The Cinematheque

“By a wide margin the funniest almost-three-hour German comedy you will ever see.”

A.O. Scott, New York Times

If there was a film this decade that rivalled the curveball humour, squirmy awkwardness, or blindsiding joys of German writer-director Maren Ade’s universally adored Toni Erdmann, we didn’t see it! Named the year’s best film by Sight & Sound, Film Comment, and Cahiers du Cinéma (a rare consensus between the big three), Ade’s coup de maître concerns mid-thirties career woman Ines (Sandra Hüller), a no-nonsense corporate climber whose life in Bucharest blows up when divorced dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a disheveled practical joker, arrives from Germany unannounced. Concerned for his daughter’s well-being, Winfried assumes the alter ego of buffoonish self-help guru Toni Erdmann and mortifyingly inserts himself into Ines’s professional circle. What follows is a compendium of hysterically funny, genuinely surprising, and disarmingly heartfelt showpieces that had these two programmers in stitches and tears by the time The Cure’s epic ​“Plainsong” announced its too‑soon end.

“Few people settle in for a three-hour German comedy about an uptight woman and her farty father expecting a masterpiece. Yet that’s what Maren Ade’s extraordinary, genre-bending revolution of a movie is.”

Catherine Shoard, The Guardian