We asked Toronto critic Adam Nayman (Sight & Sound, Ringer, Cinema Scope) to give our GOETHE FILMS audiences an introduction to the range of German actor Ronald Zehrfeld (“Phoenix”). While unfortunately last week, we couldn’t show you the North American premiere of Philipp Leinemann’s “Blame Game” with Zehrfeld in the lead, which was meant to close our GOETHE FILMS spy thriller series, Nayman’s detailed appreciation of Ronald Zehrfeld’s “thrillingly ambiguous acting" easily stands alone:In last year’s Munich Film Festival hit “Das Ende der Wahrheit” (“Blame Game”), Ronald Zehrfeld stars as an intelligence expert whose lover is killed in a terrorist attack intended as retaliation for the drone strike he’d set up —an act of retribution blurring the line between the personal and the political. Philipp Leinemann’s slickly made thriller was conceived by its director as a 21st century update of the Tom Clancy adaptations and knock-offs that proliferated in American cinemas in the late 1980s and 1990s: “The Hunt For Red October”; “Patriot Games”; “The Hunt For Red October”. In those US-produced films, strapping A-list movie stars were employed to ensure an unambiguous sense of heroism: no matter how twisty the plots got —with traitors and turncoats depicted as having infiltrated the US government— we could always tell who the good guy was. But by casting Zehrfeld in his Clancy homage, Leinemann complicates our responses: moral ambiguity is where this superb actor finds his sweet spot. Continue reading "Nayman on Zehrfeld: Moral ambiguity is this..." »
"In 2005, the German Federal Criminal Police, the BKA, was about to arrest an AI Qaida commander named Louai Sakra in Germany when he disappeared overnight without a trace. Sakra was known as a close ally of AI Qaeda in Iraq. To date, the heads of the BKA believe that the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, smuggled the high-ranking terrorist out of the country. 
