Andy-296

Emotionally overwhelming documentary series from Germany is about kids going to school in some of the most remote places in the globe. To reach school, they have to walk scores of miles through scorching hot deserts, tropical jungles full of wild animals, dangerous rivers, the frozen tundra. A lot of these children live in extreme poverty and one hopes that the filmmakers did at least share some of whatever money they earn from these documentaries with them. All the series is very good, but I particularly reccomend the episode set in Bolivia and in Papua New Guinea.

A biopic of Bert Trautmann, a once German POW in England who unexpectedly succeeded as a goalkeeper in the English football league during the immediate postwar years. German directed but filmed in England with mostly English actors, this film is quite awful with its maudlin, manipulative dialogue. The issue of Trautmann being a German soldier during the war is almost continuously raised during the movie - obviously if the film wanted to be honest it has to talk about this, but was it necessary to mention it all the time? The actors are good but they can only do so much faced with the awful lines that they have to utter. Some of the subplots, like the one of the English rabbi who first opposed him playing in Manchester City as a Nazi but then supports him, are incredibly embarrassing. Another awful scene is the one where the German prisoners in England are made to watch (real) films of the concentration camps. Trautmann's life was surely interesting but it needed a far more subtle film. The only thing to recommend for it is a good reconstruction of the English working class milieu during the postwar.

One of the best giallos (the peculiar police/terror genre made in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s). In an upscale all girl catholic high school in England, Enrico, a handsome Italian gym teacher, in marital trouble with his frosty wife Herta, a fellow German teacher at the school, has an affair with one of his students, Elizabeth (Cristina Galbo). While they are making out in a park, Elizabeth witnesses one of her fellow girls at the school being stabbed. Soon a number of other girls at the same school are killed one by one, stabbed by the same apparent killer in their genitalia. Enrico becomes the center of the suspicions of the police. But who is really the killer? Could behind this be a terrible secret held by the girls?

Set in London, this nicely plotted film is an Italian-German coproduction with mostly German and Italian actors. There is a final twist (which of course I'm not going to reveal), but the good thing is that it was unpredictable but it makes sense and it actually makes the film better, nicely connecting all the loose threads. With a nice color photography and a jazzy score by Ennio Morricone. The beautiful actresses playing the students in various states of undress add to the appeal of this (be calm, they are and look a bit older than the high school students they portray).