).

I kind of prefer Eckhart, even though he tries too hard. And Zeta-Jones is okay, even though Gedeck is more gegrubel (brooding). Mostly Martha was a big hit in Germany. No Reservations was a dud here. Why? Every Make & Remake comparison is different, but here I think it is about expectations. German audiences liked sexy aunt Martha slowly getting seduced by a man, and food. It’s Kultur (culture).

American audiences don’t give a shit about Kultur. If it’s food: there should be a lot of it, and if it sex: let’s get their clothes off. Here’s a place where a pie-in-the-face food fight followed by hot sex on the prep counter might have given us so memorable a scene that it would be endlessly played in those Academy Award clip reels of classic movies. But instead we got a gentle remake. Toss the souffle and gives us Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream ice cream. Fuck Kultur, Americans want to eat.