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Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) More at IMDbPro »Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (original title)

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3 items from 2011

17 August 2011 3:04 AM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Berlin has been the backdrop – and even the star – in movies from cold war spy thrillers to dramas about the collapse of East Germany. Andrew Pulver picks the top 10 films set in the city

• As featured in our Berlin city guide

People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), Curt and Robert Siodmak, 1930

Silent cinema flourished in Germany during the Weimar years, and Berlin was immortalised in two particularly brilliant impressionist tributes: Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and People on Sunday, which aimed to create a patchwork of ordinary Berliners' lives. This film, with its cast of non-professional actors and hidden camera, gets the pick – partly because of its extraordinary writing and directing credit roll. Virtually everyone – including Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak – went on to make a name for themselves in Hollywood, after being forced out of Germany during the Nazi era.

• Bahnhof Zoo; Nikolassee

The Bourne Supremacy, »

- Andrew Pulver

7 July 2011 5:21 AM, PDT | HollywoodChicago.com | See recent HollywoodChicago.com news »

Chicago – One of the most important home entertainment releases of the year is Criterion’s high-definition restoration of Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s “People on Sunday,” an extraordinary filmic landmark from 1930 that is a must-see for any self-respecting cinephile. Watching it for the first time, I felt like I was witnessing nothing less than the birth of independent cinema.

Coming out on the heels of “city symphony” pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s 1927 opus “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,” and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic “Man With a Movie Camera,” “Sunday” blended the stylistic flourishes of avant-garde documentaries with experimental narrative structures. At its core are five non-actors playing characters loosely based on themselves, and the film’s witty prologue notes that after production wrapped, they all returned to their regular jobs.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

A triumphant success with critics and audiences alike, this silent German masterwork united a group of brilliant unknowns, »

- adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)

30 June 2011 2:19 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

"It's easy to enjoy Raffaello Matarazzo's melodramas for the campy excess of their acting and story lines," blogs Dave Kehr, "but it's more productive to take them seriously, I think — to see how cleanly and elegantly Matarazzo presents this bezerko material, with a visual style that reminded Jacques Lourcelles of Lang, Dreyer and Mizoguchi, and how perfectly engineered his narratives are, with every outlandish episode incorporated into a serene, symmetrical structure. The new Matarazzo box set (my New York Times review is here) from Criterion's budget Eclipse line contains four of Matarazzo's seven films with the towering star couple Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson (literally — Matarazzo's mise-en-scene somehow makes them seem larger, both physically and emotionally, than any of the other characters on the screen), all subtitled in English for the first time: Chains (1949) [image above], Tormento (1950), Nobody's Children (1952) and The White Angel (1955)."

"Though immensely popular, the films were dismissed by »

3 items from 2011