Abendland

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

It's impossible to know from the movie whether Mr. Geyrhalter believes this paradise needs protecting or whether something in his words - irony, fury, laughter - was lost in translation.

The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.

There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.