Evil men, underground gangs, immigrants and the crooked world. The journey is too long to my liking. From rising through the ranks and ending up destroying everything.

Remember when almost nobody knew who Christoph Waltz was? And then everybody watched Inglourious Basterds and the rest is history. With Robert Schuch who plays one of the main characters it will be the same. Every actor in this movie is very good but he is acting circles around the others. You are glued to the screen every time he is on screen and he has a lot to play with since his character changes a lot during the movie. And the more we realize what he does with the character we can't help to be in awe with this troubled character.

Even though I would say watch the movie just to see Schuch's performance Berlin Alexanderplatz is a great movie. I didn't know anything about it. Just saw the trailer and my jaw dropped when I saw that is 3 hours long. But the trailer already kind of told you that this is something different. To be honest you could tell this story probably with 30 minutes less but it definitely needs to be long because you watch the journey of two men even though one is supposed to be the focus. The cast is great, the music is chosen well and it is shot beautifully. They create this world that our characters live in which by the way has nothing in common with reality but it isn't supposed to. It is full of colorful characters some of them very over the top. It is big, it is loud and you will have the full range of emotions. You will laugh, you will be scared in some scenes anticipating bad to happen, you will feel sorry for people, you will be angry at them and also love when they love.

I know, I'm at least as surprised as you. Believe you me, I'm one of the greatest ... wait let me rephrase that: I'm one of the most fierce critics when it comes to German movies. I detect bad acting and bad dialog and just go for the throat when that happens. Sometimes (often actually) being maybe a bit too harsh to those movies, especially considering the rating they get here or other places. In this case though, things are different as you can see.

Let me begin though with one thing: I've never seen the now over 40 year old Berlin Alexanderplatz. But I'm in good company because one of the main characters hadn't seen it either, before they filmed this. And he says it helped him with his performance. And that man is Schuch - one half of a self destroying pair!

Now the runtime may be a bit too much for some viewers. We are now used to watch shorter movies or rather our concentration does usually not hold up for a long period of time. On the other hand and also because this is split into 5 part, just perceive this as binge watching.

And while there are movies where I think: anyone can do that, come on. This is one of those showcases where I'm like "damn that is some tight filmmaking and acting - you actually need talented people to pull stuff like this off! So kudos to those involved and sorry if you hoped I could compare this to the novel or the previous incarnation on film - which I surely will watch in the future, just not sure when! So many things on my list