The Princess And The Warrior

A grim reminder of what commercial success can do to a talented director. I don’t want to overrate Tom Tykwer, the writer-director of Run Lola Run (1999), but that film showed a certain flair for expanding on some of the tricks and conceits of music videos, and it seemed an improvement on Tykwer’s heavier, more querulous Winter Sleepers (1997). This feature (2000) tries to combine the racy appeal of Run Lola Run with the more mystical ambitions of Winter Sleepers, and to my taste it fails. An obscure tale about a psychiatric nurse (Lola’s Franka Potente) trying to track down a failed robber who saved her life, it lasts 130 minutes, most of them relatively forgettable. With a better idea of what Tykwer had in mind, maybe I would have stayed interested. In German with subtitles. (JR) Read more