Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

lasttimeisaw On paper, Fatih Akin's searing revenge cautionary tale has a by-the-rote plot, a bereft woman seeks justice on her own terms after legal system fails her, but seen through Akin's dark-colored glasses, IN THE FADE (named after the song of Queens of the Stone Age, whose lead singer Josh Homme provides a sparse but effectual score here), grittily grapples with the deplorable injustice on the strength of Diane Kruger's cracking central performance, eventually, it hits the mark as a woke indictment of the surging neo-Nazism, a pernicious global pathology that should be nipped in the bud. Making allowance for Akin's Turkish ethnicity, the story seems too close to home, it takes place in Akin's hometown Hamburg, and like THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007), is divided into a triptych: The Family, Justice and The Sea, each is introduced by a faux-documentary snippet, delineating those happy moments in the past. Kruger plays Katja, a German woman marries to a Turkish ex-con Nuri (Acar), and they have a young son Rocco (Santana), but their bliss is smashed to smithereens when Nuri and Rocco are killed by a nail-bomb, as the intended targets by Neo-Nazis, but ensuing police investigation makes heavy weather of Nuri's immigrant background and his drug-dealing history, a strategy too topical under today's climates. Granted, one must hand it to Akin for not white-washing Katja and Nuri's foibles, she meets him the first time through a drug transaction in college and it is equivocal whether Nuri still conducts some illegal goings-on sub rosa. Consumed with shock, disbelief and inconsolable grief, Katja resorts to narcotics for comfort, another unwise decision that boomerangs in the Justice segment, also coincidentally, Akin employs a gory suicidal-wrist-slitting-saved-by-a-phone-call happenstance that echoes Ildikó Enyedi's more mystical yarn ON BODY AND SOUL (2017).In the following courtroom drama, even with seemingly ironclad evidences, Katja and her lawyer Danilo (a benignly vociferous Denis Moschitto) still lose the prosecution case against two suspects, one of whom she spots right on the crime scene earlier that day, this is where the story becomes a bit vexing, because of Akin's blatant intention to show audience how lousy the legal system is, for one thing, he completely eschews the angle of the two suspects, projected as the incarnation of pure evil, they are not even being questioned during the entire trial, only sporadically seen through Katja's strung-out point-of-view. Also the two suspects' flimsy alibi provided by a Greek fellow extremist is thoughtlessly skirted around, without doubt it takes more than a doctored hotel record to prove two people's presence in another country during the explosion, but Akin doesn't care to dwell on that, all leverage is left to Johannes Krisch's vile defense lawyer to chew the scenery, one wonders how soon he will be summoned by Hollywood to amp up his superb dastardliness. Finally, the third act spirits us away to a picturesque Greece where Katja traces down the two perpetrators and exacts her tit-for-tat retribution (alarmingly, there must be a do-it-yourself manual of nail-bomb available, presumably on the internet), commendably Akin graces her desperation and intrepidity with meaning pointers (the sight of an alighting bird which changes her initial decision, or that menstruation resumption), and rounds off the film with a poetic ending despite its violent means, the reverberations are appreciable. A tour-de-force from Ms. Kruger must be ranked among any year's-best list, a grueling task that she takes it to herself in devoting all her body and soul through the unimaginable fire and brimstone with conviction, verve and unstinting sympathy, as she clearly realizes that the film lives and dies with her portrayal as the sole pillar of the narrative, the upshot is arresting, powerful through and through, Cannes' BEST ACTRESS laurels are definitely not for nothing.

Bertaut Fatih Akin, the writer and director of Aus dem nichts [lit. trans. From Nothing] is a political individual; he makes political films and he makes political statements in his personal life. Akin identifies as a German-Turk; he was born in Hamburg, but his parents are both Turkish, having come to Germany with the first wave of Turkish immigrants following the Wirtschaftswunder of the fifties and sixties. He lives and works in Germany, and although almost all of his films are set there (the notable exception is The Cut (2014)), and all have German-funding, he considers himself a Turkish filmmaker. When he won Best Screenplay for Auf der anderen Seite (2007) at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, he accepted the award "on behalf of Turkish cinema." Easily the best known/most notorious of his political statements, however, was in 2006 when he was photographed wearing a t-shirt with the word "BUSH" on it, but with the "S" replaced by a swastika. Displaying a swastika in public is against the law in Germany, and after a complaint was made, he was investigated (but not charged) by German police. He later defended the shirt, stating "Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantánamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists [...] You can apply irony to something like that. You can redefine the symbol in a politically correct horizon. My T-shirt is more than mere provocation. You have to look into the context. The swastika is not there on its own, but as part of the word 'BUSH.' One would have to be pretty stupid, not to understand that." In short, this is not a guy afraid to speak his mind.Akin's main political preoccupation in his filmography, however, is not Nazism or American presidents, it's the experience of Turkish immigrants in Germany, specifically the racism often directed towards them, racism which is oftentimes found masquerading as patriotism. It is unknown how many Turks are actually in Germany, as the German census doesn't allow people to record their ethnicity, but as of 2011, there were 2.7 million inhabitants with at least one Turkish parent. However, academic estimates suggest there be as many as 7 million Turks, or people identifying as Turks, in the country. Now, with that many people of a different nationality in a country, problems are going to arise (just ask the British), and this is where Akin focuses a great deal of his energies. Everything from Solino (2002) to Gegen die Wand (2004) to Auf der anderen Seite to Soul Kitchen (2009) has political DNA derived from the experience of racism in Germany. So, with that in mind, the plot outline for Nichts doesn't jump off the page as a typical Akin film - when former convicted drug dealer, Nuri Sekerci (Numan Acar), and his son are killed in a bomb blast at his office, his wife, Katja (Diane Kruger) has faith that the police and courts will find and punish those responsible. However, as Katja finds herself becoming more and more disillusioned with the systems which are supposed to be on her side, she comes to believe she must take things into her own hands. Read like that, this could be any number of bad Hollywood movies (the wonderfully risible Law Abiding Citizen (2009) springs to mind). However, when we include the fact that Nuri is Turkish, and that the police quickly come to suspect the bombing may have been connected to a Neo-Nazi group, it fits much more comfortably into his oeuvre. Unfortunately, it's not very good.First of all, the film is rigidly divided into an intentionally artificial three-act structure, with each act given its own title ("The Family", "The Trial", and "The Sea") and introduction by way of home-movie footage. One of the most significant problems with the film is that the acts simply don't yoke. The first is a pretty decent study in grief, the second is a rather dull court-room drama, and the third is a bizarrely hollow (and irritatingly repetitive) investigation into the morality of revenge. The last act mirrors the first in its use of slow pacing, long shots of people not doing very much, and sparse dialogue (as opposed to the very wordy second act), and while this is interesting in setting the narrative up in the first act, it falls flat in the third, as the whole thing ends up coming across as rather po-faced and self-important; a film convinced of its own profundity. For all that, however, up until the conclusion, I was thinking I would give it a six; it's entertaining enough, in a fairly disposable way. But then the bottom falls out. The last scene itself is actually pretty good. It's what happens next that irritated me. This has not been an especially political film - the Neo-Nazi storyline barely features; a few mentions by police in the first act, a single scene in the second, and a couple of short scenes in the third. That's it. As Katja is the only character who is really given any degree of agency, the Neo-Nazi characters are little more than background extras (in fact, in some scenes, they are literally background extras). So this is not a film which spends a lot of time delving into issues of racism in Germany or offering insight into the rise of Right-Wing Populism across Europe. It's a revenge drama. However, as it ends, a legend appears on-screen informing the audience how many race crimes are committed against Turks in Germany each year. The film has absolutely not, by any stretch of the imagination, earned the right to preach to the audience in this way. It's almost as if Akin forgot he was trying to make something political, only remembering in time to throw together a vaguely worded statement on the sufferings of his people in an effort to give the audience something to think about. It doesn't work, with the statement serving only to trivialise the issue by trying to tie it to a film in which it barely featured, and it leaves a decidedly bitter aftertaste.5/10

El-Dod Aus dem Nichts is one of the few movies that had other dimensions of it's story that was amazingly done and very simple that could reach to the audience very easily by a lot of camera scenes as by a wonderful scene when she was sitting on the sofa in front of her window while the rains were falling outside and on the window that was reflected by the shadows on the face of our smart actress Diane Kruger to resemble her feeling of fade. The matter of the judge was too unreasonable and The story was too good and how she lived before it went to the end where she decided to start go looking for the ones that killed her family! You feel it wasn't really at the same line the story was going along with and predictable ending that is compatible with the name and idea of the movie. or you feel that the movie went into her fade a little bit more than it needed. I have to say that it is a brilliant movie that had some flops but was very well made and I have to say that the cinematography was extraordinary. 7.5/10.

jamesgalloghly I watched this film with no expectations and was blown away by the depth and quality on offer. Firstly its a very well told story with Diane Kruger giving one of the best performances I've ever seen. She gives a real performance for a genuine lead who struggles with the death of loved ones. The court case is superbly executed with an unforgettable performance from Johannes Krisch and the suspense in the final chapter is gut wrenchingly powerful. This is easily the best film I've seen this year and I'm now going to look at Fatih Akin's previous work.