While other filmmakers like, let's say Julio Medem, effortlessly provide their movies with a metaphysical, bigger-than-life-kind of eeriness, Tom Tykwer stays true to pseudo-philosophical artificiality when it comes to storytelling. Featuring excellent cinematography and surprisingly good performances by the entire cast (even by anti-actor Benno Fürmann), "Der Krieger und die Kaiserin` fails to attract deeper sympathy for the mainly quite unapproachable characters. The direction is somewhat pretentious (a common problem among German films) as well as simply too artificial; the same applies to some of the dialogue. The biggest flaw might be the running time: 130 minutes is just too long, and the movie could have been tightened by omitting some unnecessary sequences. Let me admit, though, that this is still one of the more watchable German films - at least it got this certain cinematic feeling to it which most, if not nearly all German productions lack.
Review of The Princess and the Warrior
