Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 17 October

Phoenix (Petzold, 2014) is a digital rental from AroVision (and others) and is streaming on Mubi

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a dynam­ite little psy­cho­lo­gic­al thrill­er set against the back­ground of bombed out post-war Germany.

Everyone is des­per­ately fight­ing for sur­viv­al and hav­ing to reck­on with their vari­ous mor­al failures.

Nightclub sing­er and con­cen­tra­tion camp sur­viv­or Nelly (awe­some Nina Hoss) returns to Berlin after facial recon­struc­tion from a bul­let wound. Her hus­band (Ronald Zerhrfeld) no longer recog­nises her but asks her to imper­son­ate Nelly any­way (imper­son­ate her­self!) so he can claim her inheritance.

The film builds slowly on this ter­rible decep­tion until it reaches a dev­ast­at­ing conclusion.

Phoenix is a mod­ern European mas­ter­piece from one of the best writer-directors we have.

Back in 2016 I was work­ing for RNZ in an early ver­sion of their ‘pivot to video’. I got to write, pro­duce, present and edit little video reviews fea­tur­ing film clips and stills (as well as my mug). We were work­ing it out as went along but they hold up pretty well. Here’s the one we made for Phoenix.

Phoenix is a digit­al rent­al from the usu­al loc­a­tions (but espe­cially from AroVision if you are read­ing this from Aotearoa) and also stream­ing on Mubi in Australia and New Zealand.

Further reading

I went to see the nearly three-hour Taylor Swift con­cert movie on Saturday after­noon and reviewed the exper­i­ence for RNZ here:

What you don’t get with a show this ridicu­lously well co-ordinated is much in the way of impro­visa­tion or inspir­a­tion. If one tiny ele­ment of the show goes off-script, the whole thing, under­stand­ably, breaks down and it’s churl­ish to com­plain about some­thing this spec­tac­u­lar but the ‘live­ness’ of a live show is what’s missing.