Movies I've recently seen

This one is somewhere between a comedy and a satire of modern business, making fun of team building exercises, the corporate rat race, distraught people who don't have reception on their phones and much else, all set within the wider mystery of a murdered peacock and a missing goose in a remote Scottish castle.

In this sequel we're back to dealing with one casino, but not robbing it, but making sure it fails quickly after opening. But as in Twelve, it's too over the top - too much is done, and too little of it is credible to make it truly enjoyable.

This one feels a bit rushed, as multiple break-ins need to be carried out and explained instead of everything building up to one big heist. It's amazing how the group gets their information, and is able to act on it -including getting all necessary equipment, for example, for lifting an entire house- in a very short time frame. You get the feeling that it isn't actually a documentary about entering and stealing.

A white cop investigates a 20 year old murder of an aboriginal girl in a mining community living on scraps of its former boom times. The unsolved murder left the community in limbo, as did the long ago mining rush. The black and white colors nicely do the subject and the community justice. I liked it, but an aboriginal subject alone is not nearly enough to win anything at the Berlinale these days.

Nice take on the pressures heaped upon convicts hoping to secure a lighter sentence by becoming undercover police informers. Being a trans woman who otherwise would have to serve time in a mens' prison doesn't make it easier. And having your former lover -who still has conflicted feelings about you- as your police intermediary makes it harder still. So it's perfect Berlinale material, where Thea Ehre's performance won a well-deserved Silver Bear for acting. And good to see that the pressured and abused informer triumphs at the end.

A yacht full of super rich people sinks, and the surviors -stranded on an island- depend on the survival skills of their former toilet cleaner. It's easy to satirize the super rich, and the reversal of fortunes after the disaster, and this film does so with gusto. It's not for the squeamish, it's not above cheap jokes, it's not above farce, but somehow it brings the various strands together in a capitalism critique that bites.

The original 1931 movie version of Erich Kästners's famous children's book features a thoroughly evil-looking thief, and a bunch of well-behaved kids whose worst trait is making fun of the local policeman. Various Berlin landmarks serve as backdrops as they looked back then - a city now lost in time.

The fictionalized history of the beginnings of the WikiPedia:All-American_Girls_Professional_Baseball_League, the first women's baseball league, which was founded in 1943 when many male baseball players were at war. It touches on numerous themes like how women fit into society, how they view themselves, how society views them, and what they want from life - all from the viewpoint of 1943.