Goebbels and the Führer review – private life of propagandist shows grotesque heart of Nazism

Joachim Lang’s bleak film shows a preening Goebbels and a careworn Hitler as they battle to convince the German public, and themselves, they will win the war In an appropriate spirit of cynicism and bleakness, German director Joachim Lang has made a film about the private life of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Hexenmeister or chief sorcerer of lies, and his always strained relationship with Hitler. Robert Stadlober plays the preening and self-pitying Goebbels and Fritz Karl is a careworn Hitler. Franziska Weisz plays Goebbels’s wife Magda, who at first resented his infidelities with showbusiness starlets but for the sake of the Fatherland submitted to the public image of a good Nazi wife and mother of six adorable children – whom Joseph and Magda finally murdered in the bunker before killing themselves. In its subversive, austerely satirical way, the film feels almost like a B-side to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall from 2004, and Lang has perhaps even inhaled, just a little,...

Unclenching the Fists review – claustrophobic drama full of trauma and tenderness

A quietly phenomenal performance by Milana Aguzarova as a young woman trying to break free from the unsettling relationships within her stifling family

Like her partner Kantemir Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole, there’s an uncanny claustrophobic charge to Kira Kovalenko’s family drama, though it finally exhales an equally powerful sigh of self-redemption. Milana Aguzarova stars as Ada, a young woman in a North Ossetian mining town trapped by her ailing and possessive father Zaur (Alik Karaev). He guards the only front door key, letting her and her siblings out when he chooses, and refuses to let her have an operation to correct injuries sustained during a school hostage-taking that mean she has to wear an incontinence nappy.

Ada’s brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev) comes home from the city of Rostov and seems to have the self-possession and moral compass Zaur does not. He promises to get her the treatment she needs – and a shot at romance with local chancer Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov), who has been hovering. But there’s an unsettling ambivalence to his help, expressed in their fraught confrontations and intense embraces; an incestuous undertone that younger brother Dakko (Khetag Bibilov), who tries to climb into Ada’s bed like a small child, is also subject to.

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