Halloween [1978] (5 Stars)

It's my custom to watch this film every year on 31st October. I was actually considering watching the new Halloween trilogy instead this year, but I decided against it. Maybe next year.

Success Rate:  + 213.4

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Scream 3 (5 Stars)

Scream 3 (2000) – When the Horror Becomes Hollywood

By the time Scream 3 arrived, the slasher genre had already eaten itself alive through imitation, and Wes Craven knew it. So instead of pretending to resurrect something fresh, he and writer Ehren Kruger (standing in for original scribe Kevin Williamson) leaned even further into Scream's defining trick: horror that knows it's horror. The result is a film that isn't just about killing the survivors of Scream 2, it's about killing the franchise itself, or at least dissecting it on the operating table.

Set against the backdrop of Stab 3, the in-universe film series inspired by the original Woodsboro murders, Scream 3 folds in on itself until the line between fiction and reality all but disappears. Every scene is both a murder sequence and a movie scene, a set within a set. Characters walk through Hollywood replicas of their own traumatic pasts, and Ghostface's violence becomes a twisted form of direction. If Scream was about how horror movies shape behavior, Scream 3 is about how the machinery of Hollywood rewrites the truth.

This is where the film's “rules of the trilogy” come into play, courtesy of Randy's posthumous videotape cameo – a highlight of the film and a meta masterstroke. He reminds the survivors (and us) that in the final act of a trilogy:

The past comes back to haunt you.

Secrets are revealed.

The killer's powers reach “superhuman” proportions.

Craven dutifully checks these boxes: hidden parentage, retconned motives, and a villain who practically embodies the ghost of franchise lore. The meta-commentary doubles as catharsis; what began as parody of slasher tropes becomes a self-portrait of Hollywood's own cyclical storytelling and moral amnesia.

Still, Scream 3 isn't as sharp or as sly as its predecessors. The absence of Williamson's script shows in the pacing and dialogue; the balance between horror and satire tips toward the latter. It's more playful than scary, more commentary than carnage. But as a metafilm, it's fascinating; a horror movie about the impossibility of ending a horror movie.

In the end, Scream 3 doesn't just close a trilogy; it closes a loop between artifice and authenticity. By the time the credits roll, we've watched not only a film about films but a film haunted by its own franchise DNA–a slasher turned séance.

Though generally considered the weakest film in the trilogy, Scream 3 has hordes of fans who praise it and attribute it cult status. It stands as a fittingly self-referential finale – a meta-horror about the rules, myths, and monsters that movies themselves create.

Success Rate:  + 2.1

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Demons (4½ Stars)

This is the October choice for my cinema's Weird Wednesday event. It's an excellent choice. It's 100% trash. There's mindless gore from beginning to end, and no explanation is given for the events. A film is shown about demons, and the same demons come to life in the cinema. Brilliant!

Click here for a more detailed review.

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Scream 2 (5 Stars)

Scream 2 – The Horror Sequel that Watches Itself Watching You

When Wes Craven released Scream in 1996, it revived the slasher genre by dissecting it – both loving and mocking its clichés. Its sequel, Scream 2, takes that self-reflexive impulse and amplifies it, becoming not only a horror film about horror films, but a horror sequel about the inevitability and predictability of sequels. It's a movie obsessed with its own status as cinema – what it means to depict violence, to consume it and to perform it again and again under the guise of entertainment.

The Meta of the Meta: Watching the Movie Within the Movie

The opening scene of Scream 2 is one of the most audacious metafilm gestures in mainstream horror. Set in a packed cinema showing Stab – a film based on the murders from the first Scream – we are thrust into a spectacle of spectatorship. The audience within the film, masked and gleeful, mirrors the audience watching Scream 2 in real life. Craven transforms the theatre into a mirror maze: viewers watching viewers watching murder as entertainment.

The scene literalises horror's self-awareness while critiquing its consumption. The boundaries between fiction and reality collapse in real time. When Jada Pinkett's character, Maureen Evans, is stabbed to death amid cheering crowds who think it's part of the show, Craven forces us to confront our complicity as horror audiences – our appetite for stylized death and our comfort with seeing certain bodies die first.

Race and the Periphery of the Frame

That opening sequence also foregrounds Scream 2's uneasy engagement with race. The choice to feature two black characters (Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps) in the prologue is not incidental – it's a deliberate metatextual gesture. Their dialogue critiques the horror genre's historical whiteness: Maureen complains that "Black people always get killed first", voicing a long-standing fan frustration and cultural truth about slasher films.

But Craven's choice is double-edged. By having them die in the very next moments, the film acknowledges that critique yet also reproduces it. It's both a self-aware nod and a failure of imagination – a knowing wink that doesn't save the characters from the same fate. This recursive irony is precisely what defines Scream 2's relationship to race: it sees the problem clearly but remains unable (or unwilling) to step outside the structure it mocks.

Beyond the opening, the film reverts to a predominantly white cast, situating its story in a college environment coded as upper-middle-class and implicitly white. The only black characters who speak meaningfully are relegated to brief, marginal roles. Scream 2 thus reflects a broader pattern of 1990's Hollywood diversity: inclusion through commentary, not transformation.

In other words, Scream 2 knows it's participating in exclusion, and calls attention to that fact, but still participates.

The Meta Frame as Social Commentary

What keeps Scream 2 so compelling, however, is that its metafilm sensibility extends beyond just genre rules; it becomes a mode of cultural reflection. The film within the film (Stab) mirrors how the media capitalises on real violence, transforming trauma into spectacle. For Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the survivor of the original film, the existence of Stab turns her pain into entertainment. She's forced to watch her own trauma fictionalised and sold – a meta-commentary on how real-life suffering, especially women's suffering, is endlessly recycled for cultural consumption.

This idea connects back to the racial dynamic of the opening: both Maureen and Sidney are victims of a system that aestheticises violence differently depending on who's watching. The Stab audience cheers Maureen's death; the media profits from Sidney's survival. Both are products in the machinery of spectacle.

Conclusion: Self-Aware but Not Self-Transcendent

Scream 2 remains one of the sharpest horror sequels ever made precisely because it knows it cannot escape its own reflection. It's trapped in the feedback loop of representation: critiquing what it reproduces, reproducing what it critiques. Its metafilm brilliance lies in this tension: the recognition that awareness alone doesn't equate to change.

When Jada Pinkett's Maureen dies screaming in a theatre full of spectators who mistake it for performance, Scream 2 asks us a haunting question: if horror knows it's problematic, and we know that it knows, why do we keep watching?

Success Rate:  + 5.2

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Scream (5 Stars)

Revitalising the Teen Slasher and Reimagining the Victim

By the mid-1990's, the American slasher film seemed creatively exhausted. After the explosive success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), the genre descended into formula: interchangeable masked killers, one-dimensional teenage victims and endless sequels that dulled the impact of the original innovations. The archetypes – the "final girl", the sexually active couple, the killer's traumatic backstory – had become so familiar that they no longer provoked fear. Into this stagnation entered Wes Craven's Scream (1996), a film that not only revitalised the teen slasher but also transformed the role and meaning of the victim. Through its self-aware script, complex characters and layered treatment of violence, Scream resurrected a dying form by allowing both its characters and its audience to understand and question the very rules that had once defined it.

Reviving the Rules

Kevin Williamson's screenplay for Scream is built on the premise that its characters are already fluent in horror. They know the "rules" of the slasher film – never have sex, never drink, never say "I'll be right back" – and they recite them with a mix of irony and affection. Yet, despite this awareness, they are still drawn inexorably into the same deadly pattern. This self-referential structure revitalised the genre by acknowledging its clichés while using them to generate new forms of tension.

Director Wes Craven, whose earlier "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) helped shape the original slasher boom, uses this meta-approach not as parody but as reanimation. He brings intelligence and energy back to the genre by blending comedy with genuine horror. The film's opening sequence, in which Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker is terrorised over the phone, encapsulates this new sensibility: the scene references "Halloween" and "When a Stranger Calls", but its execution is sharp, cruel and emotionally devastating. The audience expects irony but gets terror. In killing off its biggest star within the first ten minutes, Scream announces that its rules will not be predictable and that its victims will matter.

The Significance of Each Victim

One of the ways Scream revitalises the slasher is through the individualisation of its victims. Rather than treating them as disposable archetypes, Craven and Williamson give each death emotional and thematic significance, transforming what was once mechanical slaughter into commentary on horror itself.

Casey Becker, the opening victim, is the ultimate meta-casualty. Her playful conversation about favourite horror movies turns fatal when her knowledge fails to save her. Her death represents the futility of media literacy in the face of real violence. Casey's murder re-establishes fear in a genre that had become predictable; it shocks precisely because it violates expectation. The visceral brutality of her death signals a return to the raw horror that the 1980's sequels had diluted, while simultaneously marking the death of the passive horror audience.

Principal Himbry, stabbed in his office, serves as a symbolic victim of adult authority's impotence. His death, though played partly for dark humour, underscores how the adults in Scream are powerless to protect their students. The slasher's focus shifts firmly to the teenage sphere; adults are spectators, not saviours.

Tatum Riley, Sidney Prescott's best friend, embodies the genre's gender politics. Smart, witty and assertive, Tatum might in earlier slashers have been reduced to the "promiscuous victim" stereotype. Yet Scream complicates this by making her death tragic rather than moralistic. Killed in a garage door – a grotesque mixture of humour and horror – her death highlights the absurdity of slasher violence and the audience's uneasy complicity in enjoying it. Craven's staging transforms what could have been a punishment for sexuality into a critique of the genre's misogynistic conventions.

Kenny the Cameraman, representing the voyeuristic media, dies because of his proximity to spectacle. His murder outside the van literalises the film's central anxiety about watching: the line between observer and participant collapses. In Scream, to watch horror is to risk becoming part of it.

The final victims, Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, invert the genre's traditional moral dichotomy. They are not supernatural monsters but horror fans turned murderers, consciously modelling themselves on cinematic killers. Their revelation exposes Scream's central paradox: that violence in the media and violence in life are entwined in a cycle of imitation. The killers' self-awareness reflects the audience's own, implicating viewers in the very horror they consume.

The Final Girl Reimagined

At the centre of this landscape of victims stands Sidney Prescott, the quintessential yet redefined "final girl". Unlike her predecessors, Sidney is acutely aware of the horror narrative she inhabits. Her trauma – rooted in her mother's murder and the town's moral hypocrisy – gives her depth and resilience. When she eventually turns the camera on her attackers, reversing the gaze of the slasher, Sidney symbolically reclaims agency for the genre's victims. Her survival feels earned, not formulaic.

Through Sidney, Scream revitalises not just the slasher's structure but its emotional core. She is not a mere survivor but a participant in the film's deconstruction of horror, embodying both the genre's past and its future.

Cultural and Genre Legacy

The success of Scream was immediate and transformative. It rejuvenated box offices, inspired imitators like "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997) and "Urban Legend" (1998), and brought horror back into mainstream teen culture. More importantly, it made the slasher self-conscious without making it sterile. By turning victims into characters with symbolic weight, Scream restored emotional investment to a genre that had become hollow spectacle.

Each victim's death carries meaning – about youth, media, sexuality and spectatorship – so that the film becomes both a critique and a celebration of horror. In recognising the constructedness of its world, Scream paradoxically makes that world feel more real, its violence more shocking, and its victims more human.

Conclusion

Scream revitalised the teen slasher genre by reintroducing intelligence, emotional depth and cultural self-awareness. Its victims are not interchangeable bodies but reflections of the genre's own anxieties: about spectatorship, morality and identity. By giving meaning to each death, Scream transforms the mechanics of horror into a meta-narrative about the genre's rebirth.

Nearly thirty years later, Scream remains the definitive bridge between the classical slasher and the postmodern horror film; a blood-soaked love letter to the genre that refused to die.

Success Rate:  + 10.4

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Frankenstein [2025] (5 Stars)

When I heard that Guillermo del Toro was planning to film "Frankenstein", my immediate thought was "Why? Hasn't it been done so often before?"

It's true. Mary Shelley's famous novel has been adapted for cinema so often over the years, more or less accurately. The best known adaptations were made by Universal Studios in 1931, Hammer Horror in 1957 and the Hollywood version in 1994. All three have their charm, but the 1994 version is the most accurate in comparison with Mary Shelley's novel.

I don't want to include spoilers in this review, but I assume that my readers have seen the three versions named above and many have also read the novel.

The version I watched today includes the story's outer frame that was omitted in the first two versions. We see Victor Frankenstein and his creature on the ice heading towards the North Pole. Then the rest of the story is told in two parts: Victor's life up to the creation of the creature, and the creature's life. The first half is greatly changed from the novel, making it less accurate than the 1994 version, but it's so emotionally moving that it doesn't matter. The second half, the creature's life, keeps close to the novel, even more accurately than the 1994 version.

Guillermo del Toro has created a masterpiece. It's a horror film for people who don't like horror films.

Coming Home (5 Stars)

Zhang Yimou's "Coming Home" (2014) presents a restrained yet emotionally resonant study of memory, trauma and enduring love in post-Cultural Revolution China. Departing from the visual spectacle that characterized his earlier works, Zhang adopts a subdued aesthetic and an intimate narrative mode to explore how political violence fractures personal identity and collective history. Through nuanced performances by Gong Li and Chen Daoming, "Coming Home" transforms a private tragedy into a meditation on national amnesia and the human need to remember.

Introduction

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) remains one of the most traumatic periods in modern Chinese history, leaving indelible scars on both individuals and institutions. Zhang Yimou's "Coming Home" situates its narrative at the aftermath of this upheaval, not as a political exposé but as an emotional and psychological inquiry. Adapted from Yan Geling's novel "The Criminal Lu Yanshi", the film narrows its focus to a single family torn apart by ideological persecution and time. The story's apparent simplicity – a husband returning home to a wife who no longer remembers him – belies a profound investigation into how trauma reshapes love and identity.

Aesthetic Restraint and Visual Composition

Unlike the vivid colour symbolism and choreographed dynamism of Zhang's early masterpieces ("Raise the Red Lantern", "Hero"), "Coming Home" embraces minimalism. Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding constructs a muted palette dominated by greys, browns and dim natural light, evoking both the drabness of the Cultural Revolution era and the emotional desolation of its survivors.

The film's mise-en-scène is marked by enclosed spaces – stairwells, narrow corridors and the family home – which function as visual metaphors for confinement and psychological entrapment. Zhang's use of static framing and long takes amplifies the sense of temporal suspension, suggesting a world frozen between remembrance and forgetting. The recurring motif of doors and thresholds underscores the emotional distance between characters: Lu Yanshi's homecoming is perpetually deferred, both spatially and emotionally.

Performance and Embodied Memory

The performances of Gong Li and Chen Daoming constitute the film's emotional core. Gong Li's portrayal of Feng Wanyu transcends mere pathology; her selective amnesia becomes an embodiment of collective trauma. Her gestures – hesitant, repetitive, and constrained – articulate a form of bodily memory that persists even when cognitive recall has failed. In contrast, Chen's Lu Yanshi performs devotion as ritual, a repetitive act of care that affirms love's endurance amid erasure.

Their relationship functions as an allegory for the nation itself: Lu represents the persistence of historical truth, while Feng embodies the wilful or involuntary forgetting that accompanies survival. Zhang's direction avoids melodrama, allowing silence and gesture to communicate what language cannot. The absence of recognition between the couple thus becomes a site of ethical inquiry – can reconciliation occur without remembrance?

Narrative Structure and Temporal Dislocation

The film's temporal structure reinforces its thematic preoccupation with loss. By beginning after Lu's release from prison, Zhang displaces the political violence to the background, focusing instead on its psychic aftermath. Time in "Coming Home" is fragmented and recursive; letters, dreams and songs serve as mnemonic devices attempting to restore continuity. Yet each attempt at recovery collapses under the weight of absence.

This non-linear temporality aligns with trauma theory – particularly Cathy Caruth's conception of trauma as an "unclaimed experience", one that resists integration into narrative memory. Feng's amnesia can thus be read as a cinematic manifestation of collective repression, while Lu's unwavering attempts to reintroduce himself signify the ethical imperative to remember.

Sound, Silence and the Ethics of Remembering

Composer Chen Qigang's minimalist score underscores the film's meditative tone. The sparse piano melodies function less as emotional cues than as echoes of memory itself – faint, incomplete and cyclical. Silence, conversely, operates as a structural principle. Zhang allows moments of stillness to stretch uncomfortably long, forcing the audience to inhabit the same suspended temporality as his characters.

In doing so, the film poses an ethical question central to post-revolutionary Chinese cinema: How can a society confront the violence of its past without reopening unhealed wounds? "Coming Home" does not offer resolution. Instead, it constructs a space for mourning – an acknowledgment of what has been lost and what must still be remembered.

Conclusion

"Coming Home" represents Zhang Yimou's evolution from visual formalism to psychological realism. By eschewing spectacle, he achieves a film of quiet devastation and moral clarity. The story's intimacy – a husband and wife divided by memory – becomes a universal allegory for historical trauma. Gong Li's fragmented consciousness and Chen Daoming's patient fidelity embody the dialectic of forgetting and remembrance that defines modern China's relationship to its past.

Ultimately, "Coming Home" is less a story of reunion than a requiem for memory – a cinematic elegy that asks whether love alone can withstand the erasures of history.

Curse of the Golden Flower (5 Stars)

Zhang Yimou's "Curse of the Golden Flower" (2006) unfolds as a spectacle of opulence and ruin – a tragic epic wrapped in gold silk and ritual precision. Beneath its breathtaking beauty lies a narrative of decay, betrayal, and human frailty that recalls the timeless architecture of classical tragedy. Like "Hamlet" or "Oedipus Rex", it is the story of a ruling house destroyed by its own excess, where power and passion intertwine until they become indistinguishable from poison. Zhang transforms the imperial palace into both stage and prison, a site where duty masquerades as devotion and where rebellion, no matter how just, leads only to annihilation.

I. Aristotelian Foundations: The Fatal Flaws of Power

According to Aristotle's Poetics, tragedy arises from a noble character's downfall brought about by hamartia – a fatal error or flaw – which evokes pity and fear in the audience. In Zhang's imperial tragedy, every member of the royal family possesses such a flaw, and it is through these flaws that their destruction unfolds. The Emperor (Chow Yun-Fat), commanding and disciplined, is consumed by hubris, the belief that his authority extends over every life and mind within his dominion. He poisons his wife, the Empress (Gong Li), not to kill her swiftly, but to assert his control through her slow unraveling – a perverse act of dominance masquerading as medical care. His tyranny cloaks itself in ritual and ceremony; his cruelty is indistinguishable from governance.

The Empress, equally proud, embodies the tragic counterforce – the will to resist within a system designed to suppress her. Her hamartia lies not in malice, but in pride and desperation, a defiant belief that love and justice can survive within a world governed by deceit. Her decision to rebel against the Emperor, aided by her son Prince Jai, becomes both an act of self-liberation and a fatal misjudgment. Her rebellion is doomed not by weakness, but by the impossibility of moral order in a corrupted hierarchy.

II. The Poison and the Palace: Symbolism of Decay

Poison, the film's recurring motif, is the most direct expression of tragedy's moral decay. The Emperor's poison seeps through the Empress's body just as corruption seeps through the imperial household. Zhang's palace, bathed in shimmering gold, is a visual metaphor for this rot concealed beneath perfection. Every surface gleams, every movement is choreographed, and every emotion is repressed beneath the weight of decorum.

The golden chrysanthemum, from which the film takes its name, deepens this paradox. Traditionally a symbol of nobility and longevity, the flower becomes here a symbol of false beauty – of life gilded over death. When the palace fills with blooming chrysanthemums during the festival, their beauty masks the imminent bloodshed of rebellion. In this world, beauty is not redemption; it is camouflage. The curse of the golden flower is not merely poison, but the illusion of harmony that conceals ruin.

III. Filial Duty and the Confucian Trap

Tragedy in "Curse of the Golden Flower" is inseparable from the Confucian order that defines the imperial family's existence. Hierarchy, filial piety, and ritual propriety – values meant to sustain harmony – become instruments of imprisonment. Prince Jai (Jay Chou), the most honorable of the Emperor's sons, is torn between filial loyalty and moral conscience. His devotion to his mother compels him to join her rebellion, but his upbringing forbids him to raise a hand against his father. This impossible dilemma mirrors the tragic paradox of Confucian ethics: the son must both obey and resist, both honor and defy.

In the film's devastating climax, when the rebellion fails, Jai kneels before the Emperor, who demands that he execute the Empress. Jai refuses, asserting his love and moral clarity, and then takes his own life. His death completes the cycle of tragedy: virtue proves powerless within a corrupt order. Zhang renders this moment not as melodrama, but as ritual – a suicide performed with the same precision as a festival dance. In the empire of gold, even death must be beautiful.

IV. The Aesthetic of Tragedy: Beauty as Doom

Zhang Yimou's visual style – characterized by symmetrical framing, saturated color, and choreographed movement – transforms tragedy into an aesthetic experience. The palace itself becomes a living symbol of confinement: vast yet airless, dazzling yet oppressive. Every corridor glows with amber light, every garment glitters with embroidered perfection, yet the splendor suffocates rather than liberates.

This visual contradiction echoes the core of tragic art. In classical tragedy, beauty and suffering coexist – the aesthetic order of the story gives form to human chaos. "Curse of the Golden Flower" extends this principle into cinematic language: the more ornate the frame, the more unbearable the despair it contains. The Empress's golden gown, heavy and radiant, becomes her armor and her shroud; her beauty signifies both resistance and entrapment. By the film's end, she resumes drinking her poisoned medicine, surrounded by chrysanthemums – a living statue in a world where gold has devoured the human heart.

V. Catharsis and the Cycle of Power

What makes "Curse of the Golden Flower" tragic rather than merely dramatic is its evocation of catharsis – the purging of pity and fear. The audience pities the Empress, who fights for dignity in a world that denies her personhood, and fears the Emperor's capacity to turn love into control. Yet when the rebellion is crushed and the palace returns to perfect order, there is no triumph, only the stillness of despair. The Emperor's victory is hollow; the empire stands, but the family is ashes.

Zhang ends not with resolution but with repetition: the servants resume their duties, the chrysanthemums are restored, and the Empress continues to sip her poison. The palace glitters again, as if nothing has happened. This cyclical ending reflects the deepest irony of tragedy – that human suffering changes nothing in the cosmic or political order. Power survives its victims; beauty hides its crimes. The world endures, but meaning does not.

VI. Conclusion: The Curse of Beauty and the Logic of Tragedy

In "Curse of the Golden Flower", Zhang Yimou fuses the aesthetics of imperial China with the moral architecture of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. The Emperor's pride, the Empress's defiance, and the sons' divided loyalties compose a timeless pattern of downfall – not from external enemies, but from the corruption within. The film's title encapsulates this paradox: the golden flower is both the emblem of civilization and the mark of its decay.

Through his visual grandeur and moral austerity, Zhang reveals the essence of tragedy: the inevitability of loss when human passion confronts absolute power. In the Emperor's palace, every act of love becomes treason, every dream of freedom ends in submission. The final image – gold shimmering over silence – leaves us with the chilling truth that in a world built on order and beauty, the curse is not death, but endurance.

Success Rate:  - 0.3

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The Flapper (4 Stars)

Alan Crosland's "The Flapper" (1920), written by Frances Marion and starring Olive Thomas, stands as a landmark in American cinema – not merely as an early comedy about youthful rebellion, but as a film that helped define the cultural archetype of the "flapper". Often cited as the first motion picture to use and popularise the term, "The Flapper" captures a moment of profound social change at the dawn of the 1920's, when women were beginning to assert new forms of independence and identity in the wake of World War I.

At its core, "The Flapper" is a coming-of-age story. Genevieve "Ginger" King, a spirited small-town girl, longs to escape the dull conventions of her respectable upbringing. Her time at an exclusive finishing school and her innocent flirtations with men represent her first attempts to explore a world that has always been kept just out of reach. Ginger's naïve pursuit of glamour and adventure ultimately leads her into a mix-up involving stolen jewels, a comic scandal that mirrors her own confusion about where the line between fantasy and real-world consequence lies. In the end, she redeems herself by exposing the true criminals, thus reaffirming her essential goodness even as she learns the costs of rebellion.

The film's narrative is deceptively simple, but it reflects deeper tensions within early twentieth-century gender politics. Ginger's behaviour challenges the patriarchal norms of both her family and society, yet her misbehaviour is framed through comedy and moral correction rather than tragedy. This structure allows audiences of the time to enjoy the spectacle of female freedom while still witnessing its containment. The flapper figure, as represented by Olive Thomas, embodies a paradox: she is liberated enough to question social conventions, but not so liberated that the story must punish her for it. The film thus offers a safe, transitional fantasy for a culture negotiating women's growing autonomy.

Frances Marion's script lends the story both wit and empathy, avoiding moralism even as it restores order by the final act. Ginger's flirtatiousness is not condemned as wickedness but portrayed as youthful curiosity – a human response to the stifling expectations placed upon young women. Thomas's performance amplifies this complexity: her expressive face and physicality convey both mischief and vulnerability. In her, we see the birth of a new cinematic heroine: playful, self-aware, and unapologetically modern.

Visually and thematically, "The Flapper" bridges the genteel sensibilities of silent-era melodrama and the vibrant modernity that would come to define the Jazz Age. Its treatment of fashion, flirtation, and moral ambiguity foreshadows the more sophisticated flapper films of the later 1920's, such as It (1927) with Clara Bow. Yet "The Flapper" retains an innocence that reveals its transitional nature: it celebrates the possibility of freedom without fully embracing its implications.

Ultimately, The Flapper is both a product and a catalyst of cultural change. It documents the early cinematic imagination of the "modern girl", capturing the anxieties and excitements surrounding women's new visibility in public life. Through Ginger King, the film announces the arrival of a generation eager to dance out of the parlor and into the modern world – with wit, courage, and just enough scandal to make history.

Shanghai Triad (4 Stars)

This is the seventh film directed by Zhang Yimou, made in 1995. As in his previous films, Gong Li is the lead actress.

The film shows seven days in the life of a 14-year-old peasant boy called Shuisheng. His uncle summons him to Shanghai to work for a criminal gang. He's assigned to be the personal servant of the boss's mistress Xiao Jinbao, a beautiful but haughty night club singer.

After a failed attempt to assassinate the boss, the gang's elite takes refuge on a small island, along with Xiao Jinbao and Shuisheng. In the claustrophobic environment deceit and betrayal lead to internal battles within the gang, while Shuisheng looks on with wide eyes, hardly able to understand what's unfolding around him.

It's a gangster movie, but it can't be compared with films like "The Godfather". It's much more emotional, and the intricate plot subtleties are spellbinding. It deservedly won several international awards. Unlike Zhang Yimou's previous films, it wasn't banned in China.

To Live (4½ Stars)

This is the sixth film made by Zhang Yimou in 1994. Like the previous five films, it features Gong Li as the lead actress, although the lead actor Ge You plays a more important role. He was well known for playing comedy roles, but his serious role in "To Live" has since been praised as his best performance.

Ge You plays Xu Fugui, a young man who's inherited a sizable fortune. He's also a gambling addict. Despite the protests of his wife Jiazhen (Gong Li) he gambles away everything he has, including his family home.

Before losing his money Fugui had never worked. Now he turns his hobby into a career. He entertains people with shadow puppets.

The film is told in episodes from the 1940's to the 1970's. It shows the life of Fugui, Jiazhen, their children and their grandchildren under the rise of Communism. Neither Fugui nor his wife are politically motivated. They don't care who's in charge and do what they're told.

Does the story have a happy ending? Of course not. Zhang Yimou's films are tragedies.

This time there was a bigger budget, leading to the use of more locations. Zhang Yimou requested the Chinese army to send him extras, and they gave him 2000 extras. This makes the war scenes spectacular.

I would have given the film five stars, but I found the opening scenes with the gambling silly. Maybe I just don't understand gambling. How can anyone throw away everything he has when he has a beautiful wife and daughter at home? Interestingly, Zhang Yimou agrees with me. In a later interview he said that he should have omitted Fugui's decline and started the film with his life as a poor puppeteer.

"To Live" won a series of awards, including three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, it was banned in China, which hardly surprises me. Zhang Yimou claims to have shown China's cultural revolution neutrally, as it was, but this includes the bad as well as the good. After the film was released abroad, Zhang Yimou was barred from making films for five years, but fortunately this decision was taken back.

The Story of Qiu Ju (4 Stars)

In my review of "Codename Cougar" I claimed that it was Zhang Yimou's only film set in the present day. I was wrong. His fifth film, "The Story of Qiu Ju", made in 1992, is another present day film. In some ways it's also untypical for his films, even though it deals with themes that are common in his early films.

Qinglai is a peasant who grows red chilis. He wants to build a small wooden barn to store them on his land, but the local chief doesn't allow it. He says that the land is only for growing, not for any sort of buildings. It comes to an argument. Qinglai says that the chief can only grow hens, referring to the fact that he's only had daughters. The chief kicks Qinglai in the groin, injuring him so badly that he's unable to work for two months.

This is where the film starts. Qinglai himself is a humble man and accepts what the chief did to him. His wife Qiu Ju demands justice. She complains to the local constable, who tells the chief to pay Qinglai's medical bills and give him 200 yuan to compensate for lost earnings. That's only $30, but in rural China it was considered adequate. For Qiu Ju it's not about the money. She wants the chief to apologise, but he insists that Qinglai deserved the kick. She appeals to the county, who pass the same judgement. Then she travels to the (unnamed) large city, who increase the compensation to 250 yuan, but she's still not happy.

The film is about a woman's stubbornness in the face of Chinese bureaucracy. The film historian Tony Rayns points out that the Chinese bureaucrats are portrayed as untypically friendly, which is probably the reason why "The Story of Qiu Ju" was the first of Zhang Yimou's films that wasn't banned in China.

The film seems to have a lot of extras, but they aren't voluntary participants. It was filmed in busy streets with hidden cameras. That probably wouldn't be legal in America. In the 1990's the Chinese film industry was in a state of turmoil, which meant that nobody knew what was allowed and what wasn't.

Gong Li is the pregnant woman in the red coat. She was a famous film star in China, but nobody recognised her dressed as a peasant.

It's a very slow moving film. For the first 30 minutes I didn't enjoy it. It seemed boring. Then it grew on me, as I began to appreciate the film's subtleties.

Codename Cougar (3 Stars)

I recently bought a Blu-ray box set with eight films that Zhang Yimou directed with the actress Gong Li. At the time I thought it was all their collaborations, but when I checked I found that one film was missing: "Codename Cougar", Zhang Yimou's second film, made in 1989. As far as I can tell, it's never been released on disc. It's a curiosity. Gong Li won awards for her performance, but Zhang Yimou himself disowned it, calling it his worst film. After some searching I managed to download a copy, which seems to have been ripped from television. As you know, I don't approve of film piracy, but I make an exception when a film is otherwise unavailable.

The film is a political thriller set in the present, i.e. 1989. That sets it apart from all Zhang Yimou's other films, which take place in the past. A private plane carrying a senior businessman is hijacked when it's flying from Taiwan to South Korea. The hijackers foolishly fire a gun in the cockpit, damaging the landing gear. The plane is forced to make a crash landing in mainland China.

What's interesting is the way the governments of China and Taiwan are forced to work together to solve the crisis. China sends soldiers to the scene, but a senior Taiwanese diplomat leads the negotiations.

It's obvious that corners were cut to reduce the budget. Scenes are linked by a series of still shots to prevent the use of extras. It's not a bad film, but it's not my taste.

Raise the Red Lantern (4½ Stars)

Introduction

Zhang Yimou's "Raise the Red Lantern" (1991) is a visually stunning yet emotionally harrowing portrait of power, desire, and control in a rigidly patriarchal world. Set in 1920's Republican-era China, the film follows Songlian, a young woman who becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy feudal lord and finds herself trapped in a system of ritualized domination. Beneath its exquisite surfaces, the film offers a profound critique of social hierarchy and the persistence of Confucian patriarchy. Through its careful use of color, space, and ritual, "Raise the Red Lantern" reveals how beauty and tradition can serve as instruments of oppression.

Plot Synopsis

After her father's death leaves her family destitute, nineteen-year-old Songlian (Gong Li) agrees to marry a rich master, becoming his fourth wife. Upon arriving at the vast, stone-walled estate, she learns that each wife lives in a separate courtyard, and that the Master's favor is signified by the lighting of red lanterns outside the chosen wife's quarters each night.

Initially, Songlian believes she can manipulate this system, but she soon discovers a world steeped in deception and rivalry.

First Mistress, Yuru, is resigned and embittered, holding onto seniority but little affection.

Second Mistress, Zhuoyun, feigns kindness while scheming to undermine others.

Third Mistress, Meishan, a former opera singer, is passionate and rebellious, pursuing a secret affair with the family doctor.

Songlian's own attempts at self-assertion – including a false pregnancy meant to win attention – spiral into tragedy when Meishan's infidelity is discovered and punished by execution. Isolated and powerless, Songlian descends into madness. As a new fifth mistress arrives, the red lanterns are lit once more, restoring the appearance of order. The cycle continues.

Symbolism and Visual Style

The Red Lanterns

The film's central symbol, the red lantern, embodies the seductive face of power. Lit outside a wife's quarters to mark the Master's favor, the lanterns appear warm and intimate yet signify ownership and control. They represent both privilege and imprisonment, their glow a reminder that desire has been institutionalized. When Songlian is punished and her lanterns are covered in black cloth, the extinguished light becomes a symbol of erasure – a literal and emotional darkness.

Color and Composition

Zhang Yimou's visual precision transforms every frame into a tableau of meaning. The film's dominant red palette – vibrant yet oppressive – connotes both passion and danger. The cold gray architecture of the compound heightens the contrast, underscoring how ritual beauty conceals emotional sterility.

The camera's symmetrical framing and static long shots evoke a sense of confinement. The courtyard's geometry traps the characters within invisible lines of power, and the repetition of movement and color mirrors the monotony of their ritualized lives.

Architecture and Space

The mansion functions as a visual metaphor for the patriarchal system. Its walls are high, its courtyards uniform, and its servants omnipresent. Women occupy separate, near-identical quarters, creating proximity without intimacy. The film's frequent use of doorways, windows, and screens to frame characters within frames suggests surveillance and fragmentation – a world where private emotion is constantly on display but never free.

Sound and Silence

The soundtrack relies heavily on silence and repetition. The sound of ritual – servants' footsteps, bells, and chants – replaces music, reinforcing the mechanical nature of life within the compound. When music does appear, as in Meishan's operatic singing, it becomes a fleeting act of resistance, silenced as swiftly as it begins.

Cultural and Historical Context

Confucian Patriarchy and Feudal Hierarchy

The Master's household represents a microcosm of Confucian social order, where hierarchy, ritual, and obedience define every relationship. The Master is an unseen but omnipotent authority – the patriarch whose approval determines identity and worth. The wives' ranked positions mirror the Confucian emphasis on structure and stability at the cost of individuality.

Zhang Yimou contrasts this static order with Songlian's modern sensibility. Educated and self-aware, she embodies a generation caught between feudal submission and modern independence. Her suffering reveals how outdated moral codes continued to dominate even as China entered a new century.

The "Three Obediences and Four Virtues"

Traditional gender ideals in Confucian thought dictated that women obey their fathers, their husbands and their sons. In the film, the wives' entire existence revolves around pleasing the Master. Their rivalry is not natural but socially engineered, ensuring that they police each other instead of challenging authority. Even rebellion, such as Meishan's affair, is framed as moral corruption rather than an act of human longing.

The four virtues are morality, proper speech, modest appearance and hard work.

Ritual as Control

Zhang's portrayal of ritual – from lantern lighting to meal service – illustrates how repetition sustains power. Ritual replaces morality; appearance replaces sincerity. The system endures because everyone participates in it, willingly or not. The film thus becomes a critique not only of patriarchy but of any ideology that disguises domination as harmony.

Political Resonance

Although set in the 1920s, the film's critique extends beyond its historical setting. Upon release, "Raise the Red Lantern" was banned in mainland China, partly because its depiction of ritualized obedience was seen as an implicit commentary on contemporary authoritarianism. The Master's invisible control and the household's blind conformity evoke the mechanisms of political as well as domestic power.

Conclusion: Beauty as a Mask for Tyranny

Raise the Red Lantern is a masterwork of cinematic irony – a film that uses beauty to expose brutality. Zhang Yimou's meticulous aesthetics lure the viewer into admiring the very system that destroys his characters. The elegance of the lanterns, the symmetry of the architecture, and the precision of ritual all serve as metaphors for how oppression disguises itself as order.

Songlian's tragedy lies in her awareness: she sees the system's cruelty yet cannot escape it. Her descent into madness marks both defeat and protest – a final refusal to participate in the game of submission. The closing image, as a new mistress enters and the lanterns glow once again, freezes the story in perpetual repetition. The household – and the society it represents – endures through ritualized renewal of suffering.

In the end, "Raise the Red Lantern" transcends its historical context to become a universal meditation on the seductions of power and the cost of conformity. It is a film about how tradition, beauty, and control intertwine – and how, beneath the red glow of ritual, human freedom flickers and fades.

Away we go (2 Stars)

Burt and Verona are a young-ish couple expecting their first baby. I emphasise the "-ish", because they're in their early 30's and think they've left it too late. Come on, guys, lots of women don't have their first baby until they're over 30. It's completely normal.

Burt finds out that his parents are about to move to Belgium. This worries the couple, because they want their child to grow up in a family environment. They spend the next few weeks on planes visiting friends and relatives to find a new place to live. For one reason or another, the people in every place are unsuitable to associate with their new child.

The film isn't completely serious, but it's not a comedy either. I felt myself wanting to kick some sense into Burt and Veronica. There are many children who grow up with only their parents and no other relatives. As for friends, people can make new friends anywhere they live. It's never been a problem for me. Don't waste hundreds of dollars flying around the country. Stay home and concentrate on preparing a good home for the child.

Success Rate:  - 1.1

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O Brother, Where Art Thou? (5 Stars)

This is a film that I can vaguely remember seeing on television in my pre-blog days. What I didn't remember is how good it is. It's set in Mississippi in the time of America's Great Depression. Three convicts escape from a chain gang, and they have to hurry to retrieve the money that was buried from a bank heist, $1.2 million. To put it into perspective, that would be worth $22 million today. They only have four days to get the money, because the area is due to be flooded to make a new lake. Their journey by hitching rides and stealing cars leads them from one mishap to another.

When I sat down to write this review I intended to describe the plot in full, but it's impossible. So much happens in the story. The incidents in this road movie are a mix of comedy and drama. We can't help but feel affection for the three criminals. The film is loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, one of the world's oldest poems. Very loosely. People appear who are immediately recognisable to anyone who's read the Odyssey, but no attempt is made to flesh out or explain them.

The film is directed by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. They're a phenomenon in filmmaking who worked together from 1984 to 2018. Since then their ways have parted, and their solo films aren't up to the quality of their joint efforts.

Success Rate:  + 0.8

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Ju Dou (4 Stars)

Like most of Zhang Yimou's films, "Ju Dou" is a tragedy. That's a forgotten genre nowadays. Putting it in simple terms, a tragedy is a film that doesn't have a happy ending. The main character usually dies, but not by sacrificing himself as a hero. His death is a failure. His death is often the result of character flaws. The best known tragedies were written by William Shakespeare, in particular "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet".

Ju Dou is a woman who's been bought as a wife by Yang Jinshan, a merchant who owns a dye mill. His previous two wives died young, and it's implied that he was responsible for their deaths. He blamed them for not giving him a son. Now it's Ju Dou's turn to satisfy him. He's cruel to her, beating her when he's not satisfied with her work in the mill.

Yang Tianqing, Yang Jinshan's nephew, works in the mill. He's devoted to his uncle, but he's shocked when he sees how Ju Dou is beaten every day. She asks him to kill her husband, but he refuses. Nevertheless, they have an affair, and she becomes pregnant with his baby. Yang Jinshan thinks the baby is his, and they don't contradict him. Tinbai is the heir, and they don't tell him who his real father is.

In a typical Hollywood film things would be sorted out in the end. Ju Dou and her lover would find happiness. But this is a tragedy. Everything ends with sadness and death. That's the only spoiler I'll give you.

“Ju Dou” is a critique of feudal patriarchy and moral hypocrisy. The vividly colored dye vats contrast with the bleakness of the characters' lives, symbolising both passion and entrapment. The film's lush cinematography and restrained performances heighten its emotional intensity, making it a haunting tale of love crushed by social constraints.

Red Sorghum (4½ Stars)

I was lucky enough to discover this Blu-ray box set last week. It was released in 2023, but I missed it because it was only released in Australia. It's now being offered for horrendous prices on Amazon's web sites, but I was lucky enough to find it for sale on Ebay, direct from Australia. The Blu-rays are locked to Region B, which isn't a problem for me, because Australia is in the same Blu-ray region as Europe. It's only a problem for American customers.

Note that Greenland is also in Region B. If Donald Trump succeeds in taking over Greenland, it will cause problems for Blu-ray sales. I'm betting that he never thought about that.

Of the eight films in the collection, I only owned one as an individual Blu-ray. I had two of the films on DVD, and I'd never seen the other five. Zhang Yimou is one of my favourite directors, so I've been looking for these five films for years. Thank you, Australia!

The box set collects the eight films that Zhang Yimou made with the actress Gong Li. "Red Sorghum" was the first film that he directed and it was Gong Li's first film as an actress. They began their careers together.

The film is told in two parts. In the first part, that takes place round about 1930. A poor woman is given in marriage to a rich leper who owns a distillery that makes sorghum wine. She doesn't love him, but her father wants her to marry him to receive a wedding gift of a black horse. It's a sad world when that's all a woman is worth. A short time later the leper is murdered, and the woman (who's never named) marries a sedan carrier. She takes over the wine making business, and becomes rich.

Nine years later the Japanese invade. The sorghum fields are cut down to make a new highway. The woman leads the resistance against the Japanese.

It's a very patriotic film. The sorghum symbolises the Chinese spirit. It grows wild, and nobody can remember who planted it. When it's cut down, it grows back. And the wine tastes so sweet.

Die Schule der magischen Tiere 4 (4 Stars)

The fourth film in the "School of Magical Animals" has been released 12 months after the third film. The studio wants to keep the German fans happy, and so far there's no sign that the fans are losing interest in the films. Disney could learn a lesson from the Germans.

There are plans to close the school and sell the castle in which it's situated. It's a private school, and there aren't enough enrolments to finance the school. The children can only see one solution. There's a school challenge, in which four schools are competing against one another to carry out physical and intellectual tasks. They say that if their school wins the challenge the popularity will lead to new enrolments. They receive help from Miriam, a new girl who's transferred temporarily from one of the rival schools.

The main cast is the same as in the previous films, but in this film more emphasis is on Leonie. While everyone else is fighting to save the school, she's dealing with a crush she has on Max.

Like the previous three films, it's good action mixed with fantasy and comedy from start to finish. The films can carry on forever... as long as the teenage actors don't get any older.

Goodbye Lenin (5 Stars)

Today is the German holiday, the Day of German Unity. It celebrates the day that East Germany, the DDR, joined West Germany, the BRD, 3rd October 1990. It wasn't an alliance of equals. East Germany had been ruined by 40 years of being a vassal state of Russia. It joined West Germany in the hope of becoming an economically strong country. 35 years later it still hasn't reached the level of the western parts of Germany. But that's a story for another day.

Made in 2003, 13 years after reunification, "Goodbye Lenin" is a poignant and darkly humorous German film that masterfully blends political satire with heartfelt family drama. Set in Berlin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, it follows Alex, a young man who goes to great lengths to protect his fragile, socialist-idealistic mother from the shock of discovering that East Germany has collapsed while she was in a coma.

The film balances emotion and irony beautifully, capturing the absurdities of both socialist nostalgia and capitalist transformation. Daniel Brühl gives a standout performance as Alex, whose elaborate deception becomes both an act of love and a commentary on truth and illusion in a rapidly changing society.

Visually and tonally, "Goodbye Lenin" is rich with symbolism. Its reconstruction of a vanished world evokes both tenderness and loss. It’s funny, moving, and thought-provoking, offering a human lens on history rather than a purely political one.

I've never understood why 18th January isn't celebrated in Germany. That's the day when Germany was founded, as a coalition between 39 independent states, 18th January 1871. Germany had existed as a geographical area for 2000 years, but it had never been a country. In 2021 it was the 150th anniversary of the founding of Germany, but most people didn't even know.

This is the film's most iconic scene. It's actually anachronistic, because the statue wasn't removed until 1992, two years after the film's events. I'll forgive the director, because the scene is necessary for the film. The statue was buried – good riddance! – but it was dug up in 2015 and put in a museum.

In my first review of "Goodbye Lenin" I gave a summary of the events that happened in the eight months while Alex's mother is in a coma. I'll repeat them here.

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October 7th 1989: The 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) is celebrated in East Berlin with a traditional military parade. After the parade Gorbachev says in an interview that reforms are necessary. In the evening there are demonstrations in many cities that are brutally broken up by the police. More than 1000 people are arrested,

October 9th: There are many protests in German cities, and the largest is in Leipzig. More than 70,000 people demonstrate for a democratic renewal of the DDR chanting "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people"). The police do nothing to break up the demonstrations.

October 16th: More than 120,000 people demonstrate in Leipzig.

October 18th: The DDR leader Erich Honecker resigns due to ill health. He is replaced by Egon Krenz, who is very unpopular in the DDR.

October 23rd: On the evening before the formal election of Egon Krenz 300,000 people demonstrate in Berlin against the government.

November 3rd: DDR citizens are allowed to leave the country by crossing into Czechoslovakia. Thousands use the opportunity to flee to the West.

November 4th: More than a million people demonstrate in East Berlin for freedom and democracy in the DDR. The television broadcasts the demonstration live.

November 6th: In Leipzig there are large demonstrations demanding free travel and free elections.

November 7th: The complete DDR government resigns.

November 8th: The government is re-elected by the political office and Egon Krenz becomes General Secretary.

November 9th: In a press conference broadcast live in television, private journeys into West Germany are unconditionally allowed. On the same evening thousands of people from East Berlin queue at the border posts to enter West Berlin. The border patrols are overwhelmed and open the gates for people to cross without checks.

November 19th: Millions of East Germans cross the border into West Germany. Many do not return.

November 27th: The new DDR Minister President Hans Modrow announces widesweeping reforms in the DDR, but categorically denies that reunification is possible.

November 28th: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl presents a 10 point plan for the two German states which will lead to reunification.

December 1st: The DDR parliament removes the requirement for a one party state from the constitution, allowing the creation of other political parties.

December 2nd: A parliamentary committee publishes a report about corruption and abuse of power in the leadership of the socialist party.

December 3rd: The leadership of the socialist party resigns. The public prosecutor calls for the arrest of many politicians, including Erich Honecker.

December 6th: Egon Krenz resigns.

December 7th: The DDR parliament dissolves the secret police.

December 11th: At a demonstration in Leipzig there are calls for reunification.

December 19th: Helmut Kohl meets Hans Modrow in Dresden for talks about cooperation between the two countries. Modrow refuses to accept reunification.

December 22nd: Berlin's Brandenburg Gate is opened for pedestrians to walk through unhindered.

December 31st: The New Year is celebrated with a giant fireworks display at the Brandenburg Gate by both East and West Berliners.

January 15th 1990: More than 2000 demonstrators storm the offices of the secret police and trash the building.

February 1st: Minister President Modrow presents a plan for German reunification to parliament.

February 5th: The DDR parliament allows freedom of the press.

February 7th: The DDR opposition groups unite to create the political party Bündnis 90 (Alliance 1990).

February 10th: Michail Gorbachev promises Helmut Kohl that the Soviet Union will not oppose German reunification.

March 7th: The DDR parliament allows the creation of private companies.

March 18th: The first free elections take place in the DDR. The Christian Democratic Union wins 48% of the votes, the Socialist Party 21%, the Communist Party 16%, the Liberals 5%. Unexpectedly, Bündnis 90 only gets 3% of the votes.

April 12th: Lothar de Maziere becomes the DDR's Minister President. The government wants to join West Germany as soon as possible. (Note the language: the talk was no longer of a reunification of equals, but of the DDR applying for membership of West Germany).

April 27th: Negotiations begin in East Berlin about the economic, political and social union of the two countries.

May 2nd: It is decided to abolish the DDR currency and adopt the West German Mark.

June 6th: The West German terrorist Susanne Albrecht is arrested in the DDR. A series of other ex-terrorists are found who have been given new identities by the DDR secret police.

June 8th: The football World Cup begins. Germany has a united team made up of players from both countries.

June 13th: The demolition of the Berlin Wall begins.

June 21st: The parliaments of both German countries agree on a contract to lead to unity. The Green Party in West Germany and Bündnis 90 in the DDR challenge the contract because it does not treat the two German states as equals.

July 1st: The West German Mark becomes the official currency of the DDR.

July 8th: The united German football team wins the World Cup.

August 23rd: The DDR parliament votes to join West Germany on October 3rd.

September 12th: A peace treaty is finally signed between Germany and the allied powers (America, Russia, England, France). No treaty was signed in 1945. The allied powers agree to start withdrawing their occupation troops from Germany on October 3rd.

October 3rd: Germany becomes reunited.

Success Rate:  + 10.2

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