movies: Scorched Earth
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| title | country | year | length | director | url | blurb | virtual_screening | programmer_blurb | trailer_url | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scorched Earth | Germany | 2024 | 101 | Thomas Arslan | https://www.siff.net/festival/scorched-earth | In this tense, tight-lipped arthouse thriller that recalls the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Michael Mann, a criminal returns to Berlin for a big-time art heist, only for Murphy’s Law to take effect, causing everything to frantically spiral out of control. | 0 | On the gritty periphery of Berlin, nervous professionals come together for a standard brief: pinch a valuable painting from a museum warehouse. But in this slow-burning, tense, and tight-lipped arthouse thriller from Berlin-school director Thomas Arslan (In the Shadows), getting the goods is the easy part. Deliberate with its tempo and its film cred, with a lot of Jean-Pierre Melville and a little Michael Mann, this one is boiled hard and, while subtle and psychological, entertaining as hell. Once the heist is pulled off, the real suspense begins: the shadowy crook who commissioned the job turns on the pros, and the museum, trying to get its property back, isn’t playing fair either. The art subplot, focusing on a small canvas by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, is played just right, and Alexander Fehling (Inglorious Basterds) chews a delicious villain’s role to smithereens. With thieves’ honor and a lone black knight on the margins of the city, Scorched Earth is classic film noir, made in Germany today.—Martin Schwartz | German |