Films This Week 4/30/21

by Gary Palmucci | 30th April 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. On this weekend following a singular Oscar ceremony — including a dramatic surprise at the very last moment — we’re offering two of Sunday night’s winners: The Father (Best Actor, Anthony Hopkins & Best Adapted Screenplay) and Another Round (Best International Film). If you haven’t seen them yet, here’s another chance to catch up.

The week’s new film is Berlin Alexanderplatz, a kinetic re-crafting of the classic Alfred Doblin Weimar-era novel, made decades later as German director R.W. Fassbinder’s opus magnum, an epic TV miniseries. This topical new adaptation both telescopes and transposes the story to the modern day as an immigrant from Guinea-Bissau is drawn into Berlin’s sex-and-drugs underworld, its brutal bosses, and pathetic victims.

The film’s ambitious young Afghan-German director, Burban Qurbani constructs an episodic panorama of contemporary Germany with an inevitably tragic velocity. If this film succeeds in getting you in its grip, I strongly suggest also sampling an episode or two of Fassinder’s masterwork — you may find yourself unable to stop at that…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema