A strange thing happens to me at the end of each year. Tasked with compiling a list of cultural favorites, I find myself drawing a blank. It’s as if I haven’t spent the past 365 days watching films, binging various TV shows, listening to albums or attending theater productions to prepare for this very moment.
On the heel of a deadline, I usually fire off some texts to friends — some desperate, all pleading. Is there anything you’ve watched this year that deserves more attention, I ask. What’s the best song you’ve heard? The best movie you watched? The best series?
Other than outsourcing a bit of my job, the questions end up being a good exercise in perspective. They reorient my attitude toward the compilation process. I begin to recognize the importance of reflecting, even casually, on a year’s worth of culture. I get excited about what’s to come,...
On the heel of a deadline, I usually fire off some texts to friends — some desperate, all pleading. Is there anything you’ve watched this year that deserves more attention, I ask. What’s the best song you’ve heard? The best movie you watched? The best series?
Other than outsourcing a bit of my job, the questions end up being a good exercise in perspective. They reorient my attitude toward the compilation process. I begin to recognize the importance of reflecting, even casually, on a year’s worth of culture. I get excited about what’s to come,...
- 12/19/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
You can’t hold someone like Christian Petzold accountable for self-indulgence. Not when he might just be the one he’s so exasperatedly critical of through his barely cryptic, nearly autobiographical critique of a self-absorbed, miserable writer. The overlooked yet strikingly mesmerizing waves of the Baltic Sea are as important to this insufferable individual as the people he’s begrudgingly gracing with his attention in Afire. Is Leon’s character Petzold’s nonchalant, almost suicidally despondent actualization of an overwhelming sense of self-loathing? I’m afraid that’s a state of contemplation I won’t be allowed to accompany you in. But let’s take a stroll through the coarse, sandy terrain of Leon’s mind and see how much of him we can figure out.
Spoilers Ahead
Plot Synopsis: What Happens In The Film?
Had it been for leisure, Leon and Felix would’ve perhaps opted for a retreat...
Spoilers Ahead
Plot Synopsis: What Happens In The Film?
Had it been for leisure, Leon and Felix would’ve perhaps opted for a retreat...
- 11/18/2023
- by Lopamudra Mukherjee
- Film Fugitives
If there’s one thing Christian Petzold does well it’s introspective examinations of characters at the heart of overwhelming circumstances. Which isn’t the most succinct thing to put on your CV but you have to admit he does it well. After all he has a whole trilogy of films he calls ‘Love in Times of Oppressive Systems’ so clearly it’s working for him.
His latest piece, Afire, focuses on a narcissistic author agonising over his latest novel while sharing a holiday home in the Baltic Sea, completely uninterested in the raging wildfires consuming the nearby woodland. It’s a fitting subject for an artist like Petzold, a creative so obsessed with their own endeavours that they become openly hostile to anything outside themselves.
That sums up our protagonist Leon (Thomas Schubert) in a nutshell. A schlubby, sullen writer chafing against his idyllic surroundings. He refuses to go...
His latest piece, Afire, focuses on a narcissistic author agonising over his latest novel while sharing a holiday home in the Baltic Sea, completely uninterested in the raging wildfires consuming the nearby woodland. It’s a fitting subject for an artist like Petzold, a creative so obsessed with their own endeavours that they become openly hostile to anything outside themselves.
That sums up our protagonist Leon (Thomas Schubert) in a nutshell. A schlubby, sullen writer chafing against his idyllic surroundings. He refuses to go...
- 8/25/2023
- by Liam Macleod
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
(Welcome to Under the Radar, a column where we spotlight specific movies, shows, trends, performances, or scenes that caught our eye and deserved more attention ... but otherwise flew under the radar. In this edition: the pain of artistry takes centerstage in "Afire," "Passages" breaks down all boundaries, and "They Cloned Tyrone" puts a sci-fi twist on the American dream.)
You've heard of Barbenheimer, the phenomenon currently sweeping the globe (and getting Warner Bros.' social media team in trouble), but may I introduce you to Pass-afire? The one-two punch of director Ira Sach's "Passages" and Christian Petzold's "Afire" might not have the big-budget cachet of the two blockbuster behemoths currently duking it out in theaters, but this pair of shockingly complimentary character studies takes a much quieter, moodier, and thrillingly vibrant approach to dissecting much more relatable, everyday issues. Centered on two maddening artists who struggle mightily to articulate...
You've heard of Barbenheimer, the phenomenon currently sweeping the globe (and getting Warner Bros.' social media team in trouble), but may I introduce you to Pass-afire? The one-two punch of director Ira Sach's "Passages" and Christian Petzold's "Afire" might not have the big-budget cachet of the two blockbuster behemoths currently duking it out in theaters, but this pair of shockingly complimentary character studies takes a much quieter, moodier, and thrillingly vibrant approach to dissecting much more relatable, everyday issues. Centered on two maddening artists who struggle mightily to articulate...
- 8/1/2023
- by Jeremy Mathai
- Slash Film
“Do you see anything that’s happening around you?” urges Paula Beer’s Nadja to Thomas Schubert’s frustrated writer Leon in writer-director Christian Petzold’s Afire. As he strives and struggles to complete his second novel, which bears the ludicrous name Club Sandwich, Leon puts on his blinders to both the interpersonal dynamics of the youthful coterie assembled at a Baltic Sea cabin as well as to the forest fires raging inland. If there’s any temptation to conflate Leon’s writer’s block with Petzold’s own position outside the film, Nadja’s exhortation ought to clear up some of the confusion.
Petzold has long stood at the vanguard of the loose filmmaking collective known as the Berlin School. Along with his academically minded peers, he seeks to look at how Germany’s turbulent history ripples through contemporary German life. Rather than craft cinematic fantasies, flattening those tensions...
Petzold has long stood at the vanguard of the loose filmmaking collective known as the Berlin School. Along with his academically minded peers, he seeks to look at how Germany’s turbulent history ripples through contemporary German life. Rather than craft cinematic fantasies, flattening those tensions...
- 7/15/2023
- by Marshall Shaffer
- Slant Magazine
Christian Petzold, the director of the well-timed summer movie Afire with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I’m really sure that we don’t have summer movies. The Americans have summer movies, the French have summer movies.”
Christian Petzold’s slow-burning Afire, shot by Hans Fromm, stars Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt.
Nadja (Paula Beer) with Devid (Enno Trebs), Felix (Langston Uibel), and Leon (Thomas Schubert) in Afire
A scene in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr); Sophie Calle’s Voir La Mer and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs; Astrid Lindgren; a Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre touch; Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob and Margarethe von Trotta’s Jahrestage series; Johan Wolfgang von Goethe; a Nanni Moretti quote; meeting Paul Dano’s Wildlife cinematographer Diego García (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendor) in Tel Aviv; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak,...
Christian Petzold’s slow-burning Afire, shot by Hans Fromm, stars Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt.
Nadja (Paula Beer) with Devid (Enno Trebs), Felix (Langston Uibel), and Leon (Thomas Schubert) in Afire
A scene in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr); Sophie Calle’s Voir La Mer and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs; Astrid Lindgren; a Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre touch; Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob and Margarethe von Trotta’s Jahrestage series; Johan Wolfgang von Goethe; a Nanni Moretti quote; meeting Paul Dano’s Wildlife cinematographer Diego García (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendor) in Tel Aviv; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak,...
- 7/2/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Sideshow and Janus Films releases the film in select theaters on Friday, July 14, with further expansion to follow.
“Something is wrong,” says tortured author Leon (Thomas Schubert) in an uncommon bout of observation. Say what you will about this blinkered sourpuss, but his assessment, in the opening moments to Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” is right on target. Seconds later, a car battery will explode, stranding the young novelist and his travel mate Felix (Langston Uibel) in a coastal forest beset by fires, echoing in animal howls, and ever-so far from the family home where the pair intend to spend a quiet artistic retreat. So credit to Leon for this early feat of recognition — he’ll never be so perceptive again.
Gently dunking on a writer of near-apocalyptic pomposity over the course of a languid seaside vacation, Petzold...
“Something is wrong,” says tortured author Leon (Thomas Schubert) in an uncommon bout of observation. Say what you will about this blinkered sourpuss, but his assessment, in the opening moments to Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” is right on target. Seconds later, a car battery will explode, stranding the young novelist and his travel mate Felix (Langston Uibel) in a coastal forest beset by fires, echoing in animal howls, and ever-so far from the family home where the pair intend to spend a quiet artistic retreat. So credit to Leon for this early feat of recognition — he’ll never be so perceptive again.
Gently dunking on a writer of near-apocalyptic pomposity over the course of a languid seaside vacation, Petzold...
- 2/22/2023
- by Ben Croll
- Indiewire
If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny, many-layered new film “Afire,” is the latest in a long line of onscreen scribes to learn that lesson. But over the course of a hot, rainless summer by the Baltic coastline, the elusiveness of his imagined masterwork turns out to be far from his greatest problem: Writer’s block spills over into bitter social paralysis, exposing every facet of life he doesn’t yet know how to live, let alone write about. All the while, the surrounding woodsy landscape wilts and scorches, the threat of natural disaster lending an urgent pull to this dry, elegant comedy of manners — so dry,...
- 2/22/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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