Like many of Christopher Nolan’s films, The Odyssey has been one of the most anticipated films of the year, not only because of its ensemble cast, which includes Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron, but also because of the director’s technical ambition. Shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, The Odyssey is worth the buzz, considering that IMAX built special equipment, including a so-called blimp for Nolan, to silence the notoriously loud IMAX cameras so that dialogue could be recorded on set, eliminating the need for ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement). The whole thing is a soundproof box so big that the crew had to use mirrors to keep the eyelines consistent during filming, as they couldn’t see each other when standing close. Through this mirror trick, they could maintain eye contact through each other’s reflections. With its mechanism, the tricks required to film with it, and its impact on contemporary filmmaking, its significance already feels monumental. I can already see that giant rig standing in the Academy Museum in Los Angeles as part of its permanent exhibition.

Homer’s Odyssey is from a time of apparent magic, a homecoming journey full of obstacles and many side stories, a ballad of roughly 12,000 verses that follows the events of the Iliad, another epic attributed to Homer. Its lost and troubled hero, Odysseus (Matt Damon), longing for his home and beloved wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is nothing less than perfect for a Nolan film.

There are many moments throughout this almost three-hour film where it feels as though Nolan is referring to his own films, including Memento (2000), or perhaps he has been referring to Homer’s Odyssey throughout his filmmaking career. Told through flashbacks, The Odyssey by Nolan centers around the Trojan War, the guilt Odysseus carries, the sacrifices made for victory, and the silent power and perseverance of its female figures. All of these elements are layered gently in his screenplay and shot in an astonishing fashion by Hoyte van Hoytema. The film’s impact lingers for at least a few days, and you can still mentally dive deep and explore its rich texture, not only how beautiful it looks, but also its film score by Ludwig Göransson and incredibly powerful figures like the goddess Athene, played silently yet with such intensity by Zendaya, or Odysseus’ loyal friend Eumaeus, brought to life in a heartfelt performance by John Leguizamo.

There is little point in recounting the plot of a nearly three-thousand-year-old Homeric epic, but what makes Nolan’s adaptation remarkable is how relevant it remains in today’s landscape of war and its enduring impact across generations. Contrary to what might be apparent at first glance, Nolan’s The Odyssey also has a feminist side to it. The women are not merely companions to Odysseus’ journey, but key figures within it: Athene, Calypso and, of course, Penelope, whose strength and resilience become just as important as the hero’s own voyage.

It couldn’t get much more lesbian than this: “Ninja Motherf*cking Destruction“ tells a queer love story filmed over the course of eight (!) years.

Leonie and Marlene share an inseparable friendship – until Leonie falls in love with Naomi, diving headfirst into her first relationship. But Naomi comes with her own struggles: depressive episodes that increasingly take a toll on their relationship, and especially on Leonie as her primary source of support. Caught up in trying to care for Naomi, Leonie gradually neglects her other relationships, hurts her former best friend Marlene and ultimately loses herself in the process.

When the relationship finally comes to an end, Leonie realizes just how isolated she has become. She leaves Berlin to get her life back on track and starts a gardening apprenticeship. Amidst this new beginning, she comes to realize that something is still missing: her best friend.

The film convinces through its raw authenticity: minimal make-up, handheld camerawork and the complexity of adolescent relationships captured so well that it hurts. 

Raising relevant questions of queer identity, director Lotta Schwerk was longing for a display of queer women without drifting into lesbian sexualization, nor ruthlessly romanticizing mentally ill women. With a predominantly FLINTA team and cast, she gives voice to young women falling in love and navigating all the complexities that come with it – not through unnecessary sexualization, but with remarkable honesty and vulnerability.

Perhaps most impressively, Schwerk was the same age as her protagonists while writing each year’s script, carefully taking the story one year at a time. Made without film school or public funding, “Ninja Motherf*cking Destruction“ has become a wild, unfiltered portrait of the bittersweet experience of growing up.

 

“Ninja Motherf*cking Destruction“ will be released in German cinemas on 16 July.

Palme d’Or laureate Cristian Mungiu’s return to Cannes with Fjord (2026), starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, has made his mark in film history. By taking home the festival’s highest honor once again, the Romanian auteur becomes one of ten directors to have won the prestigious Palme d’Or a second time.

In Fjord, Mihai, a Romanian software engineer played by Stan, moves with his Norwegian wife Lisbet, portrayed by Reinsve, and their children to the remote Norwegian village where Lisbet grew up. Drawn by both Mihai’s new IT job and the area’s strong Christian community, the deeply conservative family initially receives a warm welcome from their neighbors and the local school staff. The situation changes dramatically after teachers notice bruises and marks on their eldest daughter (Ella (Vanessa Ceban). Following questioning by Norwegian child protection and police, the children are placed into provisional care while the parents face accusations due to their strict disciplinary methods. As the investigation unfolds, tensions grow between the family and the surrounding institutions, exposing cultural differences, language barriers, and the bias against them as Romanian migrants.

The ambiguity is clearly part of the film’s intention, but it does not always fully carry through, with key narrative threads left hanging or only partially developed, such as the children’s boat trip the day before the bruises are discovered.

The emotional fallout feels equally thin. After being separated from their parents, the teenagers appear completely unshaken, showing almost no confusion or psychological distress. Hiding Renate Reinsve behind those black-framed glasses comes at a similar cost. She’s an actor who usually communicates a great deal through micro-expressions, and in Fjord this is largely muted. Mungiu’s Fjord ultimately offers merely the outline of something more layered. It remains conceptually ambitious, but the tension between the conservative family dynamic and the surrounding institutional judgment never quite develops.

Christopher McCandless became a worldwide legend for his insatiable hunger for the wild, nature, and life itself.

The academically high achiever graduated from university in 1990, looking toward a bright career, as he also came from a wealthy family. But he had no interest in any of that. Cutting up his cards and donating his college savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, Chris began a journey that would become a lifelong quest. Not least as an escape from an abusive household, he traveled from South Dakota to California, first by car (without insurance and with expired license plates), then by hitchhiking, canoeing down the Colorado River, and walking with minimal equipment before reaching his final destination: Alaska.

During his travels, he got arrested, beaten up, and challenged by nature’s obstacles. More importantly, however, he met people along the way—remarkable personalities who each left him with different lessons.

After a two-year journey, Christopher was found in 1992 in his “Magic Bus,” an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness where he had been seeking shelter. One of the last images found on his camera, before he presumably died of starvation, shows him holding a note that reads: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL.”

When Sean Penn first read Jon Krakauer’s biography Into the Wild, published in 1996, he was immediately captivated by this extraordinary story. What followed was a ten-year process of securing the film rights, which Chris’s family initially denied him. Thanks to Penn’s unwavering dedication, they finally agreed, and production began. Featuring a high-calibre cast, including Marcia Gay Harden and Kristen Stewart, Emile Hirsch is the undisputed star of the film. He embodies Chris’s courage, dedication, and passion brilliantly. Accompanied by a moving soundtrack by Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder, the film becomes a stunning portrait of a man who died in pursuit of adventure—leaving behind all material possessions to discover the true meaning of life and to understand both nature and his place within it.

First released in 2007, Into the Wild is now returning to the big screen from 7 July 2026 in German cinemas. 

Known to any Finnish person, but also far beyond: Tove Jansson, author and creator of the iconic Moomin children’s books. What remains less known is her adult literature, classics such as “The Summer Book“. Charlie McDowell, American director and writer known for psychological thrillers and sci-fi dramas such as “The One I Love and The Discovery“, first stumbled across Jansson’s “The Summer Book“ in his twenties. Her poetic precision when writing about loneliness, nature, and transience never really left him, which is why he decided to direct the film adaptation of the classic in 2023.

Known as the author’s most personal work, McDowell managed to translate those sentiments into a slow, touching movie centering on nature, silence, and emotional perception.

The story includes three main characters: the grandmother, beautifully portrayed by multiple Oscar nominee Glenn Close; her grandchild Sophia, with Emily Matthews making her screen debut; and her father, played by Anders Danielsen Lie. The entire cast includes only seven people in total, creating an intimate portrait that leaves plenty of room to display and understand their personal relationships.

After a dramatic loss, the three seek peace and quiet on a dreamy island amidst the Finnish archipelago. Surrounded by nothing but nature, each of them is on a personal journey, portraying different chapters of life: nine-year-old Sophia is just growing into herself, curiously asking questions about life, death, and the world around her with childlike ease.

She is heavily contrasted by her grandmother, who is fast nearing the end of her life, resting mostly in acceptance and an unshakeable calmness.

In between is the father, who, stuck in his grief, isolates himself through work. He seems unable to break out of his tunnel vision.

Things change as a storm arises. The audience finally witnesses a confrontation between the characters, leading to emotional approximation and deepening their bonds.

The island starts to feel like a character itself due to the long close-up shots, reminding viewers of what being human means at its core. The accompanying film music is by the Finnish vocal trio The Harmony Sisters, who rose to prominence in the 1930s and perfectly underline the timeless feel of this movie.

For anyone with a TikTok attention span, this might be a challenging watch, but once you give in to the quiet intensity of the film, it will soon have you wondering about life, its ever-lurking end, and all the beauty in between.

“The Summer Book“ (English spoken, German subtitles) will screen in German cinemas from 25 June 2026.

For this week’s film tip, we would like to recommend a new exhibition on movies rather than one specific film, simply because it is quite remarkable in its execution.

„Inventing Queer Cinema“ is an exhibition and film programme running at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin until 13 September 2026.

As the name suggests, the exhibition explores queer cinema in all its aspects – from its very beginnings and key figures to its role in today’s cinematic landscape. Importantly, the Deutsche Kinemathek does not claim completeness in presenting queer cinema and its invention. Instead, it emphasises that this history should be understood as an ongoing process that continues to evolve today. The exhibition takes place in the vast halls of a former electrical substation and includes a textile archive featuring original costume pieces such as Marlene Dietrich’s iconic top hat and cigarette case. Special tribute is paid to Manfred Salzgeber, a film distributor who spent a lifetime advocating for queer rights and bringing queer stories to cinema screens across Germany and beyond.

A timeline documents and highlights key moments in the evolution of queer cinema history: from the world’s first explicit homosexual film, „Anders als die Andern“ by Richard Oswald in 1919, to the first lesbian kiss in a Hollywood film in „Morocco“ (1930), and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Films such as Westler and Zimmer 303 demonstrate cinematically how deeply the epidemic affected the gay community.

Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual acts, was only abolished in 1994 (!), followed 22 years later by the first Academy Award for a queer film, „Moonlight“.

The timeline concludes with studies indicating a decline in LGBTQ representation in US films due to a political backlash against diversity in 2025/26.

Three huge screens positioned side by side show excerpts from a wide range of films connected to queer history, creating an all-encompassing experience. Combined with hanging posters, information boards, quotations and portraits suspended from the ceiling, the exhibition’s curation conveys queer cinema’s quiet omnipresence. Once inside, you do not know where to look or what to read first, and slowly realise just how much there is – and has always been – just beyond the boundaries of mainstream attention.

„Inventing Queer Cinema“ successfully highlights the hopes, struggles and achievements of actors, film distributors and directors such as Chussein Erkenow, who personally smuggled his film „100 Tage, Genosse Soldat“ by train from Moscow to Germany after it had been strictly banned in Russia.

The exhibition impressively showcases the resilience of queer figures, while also revealing the beauty that can emerge from pain and hardship, leading to such special movies.

The Deutsche Kinemathek also has a studio cinema at its disposal, screening a variety of queer films daily as part of the exhibition.

The weekly corresponding programme can be found here.

 

Tokyo, 1936: Sada Abe, a former prostitute, suffocates her lover during sex and, in order to finally possess him and his sexuality entirely, cuts off his genitals. At her arrest a couple of days later, his penis was still found in her kimono. It was a crime that shook the whole country.

Shocking to most, the case became the inspiration for the defining work of Nagisa Oshima. The director is known as one of the most infamous figures of the Japanese New Wave. He wrote and directed „Im Reich der Sinne“ (In the Realm of the Senses), a film that tells the brutally fascinating story of this couple.

Sada Abe begins a new job as a housemaid for Kichizō Ishida, with whom she quickly starts an affair. At first, she still shares him with his wife, but Sada soon claims sole ownership over Kichizō and his body. Plot-wise, this is mostly it: over the span of 105 minutes, the viewer is confronted with countless (unsimulated!) sex scenes, which become almost metaphorical through their excessive repetition.

What changes is the dynamic. Sada’s complete dedication to her employer initially feels almost upsetting from a feminist perspective, as her portrayal quickly shifts into that of an insatiably aroused nymphomaniac. Kichizō seems amused by it at first. But he soon becomes completely captivated by her as she demands his promise to sleep exclusively with her, and the two begin testing sexual boundaries by choking each other during the act. It is here that the dynamic shifts entirely, and he becomes nothing more than a willing surrender to her desires.

Isolated and unconcerned with the rest of the world, the two spiral deeper and deeper into a space of obsession, ownership, freedom and pain in such a radical manner that it eventually becomes almost claustrophobic to watch.

The traditional Japanese clothing of the period, paired with Minoru Miki’s beautifully composed score, creates a captivating cultural contrast to the horrors unfolding on screen.

„Im Reich der Sinne“ had to be cut and edited further in France, as no Japanese film laboratory dared to work with material this explicit. At its first screening at the Berlinale in 1976, the film was immediately confiscated. After careful investigation, it was ultimately not deemed pornography and was screened again in 1977.

Often misunderstood, a restored version of the film is now being shown in German cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary.

Whether it is a good film or not, what remains revolutionary, then and now, is Oshima’s insistence on portraying desire as a radical act in itself. With a movie that probably contains more sex scenes than almost any other, he paradoxically manages to depict sex in a non-sexual way, instead using it to explore the concepts of desire and the point at which love meets morbid obsession.

„Im Reich der Sinne“ will be screened in German cinemas from 11 June.