The Tin Drum

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1979 and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first major international success of the New German Cinema. Adapted from Günter Grass's 1959 novel (for which Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999) the film is one of the most ambitious literary adaptations ever attempted in German cinema, with Schlöndorff distilling a 700-page novel into a 142-minute screenplay co-written with Grass and Jean-Claude Carrière.

Born in 1924 to an unconventional Kashubian family in the Free City of Danzig, Oskar Matzerath decides at his third birthday party that he will refuse to grow up, and discovers he can shatter glass with his scream when challenged. The next two decades of European catastrophe play out around him: the rise of Nazism, Kristallnacht, the German invasion of Poland, the Wehrmacht's defeat in the East, the post-war partition. David Bennent, then twelve years old, plays Oskar across the entire span of the film with one of the most extraordinary child performances ever filmed; he was small for his age and hyperactively physical, an exact fit for Grass's grotesque-genius creation.

The film's combination of magical realism, satirical comedy, and direct historical horror (the famous eel sequence, the Crystal Night vandalism, the Kashubian baptism in a potato field) produced one of the most genuinely strange canonical works of post-war German cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most ambitious German literary adaptation ever filmed, and one of the very few magical-realist features that earns the historical weight it claims. Bennent's central performance is irreplaceable.