Original and inventive on every level, this luridly enticing narrative is not your average reality-based biopic. Director Gordian Maugg’s story about the legendary filmmaker attempts to make sense on a level other than that of the real world. Don’t believe any of the “facts” depicted, just look at the emotional truth behind the tales of the filmmaker with the outsize personality and the arch monocle. Fritz Lang attempts to show “the toast of Berlin” in a moment of self-doubt, moved from his big budget epic extravaganzas of the 1920s, like the Dr. Mabuse films, the Niebelungen films and Metropolis, to films that examined “a single person.” That pivotal film was M, the birth of film noir, an unprecedented psychological dissection of a depraved child murderer. Was M an oblique critique of Weimar Germany or a daring experiment that began cinema’s fascination with the cruelty and darkness lurking in the human psyche? Lang, forever tagged in Germany as a Jew because his mother was born a Jew, divorced his Nazi-convert wife and screenwriter Thea von Harbou and fled to the United States in 1934. His filmic output thereafter was grade-A noir. The moment when he went from epic mythology to the empty darkness of perversion, is a moment to be fully considered. —Miguel Pendas
Contains graphic imagery
Co-sponsored by Sandee Blechman and Steven Goldberg