Stefan Will

Starring Nina Hoss, Jerichow is an elegantly crafted genre exercise that plays with the rules of the thriller. Partially adapting James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, this is an absorbing, noir-tinged tale of lust, envy, and deceit, which offers a biting critique of capitalist ambition.

Christian Petzold displayed a rare gift for genre subversion from the very start. At once a coming-of-age tale and terrorists-on-the-run thriller, his debut feature uses the former to comment on the latter—its mutable young protagonist serving as a proxy for a nation surveying its traumatic past.