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

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.

A Woman in Berlin (Germany 2008, 131 min, dir: Max Faberbock, cast: Nina Hoss, Yevgeni Sidikhin)

Gone With the Wind persists because it is America’s great survival story. A Woman in Berlin is Gone With the Wind without the romance. We’d all like to behave like Scarlet and vow, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.”

But would the music swell and would be feel the same pride in deciding to fuck a Russian officer for a bar of soap and a bath? Germans don’t want to see the truth of war anymore than we do. When the book from which the film is taken was first published it caused such an outrage that it was withdrawn. The author declared it could only be published after her death, and then anonymously.

Anonyma (the name used for Nina Hoss’s unnamed character) is a high-styled photojournalist as World War Two is closing in on Berlin. The Russian are racing in from the East and the city is about to fall. But the music plays on and the dancers do no cease their step until brutality devours them like a beast.

Death in the streets is graphically detailed with drunken Russian soldiers looting and killing. Anonyma and the others are grabbed and raped repeatedly. The lucky ones are left alive and retreat to an empty apartment house where they seek shelter from the chaos outside. Anonyma is pretty enough and lucky enough to catch the eye of a Russian officer. He decides to make her his mistress.

Up to this point we can see Scarlet dressing in her only gown, gratefully accepting the offer of a bar of soap and a bath in exchange for her favors. What happens next is what caused the outrage against the book. She falls in love with him. We all want to be Scarlet, but if she fell in love with a Yankee, audiences would have thrown Coca Cola bottles at the screen.

When her lover receives new orders to leave Berlin, she is left as well. Other women spit at her and shun her as a whore of the conquerors. It has been three-quarters of a century since Margaret Mitchell published her fairy tale about a woman’s survival in the War Between the States. It is time we give up our fairy tales and see the reality of war’s consequences. Survival is not for sissies.

Goodbye, Lenin! (Germany 2003 121 min, dir: Wolfgang Becker, cast: Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova)

This version of the American Rip Van Winkle legend is set in Germany. What if you went to asleep in East Berlin just before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and woke up to a new world order? What if you were kept from seeing things had changed so completely because the shock might kill you? Alex’s mother wakes from a six month long coma after a heart she suffered just before the Wall crumbled.

The doctor warns him not to do anything that could upset her fragile recovery. He interprets this as his dictum to keep things exactly the same as before the Wall went down. So he recreates East German life in her apartment just as it was a year before. But life and history move on, and there comes the inevitable moment when she ventures out in her slippers to see what has become of her cherished country and countrymen (the scene in the clip).

In Germany this film unleashed a wave of “ostolgy,” the German-English term for nostalgia for the old East Germany (someone has even started manufacturing Spreewald pickles again). Goodbye Lenin! could easily have been a crass, one-line comedy. It’s not that at all.

The deeper story is of Alex finally learning the truth about his father (who fled to the West when he was a toddler), and understanding how to free himself from the confining world he has created around himself and his mother.

Who is the real Rip Van Winkle asleep in Good bye Lenin!? Alex has been dreaming all his life and now must shake himself awake and find a life in the wider world beyond the apartment, and beyond the Wall that once protected him as well as isolated him. Washington Irving’s short story is about a man who falls asleep just before the American Revolution and wakes up twenty years later, still proclaiming his loyalty to King George. What we take as a children’s tale is not that at all, but a serious look at change and denial. History rushes past us every instant of our lives. Those of us who choose to sleepwalker can never feel the breeze.

The Edge of Heaven (Germany 2007) The Edge of Heaven (Germany 2007, 116 min, dir: Fatih Akin. cast: Baki Davrak, Nurgul Yesilcay, Hanna Schygulla).

Germans and Turks have built a symbiotic culture with Turks like American Whites have with American Blacks. With us, slavery was the original sin. With them, it is BMW. In the boom years of the German auto industry there were not enough Germans to build all the cars. So they imported “guest” workers from Turkey with the idea they would fill out the production lines until enough German kinder were born to take their place. The birth rate didn’t go up and the Turks didn’t leave.

Today in major German cities, it is as easy to buy a shwarma as a schnitzel. The cultures clash over religion, neighborhoods, police brutality and jobs. Fatih Akin is part of this clash. His parents emigrated from Turkey to Hamburg, Germany, in the 1960s. The era he grew up in saw upheavals both in German politics and German-Turkish relations. Much of this is captured in The Edge of Heaven, but the politics are of the Turkish-Kurdish radical left and its spill over into Germany society.

What makes The Edge of Heaven so wonderful is Akin has sewn all this cultural and political clamor into a drama about loss and redemption that seals together Germans and Turks in a singular quest for love. A mother grieves for her murdered daughter and redeems that loss by embracing the young woman implicated in her death. A gay young man tries to atone for his father’s accidental killing of a woman prostitute and ends up questing to understand him. All this to the beat of Kazim Koyuncu’s music (check him out on iTunes).

Great movies start with great writing. It’s rare that a writer-director can create a story that treads on the edge of melodrama but never crosses the line. This used to be the definition of great American movies; but no more. Now we look beyond our borders for the films that once defined us. Films that now help define other peoples and other struggles. The mission of MovieWithMe.com is to find them all.