Undine (15*)

In films including Yella, Phoenix and the recent Transit, Christian Petzold has offered a panoramic take on Germany present and past, drawing on cinema history to take exhilarating risks with the pleasures of narrative.

His most playful film to date, Undine is at once a quasi-realist contemporary drama and an evocative rewriting of the German myth of the water nymph. Paula Beer (Frantz) plays a historian of Berlin urbanism, who is undergoing a romantic crisis when she has a literally explosive encounter with industrial diver Christoph (Beer’s Transit co-star Franz Rogowski).

Petzold skates elegantly and provocatively on the edge of the impossible – and against the odds, weaves his magic in an entertainment that’s beautifully acted, eerily moving and, as ever, acutely intelligent.