Kreuzfahrt vor Manhattan

I couldn't quite place whether the movie was intentionally acted badly to underscore its mocku-mentary style or whether it was just badly acted. The exception being Angela Goethals who played the youngest. Quite a natural effortless-ness about her acting.

It made great use of the river and the boat as it moved around the periphery of Manhattan.

The camera angles and lighting and even the plot were reminiscent of Citizen Kane. An almost anonymous interviewer (off-sides much of the time) asks questions until we have the full picture of the family.

Philip Seymour Hoffman has about 5 minutes in the film and for that reason, this film is now being re-marketed with his name. It was a nicely acted 5 minutes.

For those of you with a taste for the unusual, try and check this film out sometime. The film follows a mock-documentary maker studying a family of children whose parents were murdered on a golf course when a hold-up went wrong. The children now live on a luxury yacht, seemingly permanently moored in a sunny New York harbour. While most of the film is set on the boat, we also meet a psychiatrist (Robbie Coltrane) attempting to help them, as well as the guardian who has charge of taking care of them.

Unsurprisingly, each of the children (age ranges 10-18) has reacted to their parents' death - and the media circus that followed it - quite dramatically, but their problems are handled sensitively and the whole drama unfolds realistically and with touching and funny scenes as the narrator struggles unsuccessfully to understand the family as individuals or as a unit.

For those tired of formulaic family dramas or Hollywood blockbusters, give this a try.

I recorded this strange independent-movie years ago from german television zdf, and I saw it at least ten times, because it is NOT a great feature film, but a really funny and ambitious work I really love, and I showed it to all my friends.

GO AND SEE IT, it is no masterpiece, but really worth looking it...