The former NME star writer rewatches the films of the German director and writes hauntingly about the way our tastes and passions change over time

A director’s infatuation with a boy turns sour in the French film-maker’s frothy reworking of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

From the stark horror of Hamsun’s novel to Fassbinder’s commentary on love and racism, our critics choose great cultural works about being alone

Oskar Röhler has created a heartfelt and appropriately awestruck portrait of the bleary Byron of the German new wave, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The actor and singer on growing up in Bremen after the second world war, becoming Germany’s Meryl Streep – and her new octogenarian lesbian romance

A director fends off meddling execs and egotistical actors while remaking a German classic in this ensemble satire

The must-see movies that have defined a century of European cinema, as chosen by the Observer’s film writers

Aki Kaurismäki’s tale of a Syrian refugee who stows away to Finland mines the deadpan humour he’s famous for while refusing to flinch from heartbreak and hardship

Queen of Earth and The Neon Demon are the latest in a long line of films about conflict and hysteria in female relationships

Danish documentarian Christian Braad Thomsen examines the great – and extremely unsympathetic – German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, using unseen interview footage. The result is an intimate, revealing and rather sentimental portrait