"Surfacing very slowly over the last few years, what can be legitimately called the New German Cinema is finally becoming an accepted reality. Young, predominantly Berlin-based filmmakers like Valeska Grisebach, Henner Winckler, Maren Ade, Angela Shanelac, and Christoph Hochhasler constitute more than a generational coincidence and less than a movement, but they are linked to each other and, as their films emerge and receive ever greater acceptance on the festival circuit and among domestic and foreign critics, they think of themselves as bound to change German cinema. Well-wrought and ariticulate, their films are far away from the Oberhausen generation, but even farther from the mainly commercial, sentimental, and exploitative output (with some notable exceptions in the experimental field) typical of German cinema in the last 20 years, most recently represented by Downfall and The Lives of Others.

The group is large enough to linked with someone like Christian Petzold on the conventional side (who serves as a kind of mentor to many in the group) or Romuald Karmakar on the more unpredictable front, but there is a family likeness in the films of the New German Cinema. The cleanness of the shots, the precise and careful camera movements, the natural restraint in the acting, the dryness of the storytelling, the silences, the ellipses, and ambiguities, the youth of the characters, the interest in exploring intimacy, and the uneasiness of individuals in society are common characteristics of almost every film in the group.

Born in 1969, Ulrich Khler is not only a good representative of the New German Cinema, but a very personal filmmaker, as already seen in Bungalow, his remarkable first feature and the film that indicated that something serious was going on in Germany. Khler has a knack for beauty, elegance, subtlety, and virtuoso shots. He also likes to play slightly perverse games withe the spectator, jumping ahead in the story and leaving some areas of the plot unexplained or unfinished (in Bungalow there is a strange sequence where the audience is not told whether or not two characters have had sex). But perversity goes a little further in Windows on Monday, his second film, and one of the year's most important."

Eduardo Antin (Quintn) - Cinemascope.