Feature film tips for the weekend: Even more fire with Angelina Jolie

1 They Want Me Dead (Saturday, Sat1, 8:15 p.m.)

Is Angelina Jolie someone you can trust? Absolutely, at least in her role as the tough firefighter Hannah Faber, with whom she made a kind of major cinema comeback in 2021.

Faber lives in the solitude of the mountains, apparently traumatized. She was unable to save children during a forest fire. She meets twelve-year-old Connor, who is wandering through the wilderness. The boy saw his father murdered and is on the run from the perpetrators. Hannah takes Connor under her wing and the killers track them down.

Lots of fire, lots of smoke, lots of stunts, lots of rescue, lots of Angelina Jolie in a solid thriller by Taylor Sheridan: in the end, perhaps exactly what you need at home after a hot Saturday evening.

2 Nevrland (Saturday, 3sat, 10:25 p.m.)

Compared to Jolie’s Action, this Austrian psychodrama, which won the Youth Jury Prize at the Max Ophüls Festival 2019, is heavier fare.

17-year-old Jakob, who works as a temporary worker in a slaughterhouse, struggles with a crippling anxiety disorder. When he met the 26-year-old artist Kristjan in a sex cam chat, he began a transpersonal journey to Nevrland and the wounds of his soul.

A lot of picture puzzles, a lot of symbolism, a lot of ambition and truthfulness, a lot of coming-of-age: director Gregor Schmidinger processed autobiographical elements in his feature film debut with Simon Früwirth and Josef Hader, but he himself suffered from massive fear and delusions for many years.

3 Scarface (Sunday, Arte, 10 p.m.)

Thanks to Francis Ford Coppola. In 1972, against the express wishes of the producer, he cast Al Pacino in “The Godfather” as a crime boss. Pacino became a global star and his style was studied intensively by many young actors.

Amazingly, it takes eleven years until Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” for a similarly brilliant appearance: Al Pacino alongside Michelle Pfeiffer again as a gangster, Tony Montana, who flees from Cuba to the USA, becomes the most powerful drug lord in the city and makes an enemy of a powerful man through outbursts of violence and paranoia.

150 minutes of lots of good sayings (“Every day above ground is better than below ground”), lots of violence, lots of blood, but that’s always to be expected with Brian De Palma.

4 Prometheus – Dark Signs (Sunday, Pro7, 11:10 p.m.)

The Alien saga, brought to life in 1979 by Ridley Scott with “Alien,” cannot be killed.

In 2012, Scott told the backstory to his sci-fi horror classic, with an all-star cast. Noomi Rapace as archaeologist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, Charlize Theron as expedition leader Meredith Vickers and Michael Fassbender as the android David are members of a team that travels to a distant solar system on behalf of science. There they want to find the creators of humanity. The mission is getting out of control.

Many, many characters, sometimes too many. Despite the occasional pseudo-metaphysics, this increases the anticipation for a new Alien film. A sequel, “Alien: Romulus 2,” is being planned.

5 Monsieur Claude and his daughters (Sunday, ARD, 11:35 p.m.)

To relax, a comedy from France, which became one of the most successful films of all time there in 2014 with more than twelve million cinema viewers.

Director Philippe de Chauveron couldn’t do much wrong with the story of a long-suffering, rather unrelaxed father (Christian Clavier), who, despite his best intentions, struggles with the intercultural diversity and the nationality of his potential sons-in-law and feels like a modern-day Job to whom God imposes one difficult test after another.

Critics accused the hit comedy of trivializing racism, and there is definitely something to that. In any case, Clash of Cultures is different, with a lot of irony and sayings (“I’m not Uncle Ben’s!”)