Reviews

The story idea is great. The acting by the heroine is excellent. The movie keeps viewers on their toes.

However, it does this only by revealing the epic truth very slowly, and in large parts only creates tension by the heroine acting irrationally and thereby creating problems on the side that do not make the story any richer.

Another weakness is that, looking at the entire story, the movie only tells one of the least interesting parts of it. It picks one early phase of the epic story and even there dwells only on a very particular, inessential fault.

Then the movie stops short of the most interesting following phase, except for a few seconds at the very end. This, for me, is frustrating. At least five or ten minutes of subsequent events, i.e. Showing the fruits of the whole effort, would make the movie much more satisfying. I think, if a movie has a happy ending, it might as well show it in full glory.

I noticed a few unintelligible details, so perhaps the entire story was not told in a fully intelligible way. If so, then that would constitute another weakness.

I cannot write a full review, because I stopped watching after noticing that the movie was wasting my time. Most of the time I saw people walk, drive, or do nothing, which did not in the least contribute to the story.

Apparently the movie makers had to do that to stretch the story, which could perhaps have been told in 20 minutes, to movie length.

The movie might be good to watch for people who only rarely watch movies or for old people who are still used to very slow story development from the old days. Today this movie is just impertinent.

The movie is entertaining and instructive, but to label it, "based on the true story" is misleading. Most of the story cornerstones are pure inventions and have nothing to do with the truth. Many of the key events in the film never happened in reality. This is the biggest shortcoming of the movie-it is a lie.

Another weak point is that the story remains fuzzy. The protagonists never make it clear what exactly they are doing and why. Thus the movie remains superficial and never really explains what is happening.

The technical computer and internet action details look as if the script writers were completely clueless and just sucked nonsense from their fingers. They seemed to barely know what an IP address is, but onion routing was alread way beyond their understanding. For a movie that is centered so much on the internet and the darknet one would wish for more precision in such details.

Apart from these shortcomings the relations between the protagonists are gripping and interesting to watch.

In 1967 Germany a farmer woman does whatever she can, against heavily stacked odds, to save her 6-year-old boy, because she recognizes that he is intelligent and not treated right by the people trying to control him. She travels first to Munich, then to Berlin to find advice from psychiatrists. Whenever she sees that the doctors don't do him any good, she pulls him out and moves on.

Finally a young psychiatrist in Berlin comes to a helpful diagnosis, but at the time public health insurance does not pay for psychiatric treatment. This has to change.

TV movie, two parts, 89 min each.

This German TV movie plays in the years 1414 and 1415 in Konstanz, Germany. Its story hails from a novel by Iny Lorentz with the same title. It is gripping and credibly presented. In spite of the relatively low budget of a TV production the settings look authentic, the acting is mostly excellent, and you have to excuse the somewhat artificial dialogues that are typical for German TV movies. The story moves from the house of a wealthy textile trader to a medieval jail, then to the travelling whores, to medieval pubs, and eventually into the houses of the gentry and to the king. Finally our heroine sets out to close the circle and move home. It is a grand story that has the potential to draw you in, that really needs all of the two hours to be told, and that is too rich to allow any slowness. The spoken language is German, and I am currently not aware of the availability of any foreign language dubs or subtitles.

The idea of the story is excellent -- a young bank robber takes a 16-year-old girl hostage, but she happens to be the daughter of a detective story author, she knows what it means to be a girl, and thus she is by far not as easy to handle as he would wish. She soon turns the tables and drives the story.

I found the acting also very good, but the story and the directing have flaws, and the dialogs, typical of German TV movies, sound like citations, rather than real-world speech.

All in all I'd call it light entertainment -- watch it if you have nothing better to do.

An archaeologist stumbles right into a local government conspiracy, but step by step discovers a serious danger to our entire civilization.

It was shown on German TV as one long movie, not as a series, which, unfortunately, causes some repetitiveness.

Not a really good movie, but acting, directing, and computer animation were quite good, well above average for a TV series. I enjoyed seeing Daryl Hannah in a difficult role, but all actors were good.

The limiting factor was the story. The beginning was almost as good as that of any high budget Hollywood movie, but then the story turned cheaper, and the movie stayed well below its potential.

My final judgment: a somewhat entertaining sci-fi thriller.

The movie tells the story of a Muslim man and a Hindu woman on a bus, getting stranded amidst a Hindu-Muslim pogrom. She pretends that he's her Hindu husband to save his life. They are forced to spend some time together, and the initial fear, mistrust, and weariness changes into something both had not expected at all.

Like many Indian movies, this one was made on a tiny budget, has simple story details and simple language, short sentences, very clear pronunciation, so it works even in the smallest Indian makeshift movie theater and on television. Hence only 8 out of 10 points.

That said, the story is very timely, intense, moving, and absolutely believable. Both directing and acting are very good as well, making this a remarkable Indian movie.