The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle. Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie’s opening scenes are equally Tykwer’s, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous.
In Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan uses the superhero mythology to create an epic study of ethics, evil, fear, and justice. It’s a bracing, dark, provocative, and serious work that at last transcends the juvenile roots of the comic-book genre. It’s not just the best superhero movie ever made, but likely also the best mainstream film of 2005.
Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can’t survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.
