Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...
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The Exorcism review – Russell Crowe v the Devil in cursed horror about a cursed horror

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The actor plays an actor struggling with a demonically bad film shoot in a well-made yet increasingly messy chiller

Like many other dethroned A-listers of his generation, Oscar winner Russell Crowe has found himself a steady career hustling far further down the food chain, headlining B-movies he once would have balked at. The last few years have seen the famed actor crop up in gonzo road rage thriller Unhinged, shepherd the other Hemsworths in war drama Land of Bad, lead the barely released crime thriller Sleeping Dogs earlier this year and become the pope’s exorcist in The Pope’s Exorcist.

The latter became something of a surprise hit, first theatrically and then on Netflix, albeit in a rather jokey way, the film most easily remembered for the many memes of Crowe on a scooter. Its success was such that it not only guaranteed a sequel (The Pope’s Exorcist 2 is coming), but it also led to another of his exorcism movies getting saved from streaming hell and being delivered to the big screen instead, this weekend’s The Exorcism, a film originally shot back in 2019. It has an interesting backstory, loosely inspired by director Joshua John Miller’s experience as the son of actor Jason Miller who played Father Karras in The Exorcist. His father’s tales of a haunted set led to a film about an actor starring in a remake of what appears to be The Exorcist then becoming more explicitly plagued by demonic forces during production.

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