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Just before the horizon of AIDS’ onset in the early 1980s, Frank Ripploh made his autobiographical directing debut about a very sexually active gay schoolteacher with “Taxi zum Klo.” A favorite of Gus Van Sant, Ira Sachs, and Bruce Labruce, the 1981-made, sexually explicit, and West Berlin-set portrait of queer life demonstrates more idyllic time and place for it — while not skimping on graphic (and unsimulated) sex acts and dicks up on screen, of course.

This year marks the 45th anniversary, and distributor Altered Innocence is re-releasing “Taxi zum Klo” in 4K. It’s launching August 1 at Metrograph in New York as part of the series “The Many Faces of Frank Ripploh.” Below, IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for “Taxi zum Klo” in 4K.

More about the film courtesy of the distributor: “By day, Frank is a dedicated schoolteacher. By night, he embraces the sexual freedoms of the city’s...

With all due respect to clean, uplifting, straightforwardly sweeping romances, sometimes there's nothing better than a movie that understands love's power of destruction. There's something timelessly alluring about a romance tale that veers into dark, untold places -- whether by exploring the secret underside of the romance itself, arriving at the romance through a twisty and wretched path, letting the romance explode into violent catharsis (or lack thereof), or seeing what happens when the romance brushes up against the brutality of the external world.

Below, you'll find a ranking of 15 great dark romance movies from every era of film history that do all that, telling love stories too somber, bloody, turbulent, or otherwise twisted to inspire anyone's wedding vows -- unless the couple in question is into some real off-the-cuff stuff. From a defiant medieval life partnership to a dangerous mid-20th-century Californian obsession, these are the best dark romance movies of all time.

A movie all too palpably real for those of us who can remember years of shame, fear and secrecy, Plainclothes follows a young cop assigned to a sting operation, arresting gay men cruising for sex in a mall in Syracuse, New York. His willingness to pose as bait dissolves when he starts facing his own sexual identity while getting obsessive about a similarly closeted hook-up. First-time writer-director Carmen Emmi’s aesthetically overworked use of low-grade video and distorted sound is intrusive, but very fine performances from Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey keep you glued to this sexy, sad, authentically gritty drama.

The strains of Omc’s “How Bizarre” coming over the speakers in a shopping mall instantly position the story in the mid ‘90s. A young cop, Lucas (Blyth), sits in the food court, serving as the tasty bait for gay men on the prowl. An exchange of eye contact,...

Gaspar Noé’s bid to shock us into submission with 3D sex is let down by two-dimensional performances

“I want to film that which cinema has rarely allowed itself, either for commercial or legal reasons,” says Gaspar Noé, writer/director of cause celebre Cannes favourites Seul Contre Tous, Irréversible and Enter the Void. For his fourth feature, Noé sets out “to film the organic dimension of being in love”, free from “the ridiculous division that dictates no normal film can contain overly erotic scenes”. Thus we have a Last Tango in Paris-tinged tale of amour fou in which a disconsolate young American in Paris drifts from the responsibilities of fatherhood back into memories of lost love, Noé taking us on a lurid three-way tour of appendages and orifices, physical and psychological.

This of course is nothing new. Since the post-Deep Throat days of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida...

A fresh crop of directors are rejecting stereotypical roles and predictable plots, creating films that deal with real life and rounded characters

Ira Sach's new film, Keep the Lights On, follows the decade-long relationship between two men who meet on a New York phone-sex line in 1998. It includes explicit sex and copious drug use; it also includes domestic squabbles, quotidian work hassles and meals with friends, straight and gay. No one comes out or dies, and everything is shown with the same fluid, elegant transparency. "I feel very few films convey the communal nature of urban life these days, the lack of boundaries," Sachs says. "'Those are the gays over there' – that's not how we live any more."

Keep the Lights On is at once very good and conspicuously ordinary. Like several other recent features about gay characters by gay directors, it deploys naturalism – often shooting handheld in found locations...

Mark Kermode's pick of the DVDs that were overlooked this year

Benda Bilili!

A strong contender for best film of the year, this electrifying account of Congolese street musicians overcoming incredible odds to bring their invigorating music to the world is a real reason to be cheerful. The soundtrack is infectious, the film-making unobtrusive, and the central characters endlessly inspiring. Bravo!

Patagonia

Diverse and unpredictable in his output, Marc Evans (Resurrection Man, My Litte Eye, Snow Cake) remains one of the UK's most consistently interesting and inventive filmmakers. Somewhat overlooked in cinemas, this lyrical cross-cultural escapade teases out longstanding connections between Wales and Argentina, with Evans drawing together the past and present with ease.

We Were Here

The outbreak of Aids, which ravaged San Francisco in the early 80s, is recounted by those who lived through it, offering a celebration of the indomitable human spirit that enabled diverse communities...

Thirty years ago, when Taxi zum Klo was shown in several cinemas under club conditions without a BBFC certificate, I was lined up to give evidence for the defence were it to be prosecuted for obscenity. My services were not required and the film now stands as a milestone in the history of both free speech and the representation of gays in the cinema.

What helps it retain its vitality is that writer-director Frank Ripploh (who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 52) treats his life as "a normal, tired, neurotic polymorphous-perverse teacher" in Berlin with the same witty, generous, self-denigratory honesty as Clive James and Simon Gray brought to their heterosexual exercises in confessional autobiographies.

Taxi zum Klo is a truthful film, revolutionary in its time, about love, the pleasures of promiscuity and the fears of the fading of desire. Shot just before the great Aids scare of the early 1980s,...

"The indie Texan filmmaker David Lowery receives a double bill at the reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and while Pioneer, a 16-minute short, and St Nick, an 86-minute feature, don't provide hard answers to their mysteries, both are deeply intriguing," writes Andy Webster in the New York Times. Regarding St Nick, a "potentially stifling ambience is deflected by quiet suspense and the awe-inspiring compositions of the cinematographer, Clay Liford. Decaying rustic interiors evoke Andrew Wyeth still lifes; pastoral long shots suggest a Southwestern walkabout. And Mr Lowery seems ready for a bigger canvas."

"Obliquely charting the terror, loneliness, and liberation of navigating a cold, callous grown-up world, St Nick follows nameless brother and sister runaways (played by real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears) who take up impermanent residence in an empty Texas house," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "David Lowery's debut feature is long on silence and laden...

Arthur (12A)

(Jason Winer, 2011, Us) Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner, Luis Guzmán. 110 mins

You can see what they were thinking: "it worked for one difficult-to-market English comic, so let's try it again". But somewhere between the moon and New York City this romcom seems to have lost some of its spirit and spontaneity. There are some snappy lines and funny moments, but Brand's overprivileged wastrel is nowhere near as cuddly as Dudley Moore's was – or as convincingly drunk. Sometimes, hair of the dog isn't the answer.

How I Ended This Summer (12A)

(Aleksei Popogrebsky, 2010, Rus) Grigory Dobrygin, Sergei Puskepalis. 130 mins

Spare and distinctive two-hander set in remote Arctic Russia, where the endless daylight, monotonous work, some terrible news and a touch of radiation exacerbate generational differences to deadly levels.

Pina (U)

(Wim Wenders, 2011, Ger/Fra/UK) 104 mins

A 3D tribute to the work, rather than the life,...

Reissued scabrous, satirical, confrontational German gay sex comedy. By Peter Bradshaw

Frank Ripploh's chaotic, low-budget, hardcore gay sex movie from 1980 still looks heavy-duty more than 30 years on. At the time, supportive liberal straights earnestly praised it for being humane and life-affirming. Perhaps now is the time to emphasise its less high-minded qualities: it is scabrous, satirical, confrontational. The movie is set in West Germany at the end of the pre-Aids era, although the idea of promiscuity and sickness is candidly addressed. Director-star Ripploh plays a version of himself: an earnest and dull schoolteacher by day – by night a dedicated cottager, and frequenter of public lavatories and bath houses. Three decades ago, this was seen as a challenging "issue" movie. Now it looks more like a daring, acid black comedy filmed on the hoof. Taxi Zum Klo was a one-man, one-film gay new wave.

Rating: 4/5

ComedyWorld cinemaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.co.

Bowie, Christiane F and Taxi zum Klo: these are the things that made Berlin so alluring to the British pop culture of the late 70s and early 80s. Jon Savage remembers a bewitching era

Frank Ripploh is fed up. Stuck in hospital for six weeks with some unnamed contagious sexual disease – most probably hepatitis – he receives a visit from his live-in lover. Instead of listening sympathetically to Frank's moans about the other patients, Bernd gives him a right telling-off about his promiscuity: "I hope lying here teaches you something." After Bernd leaves, a furious Frank pulls his clothes on and hails a taxi. There then follows a mad dash around various public toilets. With the meter running, he desperately searches for a quick pick-up and eventually ends up in Berlin's Tiergarten – a large public park near the centre of the city that was a notorious cruising ground at that time.

During one scene from Frank Ripploh's semi-autobiographical tale of a sex-obsessed, German school teacher Taxi Zum Klo (1980) we witness a man lying on a bed being sprayed in the face with urine. For ten, maybe fifteen seconds, all we are shown is the increasingly soaked and excited gent and a stream of the aforementioned urine being directed by an unknown party. 

Although a large percentage of the film-going public would claim to be appalled by the allusion of one man relieving himself on another, I thought it was a brave and interesting scene. Certainly my first experience of seeing a 'golden shower' on the big screen and being a liberal fellow in an art house cinema I had no problem with the suggestion. Hell, it was only a stream of water or something; it's not as if Ripploh had furnished us with a wide shot of him with his...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Gasland" (2010)

Directed by Josh Fox

Released by New Video Group

"Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"

Directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg

Released by Mpi Home Video

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" (2010)

Directed by Banksy

Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories

If you haven't caught up on the year's best documentaries in time to fill out your top 10 list, three of them will be hitting DVD shelves this week, beginning with Josh Fox's Sundance award-winning "Gasland," an exploration of the "hydraulic fracturing" going on in own backyard, a type of drilling that has spread to 34 states in the U.S. and has left a host of reservoirs of toxic waste and frequent gas explosions along the way. For something less serious, but equally compelling, there is also Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," which follows the...

Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dali, Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca in Paul Morrison’s Little Ashes (top); Eytan Fox’s Mary Lou (middle); Frank Ripploh’s raunchy gay classic Taxi Zum Klo (bottom) Torino Lgbt Film Festival 2010: Leo’S Room, Boy In A Bathtub, Rosa von Praunheim Other Torino screenings on Wednesday, April 21, include Paul Morrison’s Little Ashes, starring Twilight idol Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dali (!) and Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca. Set in 1920s Spain, Dali is portrayed as a closet case in love with Lorca, who ended up killed by Franco sympathizers during the Spanish Civil War. Future filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) is depicted as an anti-gay grouch. Producer Carlo Dusi will be present at [...]...