Starring Betty Amann in her most famous leading role, Joe May's Asphalt is a luxuriously produced German Expressionist classic where tragic liaisons and fatal encounters are shaped alongside the constant roar of Berlin traffic.
Social & External
The people behind it
Albert Steinrück
Hauptwachtmeister Holk
Else Heller
Mutter Holk
Gustav Fröhlich
Wachtmeister Albert Holk
Betty Amann
Else Kramer
Hans Adalbert Schlettow
Konsul Langen
Hans Albers
Erster Dieb
Rosa Valetti
Geschäftsführerin
Paul Hörbiger
Zweiter Dieb
Arthur Duarte
Trude Lieske
Based on Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel, Atomised (aka The Elementary Particles) focuses on Michael and Bruno, two very different half-brothers and their disturbed sexuality. After a chaotic childhood with a hippie mother only caring for her affairs, Michael, a molecular biologist, is more interested in genes than women, while Bruno is obsessed with his sexual desires, but mostly finds his satisfaction with prostitutes. But Bruno's life changes when he gets to know the experienced Christiane. In the meantime, Michael meets Annabelle, the love of his youth, again.
Expecting the usual tedium that accompanies a summer in the Catskills with her family, 17-year-old Frances 'Baby' Houseman is surprised to find herself stepping into the shoes of a professional hoofer—and unexpectedly falling in love.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her young son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life becomes increasingly difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the rich and the poor, the son of the city's mastermind meets a prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
An American journalist arrives in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. He becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding a dead GI who washes up at a lakeside mansion during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers. Soon his investigation connects with his search for his married pre-war German lover.
Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.
Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He lost 100,000 DM in a subway train that belongs to a very bad guy. She has 20 minutes to raise this amount and meet Manni. Otherwise, he will rob a store to get the money. Three different alternatives may happen depending on some minor event along Lola's run.
Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.
Eyal, an Israeli Mossad agent, is given the mission to track down and kill the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might still be alive. Pretending to be a tourist guide, he befriends his grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister Pia. The two men set out on a tour of the country, during which Axel challenges Eyal's values.
An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.
Prot is a patient at a mental hospital who claims to be from a far away planet. His psychiatrist tries to help him, only to begin to doubt his own explanations.
Career criminal Johnny Clay recruits a sharpshooter, a crooked police officer, a bartender and a betting teller named George, among others, for one last job before he goes straight and gets married. But when George tells his restless wife about the scheme to steal millions from the racetrack where he works, she hatches a plot of her own.
Sunny is the singer of a band trying to establish itself in the East Berlin music scene. They play regular gigs in small towns, but Sunny feels out of touch with the audience and with her life as a whole. She begins a relationship with Ralph, an amateur saxophonist and philosophy student, who writes her a very personal song—but his obsession with death and unfaithful lifestyle are not for her. After getting into a quarrel with a band member who harasses her and telling off a show host, she is thrown out of the band. Abandoned, she struggles to regain control over her life.
Frustrated, because he is forced to produce bad TV-shows, a manager of a TV-station, enters the station and manipulates the ratings, to initiate a TV-revolution.
A posthumous look at the last days of Guenther's life as he, his best friend, and his sister let loose on a four-day binge of alcohol, drugs, and sex.
In Berlin in 1961, an American soldier and a German engineer join forces to build a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in order to smuggle out refugees, including the soldier's East German girlfriend.
While doing a friend a favor and searching for a runaway teenager, a police detective stumbles upon a bizarre band of criminals about to pull off a bank robbery.
On a dark night, four youths loiter behind a makeshift shed. They perk up when a taxi cab arrives near an apartment building. One lad picks up a length of pipe, another opens and locks his switchblade. The four accost a man who's gotten out of the cab.
Silent film from 1915 which draws on the story of Carmen
With friends like these, who needs enemies? That's the question bad guy Porter is left asking after his wife and partner steal his heist money and leave him for dead -- or so they think. Five months and an endless reservoir of bitterness later, Porter's partners and the crooked cops on his tail learn how bad payback can be.
In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.
In 1984 East Berlin, dedicated Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler begins spying on a famous playwright and his actress-lover Christa-Maria. Wiesler becomes unexpectedly sympathetic to the couple, and faces conflicting loyalties when his superior takes a liking to Christa-Maria.
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor against the new straight-arrow building commissioner, Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.
A teen girl in 1970s Berlin becomes addicted to heroin. Everything in her life slowly begins to distort and disappear as she befriends a small crew of junkies and falls in love with a drug-abusing male prostitute.
In this classic German thriller, Hans Beckert, a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert's heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seedy underworld network. With both cops and criminals in pursuit, the murderer soon realizes that people are on his trail, sending him into a tense, panicked attempt to escape justice.
In post-war Europe, a diverse group of passengers aboard a U.S. Army train to bombed-out Frankfurt becomes involved in a Nazi assassination plot.
Former East Germany, 1992. Patrick Stein and Markus Bach, two very different police officers, are commissioned to investigate the disappearance of two female teenagers in a remote area of the country. Did they run away from home or did something more terrible happen to them?
A police detective falls for the bank robber's girlfriend he is supposed to be tailing.
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
A woman tries to survive the invasion of Berlin by the Soviet troops during the last days of World War II.
Police Lt. Leonard Diamond vies to bring a clever, well connected, and sadistic gangster to justice all the while obsessing over the gangster's girlfriend.
After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.
Ricky spent years behind bars after taking the rap for his brother Rafael and his buddy Latif after a failed robbery. Now, Latif wants to express gratitude by letting Ricky in on a coup that will bring lots of money. After some hesitation, Ricky agrees, and gets his brother Rafael on board. Everything runs smoothly, until police officer Diana turns up on the scene. A nerve-wracking cat and mouse game is set in motion. Director Özgür Yildirim’s most recent film offers insight into Frankfurt’s gangster world. As before in CHIKO – which also starred Moritz Bleibtreu – he portrays the daily life of the criminal underground scene in a large German city.
At the end of World War II, a German soldier is looking for his daughter while an SS troop is looking for a Jewish treasure.
In the aftermath of WWII, German-Jewish cabaret singer Nelly has to undergo facial reconstructive surgery following her survival from Auschwitz. Without recognising Nelly, her former husband Johnny asks her to help him claim his wife’s inheritance. To see if he's betrayed her, she agrees, becoming her own doppelgänger.
Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.
Maria Altmann, an octogenarian Jewish refugee, takes on the government to recover artwork she believes rightfully belongs to her family.
A female executive and a night janitor conspire to commit a daring diamond heist from their mutual employer, The London Diamond Corporation.
A doctor in early 19th-century Germany becomes infatuated with the sister of a man he unintentionally killed and bargains with the Devil incarnate to conjure their union in exchange for his soul.
In a small Northern German town, a dishonourably discharged Afghanistan veteran is offered a job as a deliveryman by an alcoholic Turkish entrepreneur, through which the former meets the latter's gorgeous wife.