Interested in the Art of Film: SEE

“Revanche”
Monday, April 20 – 7:00 p.m.
Marcus North Shore Cinema
11700 N. Port Washington Rd. (Mequon)
Admission: $10
Purchase Tickets Now Online

“Revanche” Red Band Trailer

“Revanche” Website

Winner of over 14 film festival awards including: Best European Film at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival & Best Foreign Language Film of the Year from FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics); Milwaukee audiences have a chance to see “Revanche” two weeks prior to its US theatrical release date

At once a gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar–nominated, international breakthrough film from Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex (the mesmerizing Johannes Krisch) works as an assistant in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara (Irina Potapenko). Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop (Andreas Lust) and his seemingly content wife (Ursula Strauss). With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

Dir. Götz Spielmann / Austria 2008 / Color / 35mm / 1.85 / Dolby Digital / 121 min

“As it unfolds with calculated intricacy and diabolical inevitability, it overturns conventions and preconceptions to construct a haunting parable of crime and punishment, redemption and revenge.” -- Peter Keough, FIPRESCI

“A potent, sympathetically observed tragedy.”
-- Nicolas Rapold, Film Comment

"[Revanche] quietly attested to Spielmann's virtues as both writer and director: his patience, his watchful eye, his essentially compassionate view of human nature. The film goes off in all number of fascinating directions, at least one of which is totally unexpected. Yet it works -- magnificently, in fact."
-- Shane Danielsen, indieWIRE

“A galvanizing psychological thriller worthy of repeat viewings.”
-- Robert Bell, exclaim.ca

"Revanche is the kind of taut, thinking-adult's drama that America stopped producing 30 years ago.” -- Darren Hughes, longpauses.com

“A superb existential thriller that haunts you long after you’ve left the theater ... Avoiding cheap sentimentality and one of those scores that pushes buttons, Spielmann’s set piece will draw you in.”-- Yama Rahimi, IONCINEMA.com

“A thing of sheer beauty, the kind of film in which the details of each individual scene - composition, rhythm, performances, stray bits of business - are all so perfectly judged that their cumulative force kind of sneaks up on you.”
-- Mike D’Angelo, The Man Who Viewed Too Much

“Revanche is what we call a grower, its complexity gaining in richness with every turn.”
-- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“[A] gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neo-noir ... it’s dynamite.”
-- Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

“A subtle, poignant and thoroughly captivating film ... Masterfully and subtly, Spielmann puts on the screen all the emotion that can ripple just beneath the surface of lives and personalities, near and felt, but unseen and out of reach.”
-- Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, The Vienna Review

“A profound revelation ... Spielmann combines a meticulous structural form with emotional truth, a thorough poetics with a penetrating understanding of human nature.”
-- Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope

"A film that simmers within you days after viewing ... as restrained as it is ravishing."
-- Jeff Meyers, Detroit Metro Times