Cinema listings with film information and movie reviews
Victoria
Unlike Oscar-winning black comedy Birdman, which was cleverly edited to resemble a single fluid take, Sebastian Schipper's tense German thriller was actually filmed in one unbroken shot - an act of technical daring, meticulous preparation and ambition, which reaps huge rewards as we are sucked into the vortex of the characters' nightmarish journey through the streets of night-time Berlin. Nils Frahm's metronomic score increases our pulses as the eponymous heroine faces life or death decisions, surrounded by armed police, who could end her life with a single nervous pull of a trigger. These scenes of characters on the run are orchestrated at a breathless pace, the camera bobbing and weaving to heighten the visceral thrill. The film opens in a strobe-lit nightclub where a Spanish girl called Victoria (Laia Costa) is dancing prior to her morning shift at a cafe. She orders a drink, looks around the bar searching for a human connection but finds none. As she leaves, Victoria encounters four rowdy men - Sonne (Frederick Lau), Boxer (Franz Rogowski), Blinker (Burak Yigit) and Fuss (Max Mauff) - who persuade her to join them for a drink on the rooftop of a nearby building. She enjoys a flirtation with Sonne and he accompanies her to the cafe, where Victoria agrees to make him a mug of hot chocolate before they go their separate ways. The romantic mood is shattered when Boxer, Blinker and Fuss arrive to collect Sonne to carry out a job on behalf of a sadistic gangster called Andi (Andre Hennicke). Their plan goes awry and Victoria agrees to help her new acquaintances to carry out their illegal plan before the sun rises. Anchored by a luminous central performance from Costa, Victoria is a nail-biting exercise in technical brio that remains uncomfortably close to the characters as events spiral sickeningly out of control. Action set pieces are orchestrated with aplomb including a clash with police that propels us to the edge of our seats and the on-screen quintet to the brink of self-destruction.
