German Gems premiered last year in San Francisco as a one-day celebration of new films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It returns this year to the Castro Theatre but expands to a three-day mini-festival running Friday, January 14th to Sunday, January 16th. Advance tickets are available at brownpapertickets, and more information about the fest can be found here. Youth on youth violence is never a pretty thing. Well, maybe ‘never’ isn’t the right word. Sword-fighting Asian schoolgirls for example can be visually appealing.  Same goes for cheerleaders in slow motion pillow fights and Catholic high-schoolers engaged in holy water-balloon battles on a hot summer day. But I’m getting a bit off topic. There’s nothing attractive or appealing about the based-on-a-true-story youth violence on display in She Deserved It, and the movie is all the better for it.

German Gems premiered last year in San Francisco as a one-day celebration of new films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It returns this year to the Castro Theatre but expands to a three-day mini-festival running Friday, January 14th to Sunday, January 16th. Advance tickets are available at brownpapertickets, and more information about the fest can be found here. Biopics can be a tricky genre because regardless of the subject’s popularity or the inherently interesting aspects of their story the resulting film can still fall flat in its factual presentation. No one would argue for example that Nelson Mandela’s life is anything but a dramatic triumph of will power and humanity, but there’s a reason Clint Eastwood’s Invictus is used as a treatment for insomniacs. One way around the risk of simply relaying facts with your film is to inject it with a unique style that keeps viewers on their proverbial toes throughout. When it works the result can be a stunning achievement like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson. And when it doesn’t? You get Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Somewhere in between those two extremes sits Mahler On the Couch.