Stefan Stabenow

If The State I’m In was a new German cinema at its start, Christoph Hochhäusler’s combination financial drama and romance showcases its maturity. The setting is 21st century capitalism, the playing field, glass-walled skyscrapers and flats. But the stakes—life, happiness, love—are utterly human.

Genre conventions are retooled in Christoph Hochhäusler’s fifth feature, a political thriller engineered with all the slick ingenuity of Berlin’s glass and steel business districts. Corruption in those high places of late neoliberalism has rarely been rendered as cleverly and sexily as this.