Jerichow

Petzold's seventh feature competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2008 and took Lola nominations for Best Feature Film and Best Director the following year. It is his most openly generic film: the frame is The Postman Always Rings Twice, transplanted to the sandy, half-empty landscape of the Prignitz in the German northeast, where the roads are straight and the businesses are marginal.

Benno Fürmann plays Thomas, back from Afghanistan without honour or money; Hilmi Sözer is Ali, who runs a chain of snack bars, drinks more than his heart allows and hires Thomas to drive him between them; Nina Hoss is Laura, Ali's wife, who has her own arithmetic to do. Petzold shoots almost entirely in flat daylight, and lets long stretches pass in the car, where the three of them cannot avoid each other. There is no score to speak of, which makes the film feel less like noir than like a documentary about people who have seen noir.

Reviews were strong — 90% on Rotten Tomatoes — and several critics singled out Sözer, whose Ali refuses the role the genre assigns him. Petzold has said the film began with the observation that in German cinema the Turkish-German character is almost never the man with the money. That inversion, more than the plot mechanics, is what the film is actually interested in.