Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06.12.2006

To a fuming Niklas Maak, Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts' paintings (more here) look "like pattern samples from an old GDR wallpaper factory." Design maybe, but hardly Turner Prize material. "Abts' paintings are what background music is to bars and what the right material is to pieces of furniture – not that I have anything against good decorative design: it's certainly more useful than poor social criticism. But on the other hand it does strike me as odd that when Abts' elegant lurchings, and other harmless little paintings by artists of the Neue Deutsche Malerei showing people with hanging heads in brownish-green fields, are dunked into the terminological dragon blood of cultural criticism long enough, they emerge as 'a questioning of conventional ways of seeing' and 'a subtle analysis of our time'."


Frankfurter Rundschau 06.12.2006

For Elke Buhr, the success of the freshly selected Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts has to do with the pure aesthetic quality of her works, which abstain from messages of any kind: "The paintings emerge from their long creation process above all as decorative works. At the same time, they are so subtle, so unobtrusive, that some collectors much prefer them to a showy work by artist Jonathan Meese when decorating their bedrooms. Hanging a painting by Tomma Abts demonstrates understatement, taste and a sense of style."


Der Tagesspiegel 06.12.2006

Tomorrow Martin Scorsese's thriller "The Departed" comes out in German cinemas. "A great film? More an old master's leisurely return to his roots", writes Jan Schulz-Ojala. "The happy end which follows what is tantamount to a Shakespearian slaughter is like a Nicholson grimace. The ending in Andrew Lau's Hong Kong hit 'Infernal Affairs' from 2002, on which 'The Departed' is based, is more painful and thus more effective. Scorsese's film, however casually the director might deny it, is a direct remake of the Triad thriller, in which Tony Leung plays what was once the more moral and Andy Lau the more unscrupulous of the two characters who become increasingly anthracite in colour as the film progresses. Aside from the cell phones, which are used in one memorable scene in a breathless, silent mutual eavesdropping operation, the Boston setting feels overly retro: Mafia unplugged in mostly dingy, run-down interiors."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 06.12.2006

Thomas Binotto dismisses "The Departed" with the words: "You don't make 'Taxi Driver' on a 90 million dollar budget. This is the problem with 'The Departed'. Whereas the film it was based on, the Hongkong production 'Internal Affairs' by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, was a laconic genre film which gets to the point unpretentiously and is still a refined finger exercise, Scorsese's remake congeals over its 150 minutes running time into a confused gangster farce that is always laid on too thick."

Ulrich Schmid has had enough of the speculation surrounding the death of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. "Putin did it. The Russian secret service FSB did it. Vengeful old KGB men did it because they couldn't forgive the former spy for deserting. The Mafia did it. No, Putin, the Russians, the FSB, the KGB, couldn't have done it, because that would have tarnished their image. It would have been irrational to focus suspicion on themselves. So it was Putin's enemies, covert Russia-haters, anti-communists, flipped-out neoliberals. Perhaps he poisoned himself, who knows? Spies are sneaky people. Any other ideas? We don't know anything, and we will never know anything. The English police will find further clues, and perhaps suspects, but no culprits.... No, the orgy of speculation in the Litvinenko case only reveals who needs to think what."