Best Of...

German cinema: Drama

From the Life of the Marionettes (1980)
Ingmar Bergman

One evening, successful businessman Peter Egermann pays a visit to a brothel where he meets and kills a prostitute. What could have driven such a seemingly well-adjusted young man to perform this random act of brutality...   [More...]

Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire (1920)
Robert Wiene

A young artist named Percy has completed a painting of Genuine, a high priestess with an irresistible allure. Since, he has become withdrawn, preferring the company of his creation to that of his friends...   [More...]

Die Gezeichneten (1922)
Carl Theodor Dreyer

In western Russia circa 1900, Hannah-Liebe is a Jewish girl growing up in a small town inhabited by Jews and serfs. Driven from the town by malicious gossip, she travels to St Petersburg to live with her older brother Jakov, who has converted to Christianity and now makes a comfortable living as a lawyer...   [More...]

Gods of the Plague (1970)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Shortly after being released from prison, small-time crook Franz Walsch meets up with his girlfriend Johanna but it is evident that the passion has gone out of their relationship...   [More...]

Hamlet (1921)
Svend Gade

Hamlet, king of Denmark, returns from the war against Norway badly wounded. At the same time, Gertrude, his queen, gives birth - to a daughter...   [More...]

Der Heilige Berg (1926)
Arnold Fanck

An engineer living in the Swiss Alps falls under the spell of a young dancer, Diotima. A love affair ensues, but Diotima's beauty attracts another admirer, the engineer's younger friend, Vigo...   [More...]

Joyeux Noël (2005)
Christian Carion

24th December 1914. Five months into World War I, regiments of French and Scottish troops face off their German opponents in the muddy, snow-covered wastes of No Man's Land...   [More...]

Kameradschaft (1931)
Georg Wilhelm Pabst

During the Great Depression, France and Germany are both beset with high unemployment. In a French border town, unemployed German miners are turned away when they try to find work in a French mine...   [More...]

Katzelmacher (1969)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A group of disaffected young people hang out in their modern Munich apartment block, struggling to fill their empty days with tedious conversation and meaningless sex...   [More...]

Lacombe Lucien (1974)
Louis Malle

The location is a small provincial town in south-west France. It is June 1944 and the country is still under Nazi occupation...   [More...]

Lola Montès (1955)
Max Ophüls

By the 1850s, Lola Montès is one of most notorious women of her time. Her love affairs with composers, kings and other men of distinction are legendary...   [More...]

Ludwig (1972)
Luchino Visconti

Ludwig II is a mere youth of nineteen when he ascends to the throne of Bavaria in 1864. A sensitive and idealistic young man, he shows far more interest in the arts and architecture than he does in matters of state...   [More...]

Madame Du Barry (1919)
Ernst Lubitsch

In France, around the middle of the 18th century, Jeanne Bécu is happy in her life as a milliner's assistant at a haberdashery in Paris...   [More...]

Marianne, meine Jugendliebe (1955)
Julien Duvivier

Vincent Loringer's arrival at a private school in Bavaria creates an immediate stir. The strangely charismatic adolescent who can draw wild animals towards him casts a spell over the other boys, who are enthralled by the stories he tells of his former life on a farm in Argentina...   [More...]

Die Marquise von O... (1976)
Eric Rohmer

In the 18th century, in a town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise von O lives with her father, a Colonel, and mother...   [More...]

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Hans Epp is a man in his early thirties who makes a modest living by selling fruit from a barrow in the back streets of Munich...   [More...]

Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang

In the twenty-first century city of Metropolis, the wealthy elite live in luxury in sprawling tower complexes whilst millions of workers toil away in subterranean vaults, constantly serving the machines which keep the city alive...   [More...]

Michel Strogoff (1926)
Viktor Tourjansky

As a revolt by the Tartars threatens to tear the Russian Empire in two, the soldier Michel Strogoff is sent to the Siberian town of Irkutsk with a vital message from the Tsar...   [More...]

Mikaël (1924)
Carl Theodor Dreyer

Claude Zoret is one of the greatest and wealthiest artists of his day. His success derives from the source of his inspiration: a young man named Mikaël, who is both his model and his protégé...   [More...]

Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931)
Fyodor Otsep

In Russia during the mid-1800s, Dimitri Karamazov takes his leave of the woman he intends to marry, Katya, so that he can return to his home town and extort money from his father, Fyodor...   [More...]

La Mort en direct (1980)
Bertrand Tavernier

Mindful of the need to drive up his network's viewing figures, television producer Vincent Ferriman has devised a new reality TV show named Death Watch in which he will beam into people's homes the last days of a terminally ill person...   [More...]

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924)
Fritz Lang

After the death of her husband Siegfried, Kriemhild appeals to her brother Gunther to have his killer, Hagen, executed. When Gunther refuses, Kriemhild allows herself to be married to Etzel, the king of the Huns...   [More...]

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924)
Fritz Lang

Having completed his apprenticeship to a blacksmith, Siegfried, son of Siegmund, king of the Netherlands, sets out for the court of King Gunther of Burgundy at Worms...   [More...]

The Niklashausen Journey (1970)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

On 3rd March 1476, a shepherd named Hans Böhm makes a public declaration in the town of Niklashausen that he has been visited by the Virgin Mary...   [More...]

The Odessa File (1974)
Ronald Neame

Munich, November 1963. Whilst the world is still reeling from the news of President Kennedy's assassination, journalist Peter Miller allows himself to be distracted by the suicide of an elderly Jewish man, Solomon Tauber...   [More...]

Pandora's Box (1929)
Georg Wilhelm Pabst

No one can resist the appeal of Lulu. The beautiful young dancer is cursed with a raw sensual allure that no man can resist...   [More...]

Le Passage du Rhin (1960)
André Cayatte

Paris, 1939. War is about to be declared any day. Roger works in a bakery and Jean is a reporter for the magazine L'Espoir...   [More...]

Phantom (1922)
F.W. Murnau

Haunted by his past, Lorenz Lubota agrees to his wife's suggestion to write the tragic story of his life. Some years before, he was a humble clerk, earning barely enough to keep himself and his elderly mother...   [More...]

The Pianist (2002)
Roman Polanski

Warsaw, September 1939. Wladyslaw Szpilman is making a comfortable living as a virtuoso pianist in Poland when the Nazis invade his country and begin their systematic persecution of its Jewish population...   [More...]

La Pianiste (2001)
Michael Haneke

Erika Kohut is a brilliant pianist who gives master class piano lessons in Vienna. Although in her forties, she still lives with her dominating mother and apparently has no interest in men...   [More...]



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