Micro-Reviews 2025

APR 09, 2025, Metropol Theater
Bong Joon-ho’s 2009 마더 (Madeo aka Mother

Pending.

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APR 03, 2025, Metropol Theater
Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 살인의 추억 (Sarinui Chueok [Murder Memory/Memories] aka Memories of Murder

Pending.

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APR 02, 2025, Metropol Theater
Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 괴물 (Goemul [Monster] aka The Host

Pending.

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APR 02, 2025, Atelier Theater
Gints Zilbalodis’s 2024 Flow

Pending.

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APR 01, 2025, CineStar Theater
Jiaozi’s 2025 哪吒之魔童闹海 (Nézhā zhī Mótóng nào hǎi [Nezha: Sea-Churning Demon Boy] aka Ne Zha 2

Pending.

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MAR 31, 2025, Metropol Theater
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation

Pending.

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MAR 17, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Lynch’s 2001 Mullholland Drive

Full-length review.

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MAR 06, 2025, Lichtburg Theater
Brady Corbet’s 2024 The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s 2024 The Brutalist is a highly ambitious monumental original American epic, with great acting, fantastic cinematography and music, and excellent sound design. Despite, or perhaps because of, the movie’s dizzying overabundance of motifs from the immigrant experience to physical trauma effects to antisemitism to the erosiveness of capitalist power, the overall theme remains opaque. Mostly, that is—similar to the way the movie doesn’t arrive at a particular theme or conclusion, the protagonist never arrives anywhere either. Moreover, in the “Epilogue” part, it is claimed by the protagonist’s niece that he once told her, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Which, interestingly, has to be taken with more than a grain of salt—not only do we never hear the protagonist claim that, but the niece and her family also had made aliyah earlier, the epitome of “destination,” causing considerable misgivings by trying to shame the protagonist and his wife into following her example. Thus, from immigration to unfinished architectural projects to falling apart mentally and physically, it becomes likely that the tension between epic journeys and elusive destinations is, if not the theme, at least an overarching connecting motif. Which, perhaps, should have been treated more prominently to keep everything together more tightly, given the movie’s runtime of three and a half hours. Add to that—several baffling exceptions with regard to the aforementioned niece’s character development notwithstanding—that the overall cut in general and the script’s nutshell technique and foreshadowings in particular are all fine but equally too subtle to keep a movie of this length with an intermission legibly together. Hence, key scenes come as a surprise or even shock that actually are well-prepared and shouldn’t. Crawley’s cinematography, filmed—incredibly—fully on VistaVision, is nothing short of great art. At the theater, sadly, only the first half was shown in its original 70mm analog format, courtesy of the DTS audio track collapsing several times, so that the management decided to switch to the digital version after the intermission. While no one’s fault, that was a major letdown.

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MAR 04, 2025, Metropol Theater
Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 Fargo

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1997 Fargo, just everything is spot-on in brilliant ways—the screenplay, Deakins’s cinematography (he’s a giant), the sound design, Burwell’s score, the Coens’ terrific cut, and the stellar performances by essentially the entire cast. When I was still a kid and my father still a cop, he told me I shouldn’t believe a thing about how gangsters were depicted on TV, because “in reality, you know, crooks are stupid.” I think he would be delighted with Fargo, where the crooks keep reaching for new and unimagined levels of incompetence. But, miraculously, without ever being presented as caricatures, or in a cynical or sneering manner. As so often, the Coen brothers not only get away with taking huge risks and breaking tons of rules, but create an utterly original and delightful movie in the process. Another memory I have, from watching it for the first time, is that I had a hard time not laughing out loud in the theater when the opening credits claimed the movie were based on a true story, and that “out of respect for the dead” the story were “told exactly as it occurred.” Apparently, many people actually believed that—people who’d never heard of postmodernism; didn’t register the claim’s hilarious absurdity; and failed to notice the closing credit’s disclaimer that all persons and events “are fictitious.”

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MAR 03, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway

David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway, like many if not all of his movies, becomes more structurally coherent, psychologically haunting, and narratively impressive with every rewatch. Once again, reviews from the time are more than mixed, prominently failing to do their job by trying to “make sense” of it in unsuitable ways. Ebert even grasps at the surrealism straw by comparing it—unfavorably, of course—to Buñuel’s 1977 Cet obscur objet du désir. Which doesn’t work because Lost Highway’s surrealist elements, like its neo-noir and horror elements, are brilliant illusions, diversions even, whose expectations and tropes are constantly played with. What happens inside these illusions, however, soon becomes evident, intuitively at first, then emotionally, then analytically. Albeit on a level that precludes summarization, because the movie—like a dream or a fugue (state)—cannot be descriptively compressed into anything other than itself.

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MAR 05, 2025, Metropol Theater
Bong Joon-ho‘s 2025 Mickey 17

Let’s put it this way. If you like watching movies where off-the-shelf dialogue is painstakingly drowned out by a voice-over audiobook, and if you‘re enthusiastic about slapstick that is as cognitively undemanding as it is performatively crude, and if you happen to love intellectually frugal and impeccably predictable socio-religio-political satire that makes Disaster Movie look like the Citicen Kane of the comedy genre, and if you appreciate haphazardly introduced gimmicks every ten minutes to keep the action going instead of development or foreshadowing, and if you prefer to have your interesting premise served in a retirement home of exhausted tropes that remember the time when horse-drawn carriages filled the streets, then Bong Joon-ho‘s 2025 Mickey 17 is the perfect movie for you.

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FEB 24, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Lynch’s 1990 Wild at Heart

Back in my wilder days, David Lynch’s 1990 Wild at Heart was “our” movie. Her family was, let’s put it that way, monetarily more accomplished than mine, and her father hated me. While not a snakeskin jacket, I wore a brown leather jacket and western boots, and I smoked about as many cigarettes as Sailor does in the movie. We also, for various reasons, traveled around a lot, either in her car or on my motorbike together, loved rock ’n’ roll, and we even, after we’d watched the movie, began to refer to each other as Sailor and Lula in written notes. There were also moments of contemplation, like when she asked me, in tears, that there must be more to life than driving across the U.S. in a convertible, having sex, and smoking cigarettes, and she sure had a point there. But then, as Springsteen would say, times got hard, and I didn’t learn my lesson in time like Sailor, and all of this became history, and finally myth, and I miss her to this day. As for the movie, it’s fantastic and one of my all-time favorites. It was yet another movie critics had to warm up to first, and some of them took the Palme d’Or it was awarded with as a personal affront. Thus, go watch it as often as you can—in Sailor’s words, it has a lot of the same power Elvis had.

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FEB 19, 2025, Metropol Theater
Neil Jordan’s 1994 Interview with the Vampire

I consistently managed to miss Neil Jordan’s 1994 Interview with the Vampire until now, probably because I’m neither into Rice (I tried) nor Cruise (with rare exceptions like 2001 Vanilla Sky). Now, for about the first half of the movie, I was mildly entertained but not too much. Even though Cruise is better in that role than I expected by a lot, I just can’t take him or Pitt seriously as late 1700s characters. And in the frame story, I keep confusing Pitt with Travolta, partly courtesy of Pitt’s 1994 Pulp Fiction styling, partly because 1996 Broken Arrow still vividly resides in my memory. All this gets much better, however, with the late nineteenth century Paris sequence: the characters become more believable; Banderas is a blast; something like a plot develops where there have been only character journeys before; stakes are at stake all of a sudden; and the script eventually gives Pitt something to do other than interminably wallow in pain and regret. The ending—even though it lacks some urgently needed foreshadowing—is also fine and clever; in the theater, I had been asking myself repeatedly how the script would escape from the corner it painted itself into through the frame story in particular. (As I understand it, that ending isn’t from Rice’s script, but from a rewrite by Jordan.) What else is good? Dunst, clearly, Goldenthal’s score, Winston’s special and makeup effects, Powell’s costumes, and Ferretti’s production design. Rousselot’s cinematography is nice, but camera angles and movement, to my taste, are a bit too operatically stilted to become truly dramatic, and the score has too often to come to the rescue. Also, together with some puzzling editing decisions, it even becomes a bit murky at times as to what’s actually happening.

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FEB 17, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet

Not a lot hasn’t been written about David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet, which I just now rewatched at a theater after what feels like a lifetime. So I’ll keep it snappy. (Although I could write several paragraphs on Splet’s sound design alone.) First, I never knew why I prefer Heineken to other export/lager brands, but now I realize why—subconscious hooks go a long way. Then, I totally forgot that Dean Stockwell is in it, and how awesome he is at being inexplicably terrifying. Next, I still have no idea which decade the movie’s supposed to take place in, and I’m still fifty-fifty on whether anything between entering Don’s dirty ear and leaving Jeffrey’s clean ear happens the way we watch it. I’m still sure, however, that these uncertainties are important, maybe even the point—and something certainly happens, some kind of journey, between these two complementary thresholds. Finally, of course there are Freudian motifs, but I think how they’re employed is more interesting and more complicated than what your friendly neighborhood run-of-the-mill psychoanalytic review unsurprisingly suggests. Heck, Freud himself is more interesting and complicated than that! (Not to speak of Lacan—I’d probably even be a fan of Žižek’s if he didn’t make being an exasperating asshat such a central part of his shtick.) And, as a coda, it’s a miracle again this great and important movie got made when it was made, particularly after Lynch’s disastrous experience with the movie that will not be named.

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FEB 13, 2025, CineStar Theater
Julius Onah’s 2025 Captain America: Brave New World

Along the second MCU arc, I’ve dodged some bullets by making it a habit to feel the temperature first. But I didn’t do that for Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World—I just didn’t expect them to screw up Cap, of all heroes. But here we are. Too many close combat and shoot-out sequences have way too many—and at times confusing—cuts to be interesting. Too many superhero special effects don’t hit their marks, let’s put it that way, and 3D doesn’t help. (I love 3D, but I guess I’m part of an ever-dwindling minority here.) The camera work is at times exceptionally boring, at times so peculiarly placed that frames seem to foreshadow surprise follow-up beats which never happen. But what’s really terrible is the script—against it, the actors stand no chance. Even if it were a TV episode, what the movie indeed feels like, the script would have to be called mediocre at best and incompetent at worst. All is melodrama instead of drama. The dialogues, beyond being boring and the opposite of funny and clever, are often cheesy enough that a South Korean soap opera could learn a thing or two. And the plot only works because about a dozen extremely unlikely and disparate things happen along very bad pacing and a thoroughly botched intensity curve. Also, everything that’s not shooty and explody and smashy feels like mere padding that happens solely to justify the action scenes, reminiscent of afternoon TV shows where everything is just interesting enough to keep people from reaching for their remotes but bland enough to let the commercial breaks shine that these shows are actually about. Now, other people do seem to have felt the temperature first—premiere night, prime time, original version, 3D, huge multiplex theater with bells and whistles, and there were nine people in attendance, four of them Chinese. Plus yours truly.

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FEB 07, 2025, CineStar Theater
Drew Hancock’s 2025 Companion

I went to watch Drew Hancock’s 2025 Companion partly because it was—advertised? insinuated?—to be a horror movie, partly because I was curious as exactly that somehow didn’t seem likely. It’s great! (Up-front advice: the less you know about the movie before you watch it, the better.) While the cinematography, the music, the sound design, and the actors—particularly Thatcher and Quaid are killing it—really shine, what makes them shine is Hancock’s script. Its Chinese firecrackers-style twists and reveals are both clever and rewarding, and you can certainly interpret a lot into it. Which I do! One of it being that the movie brilliantly portraits the experience women had in 2014 and after (either you instantly get the reference or you don’t, sorry about that). It also touches upon a slew of other things in good ways, all of which make me think. It’s one of these movies I instantly want to rewatch, but it might be better to wait and let it breathe.

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FEB 06, 2025, CineStar Theater
Chen Sicheng’s 2025 唐探1900 aka China Detective(s) 1900

Happy to have watched this year’s second Lunar New Year blockbuster, Chen Sicheng’s 2025 唐探1900 aka China Detective(s) 1900*, with actual (Chinese and English) subtitles! And this time, it wouldn’t have worked without subtitles at all. The movie, a reboot of Chen’s outrageously successful China Detective franchise, is advertised as a “comedy mystery buddy” movie, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a lot more than that, and each beat of its 135 minutes running time is packed. Yes, it’s a comedy, with the most juvenile (non-sexual) humor you can imagine, and a buddy movie, and a Sherlock Homes-style mystery movie. But it’s also a gang warfare action movie, a slapstick movie, a period drama, a multi-generational family drama, a wuxia movie with plenty of bloodshed and severed limbs, a serial killer movie with gruesome Jack the Ripper-style murders, and a political (revolutionary) movie to boot. (The intrepid editor who tried to summarize all this on Wikipedia spectacularly dropped the ball.) Sure, the true reason I wanted to watch this movie was to see Chow Yun-fat, who—not the lead, but a major role—is indeed as gorgeous as ever, and especially the juvenile humor was headache-inducing at first. But then China Detective(s) 1900 became a highly enjoyable romp through almost all genres known to humankind. Some Western reviews had misgivings about the finale’s political message, but hoo boy, if you knew both Chinese and American history, then you would know how terrible everything was for the Chinese in 1900 on both sides of the Pacific, and that the ending qualifies rather as “mildly put” in its historical context.

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* My knowledge of Standard Guānhuà (“Standard Mandarin”) Chinese is nil, but if the secondary meanings of the first hanzi character 唐 are comparable to those of its Japanese kanji counterpart, a wordplay might be involved where “China Detective(s)” also means “Bogus Detective(s),” which would fit the bill perfectly.

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FEB 02, 2025, Metropol Theater
Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2009 A Serious Man

Full-length review.

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JAN 30, 2025, CineStar Theater
Tsui Hark’s 2025 射鵰英雄傳：俠之大者 (The Story of the Bird of Prey-Shooting Hero: The Greatest Hero)

Tsui Hark’s 2025 射鵰英雄傳：俠之大者 aka The Story of the Bird of Prey-Shooting Hero: The Greatest Hero (lit. The Most Noble/Chivalrous Man)* is based on only the final seven parts from the original newspaper serialization of the first book of Louis Cha Leung-yung aka Lin Yong’s famous Bird of Prey-Shooting Trilogy (射鵰三部曲), but it’s epic enough to be overwhelming at times. What’s more, the movie adds contextual depth through a lengthy introduction, numerous flashbacks, and rapid-fire flash-forwards during the end credits, and not everything is crystal clear even with some basic knowledge of the trilogy. What certainly didn’t help was that the local CineStar multiplex in Düsseldorf, Germany, messed up—except for the occasional diegetic Hanzi script and non-diegetic song lyrics, the promised subtitles were entirely missing. I didn’t complain, though. It was this year’s most prominent Lunar New Year movie, so the theater was sold out and the audience almost entirely Chinese, and they were certainly happy to watch the movie without distracting subtitles. However, when the movie began to switch to Mongolian time and again for an estimated 20–30% of its running time, they had to rely on their knowledge of the trilogy too, so we could call it even :D Anyway, the lead actors are so wonderful that I fell in love with their characters right away, especially with Huang Rong (Zhuang Da Fei) and later Hua Zheng (Zhang Wen Xin), both of whom are, courtesy of the script, substantially upgraded from their treatment in the novel. The wuxia spectacles are spectacular, as they should be. And even if the script’s dramatic structure is a bit wobbly at times, the movie has more than enough funny, sad, romantic, and dramatic moments to keep one spellbound and let its two and a half hours running time go by in a blink.

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* All garbled for the title’s English translation to a remarkable degree, from the ridiculous “condor” to “gallants” to twisting what contextually clearly represents a singular—the bird of prey-shooting refers to a biographical detail of the protagonist—into a plural. Well done. Good job.

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JAN 22, 2025, CineStar Theater
Clint Eastwood’s 2024 Juror #2

Clint Eastwood’s 2024 Juror #2 is an old-school, old-fashioned (legal) thriller/drama without any fuss or frills, where everything from camera to foley to score to acting is just there to present and develop the story. In other words, a typical Clint Eastwood movie the kind of which, once mainstream fare, the studios nowadays seem incapable of handling. (The movie almost didn’t make it into theaters, and it’s absolutely enraging. As Bilge Ebiri put it in his Vulture review: “To the modern studio executive, [Eastwood] must look like a glitch in the matrix—not an artist to be protected, but an error to be corrected.”) What I love most about the movie is its dramatic structure that steers clear from any black & white or good & bad schemes, be it the characters or the system. Just like in Greek Tragedy, everybody is trying their best, and the conflict arises from irreconcilable intentions; human character flaws and missteps; plausible biases from life experiences on the individual level; and a flawed legal system that isn’t perfect and can never be perfect—all of which the characters and the script neither cynically reject nor zealously endorse.

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JAN 21, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Cronenberg’s 1991 Naked Lunch

Peter Weller and Judy Davis are great, and so are Scheider and Holm, and I really like David Cronenberg’s 1991 The Naked Lunch as a movie. But as an adaption of William S. Burroughs’s eponymous novel, it feels slightly disappointing. Maybe it’s because I have a much more complex picture in my head of the novel that I read a long time ago, maybe because there’s a lot of biographical stuff Cronenberg threw into the script that you have to know—particularly the recurring Tell/Writer motif—if you want to make sense of several core beats. (And I usually don’t know or care about artists’ biographical details, except in cases where I engage the litcrit afterburner when a text appears to be saying something that the writer didn’t want to or even tried to suppress.) But yeah, apart from that, it’s a terrific movie. And while there is a vigorous thread of misogyny that runs through it, partly picked up from the novel, partly from Burroughs’s biography, it’s not altogether clear what the movie’s doing with it. But given its overall aloof tone—in sync with Weller’s uncannily aloof performance—which appears to neither criticize nor endorse anything in situ, it seems legit that it leaves any judgment about this too to the viewer.

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JAN 12, 2025, CineStar Theater
Błażej Jankowiak’s 2024 Diabeł

Błażej Jankowiak’s 2024 Diabeł is a thoroughly enjoyable not-fast-paced-in-good-ways suspense action thriller with a decent script that employs tons of tropes from several genres but keeps close to the characters and is always good for some relatable, idiosyncratic, or just plain funny moments. Toward the end, I more or less lost the plot among multilayered reveals, courtesy of the script putting too many of them into dialog instead of into action on the one hand, and my entirely untrained memory for Polish names on the other. Also, the one-on-one finale feels contrived. But then I do like the denouement, and appreciate the closing title cards about the conditions for veterans in the U.S. and Poland. I’ve never engaged in learning Polish, or any Slavic language, but the (English) subtitles seemed solid. Also, not to forget, a co-starring doggie! And she’s definitely a good girl.

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JAN 11, 2025, Metropol Theater
Magnus von Horn’s 2024 Pigen med nålen (The Girl with the Needle)

Full-length review.

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JAN 09, 2025, Bambi Theater
Scott Beck & Bryan Woods’s 2024 Heretic

The less you know about Scott Beck & Bryan Woods 2024 Heretic before you watch it, the better. I wasn’t interested at first and wanted to watch a different movie, but then there was a heavy snowfall in the area that night, and the theater that showed Heretic was easier to get to. From the trailer I’d seen I’d thought it would be less like a genuine horror movie than a psychological thriller in form of a three-hander chamber play, and that is true for a very good while. Until the midpoint. Then, uh boy. The movie slams both feet on the gas and shows its true face, among other things. Yet it never ceases to be a fiendishly plotted mind game around existential questions, which keeps it both interesting and enjoyable the whole way through. Cinematography and set design do a really good job, and shining on top of it are the script, the sound design, and the three lead actors, which are particularly terrific.

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JAN 07, 2025, Metropol Theater
David Fincher’s Se7en

David Fincher’s 1995 Se7en should count among the most stylish serial killer police procedure neo noir thrillers ever made, a masterpiece with tons of innovative stuff from its title cards down to its grizzly ending. Everything from Khondji’s cinematography (shot, besides Panavision cameras, with an Aaton 35-III so no wonder some dialogs had to be overdubbed; lots of clever underexposure trickery; ingenious claustrophobic establishing shots that aren’t), Francis-Bruce’s cut, Shore’s score, the soundtrack, the sound and set designs, to the action choreography showed at the time what was possible, and it had an enormous influence on later movies. But reviews left all that more or less underappreciated at the time of its release, not unlike they did for Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner or Proyas’s 1998 Dark City. Walker’s script is stellar, from its high concept premise up to dialog refinements after casting and touch-ups during filming, with career-defining performances by the principle actors. What’s somewhat disconcerting is that so many improbable things had to happen for this movie to see the light of day, against the odds and the sensibilities of studio executives as a species (who had already fucked up Fincher’s 1992 Alien ³), so that one is left to wonder how many movies that could have been great never happened or were managed into mediocrity.

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MAR 30, 2025, Rheinoper
Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1934 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Directed by Elisabeth Stöppler (production) and Vitali Alekseenok (music)

First, the good things, and they are all really good. It’s the original version, not the one Shostakovich himself bowdlerized later in both music and content to keep it staged, and it’s also performed in its original Russian. Kudos! Next, the music is phenomenal, and the libretto (Alexander Preys & Shostakovich, based on Leskov’s 1865 eponymous novel) is well written with all the foreshadowings at their most effective places. Then, listening to the terrific ensemble, the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker with its extra brass section, and the Chor der Deutschen Oper am Rhein is a fantastic, exciting, and thoroughly enjoyable experience. Now, the bad things. The staging overall is wildly unconvincing, choreographies cleverly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own notwithstanding. Haller’s stage setting, both bland by design and bland in effect is certainly supposed to be boring and fiercely uninspiring, which is moderately acceptable up to the intermission. After the intermission, however, it becomes singularly unsuited to what’s actually going on in the opera, amplified by the most dubious costume decisions perpetrated in years. During the subsequent public Q&A, the head dramaturge addressed some of these staging and costume decisions, arguing along the direction’s line of ideas about “abstraction” and “inner worlds,” which then also served as an explanation as to why the staging robustly defuses several famous (or infamous) graphic scenes in the opera’s first half. Regrettably, these explanations were weak sauce, and they did nothing to dispel the staging’s aura of artificiality capped with a dose of laziness. As a result, the characters who perform emotions and mental states in the first half in a highly relatable and engaging manner, are reduced after the intermission to abstract signifiers that merely point to emotions and mental states, and the opera comes across less than a human drama and more like a lesson in layperson psychology.

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MAR 29, 2025, Tonhalle
Jadgen und Formen by Wolfgang Rihm
notabu Ensemble Neue Musik, Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen (director/conductor)

Pending.

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MAR 10, 2025, Tonhalle
Beethoven Violin Concerto D major Op.61 / Shostakovich Symphony No.11 Op.103 “1905”
Alina Ibragimova (Violin), Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Michael Sanderling (Conductor)

Not sure what was going on that night, but everything was just stellar. The orchestra was at the top of its game, precise and expressive, and—particularly for Shostakovich’s 11th—with an enormous dynamic range between stunning ppp’s and brutal fff’s. I’m sure Sanderling, the conductor, had a lot to do with it too—never saw him conduct before, but from now on I’ll be on the lookout. Then, Ibragimova’s performance was an absolute delight. I’ve never been the greatest fan of Beethoven’s, with some carefully vetted exceptions—late string quartets, piano sonatas, folksongs—but I always loved the violin concerto to death. Her play was precise, energetic, and expressive in the just-right way for this incredible piece of music lodged between Wiener Klassik and Romanticism, and the beautiful tone she endowed it with was a genuinely new experience. Also, she played the timpani-accompanied cadenza Beethoven wrote for his later Op.61a piano version, rearranged back for the violin part, which I’d never heard performed before. A nice bonus on top of a terrific evening!

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FEB 12, 2025, Tonhalle
»Na hör’n Sie mal« — Neue Musik: In memoriam Wolfgang Rihm / Luciano Berio 100
notabu Ensemble Neue Musik, Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen (director/conductor)

The first notabu concert in 2025, with compositions by Áskell Másson, Luciano Berio, Elliot Cole, Diethelm Zuckmantel (in attendance), Wolfgang Rihm, and Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen. Once more, it involved quite a bit of solo percussion, notably Másson’s »Prím für kleine Trommel« (performed with dizzying mastery by Vera Seedorf) and Cole’s “Flowerpot Music No.1” for two players, but also Zuckmantel’s »Signale am gläsernen Horizont« for trumpet, four bottle sets, and double bass, all of which were a blast. Berio’s violin duos and Rihm’s »Klavierstück Nr.4« were riveting, as they should be, and the finale, Schlingensiepen’s »›…und dann?‹ – Nachhall in memoriam Wolfgang Rihm« for trumpet, accordion, percussion, harp, piano, and double bass was outright stunning in its poignancy and texture. Also, following the trend of the last two years, the Tonhalle’s Kammermusiksaal with its seating capacity of three hundred seats was sold out, which is fantastic and quite a feat for Neue Musik events.

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JAN 06, 2025, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, Australia 2019

Suzie Miller’s 2019 one-woman play Prima Facie is terrific, even with some minor script weaknesses and an ending that comes across a bit too didactic, where in-play performance gives way to addressing the audience—instead of transforming its matter too into action—as if the play doesn’t trust its own strength. Which it can and should. It is strong throughout both on the surface and under the hood, which includes touching on the nature of processes and procedures in interesting ways that make me want to read Luhmann again. For a first in decades, as friends had invited me to join, I saw a performance not in its original language; but the German translation seemed solidly plausible and Tessa Ensler’s performance was excellent.

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MAR 20, 2025, K20 | Kunstsammlung NRW

As a child, I grew up with the works of Marc Chagall through art books, prints, and exhibitions, first and foremost through my grandmother, an artist, art professor, and graphic designer. Thus, one of the first things I did on my very first trip to Israel was to visit the Hadassah Medical Center’s synagogue in Jerusalem, to watch his series of twelve stained-glass windows around which the Center’s synagogue was literally built—each window 8 by 11 feet in size with motifs relating to the twelve sons of Jacob. It was an experience that, in every respect, was even more breathtaking than I had anticipated it to be. The K20 exhibition, which focuses—but not exclusively so—on Chagall’s earlier work from 1910 to 1923 with over 120 exhibits, is absolutely enormous. It’s an exhibition one should visit at least once a month as long as it lasts.

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MAR 18, 2025, K21 | Kunstsammlung NRW
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

Across three rooms, the exhibition displays over eighty paintings, drawings, and art diaries by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, representing her work from the early 1980s to post-10/7. This is her first official exhibition in Germany, not counting activist art events. One of the things that’s fascinating are her techniques, notably how she creates her oil paintings over many years through “unconscious processes.” (You’ll find more about her work and techniques here.) With a handful of exceptions, I couldn’t quite relate to her work the first time around, which is peculiar. I’ll have to give it another shot in a few weeks.

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JAN 23, 2025, Kai 10 | Arthena Foundation
Talk: “A Painted Picture Is First and Foremost a Painted Picture”

Great conversation, moderated by Ludwig Seyfarth, with Karin Kneffel and René Wirths, some of whose works are part of the group exhibition Frozen Mirrors (running until April 26, 2025, at Kai 10 | Arthena Foundation). It revolved around the challenge of finding motifs for painting that, while art history marches on, are neither illustrative nor a pastime affectation; how “observation layers” as part of the artistic process puts painting closer to sculpture than to photography; and the peculiar “come in to look out” dynamic where a painting can be either a window or a mirror or both (or neither). The audience was unexpectedly packed, and the conversation made the visit absolutely worthwhile.

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