Despair

Newly restored so that both Michael Ballhaus's cinematography and Peer Raben's score can dazzle once more, Fassbinder's English-language adaptation of Nabokov's novel boasts a sharp Tom Stoppard script and a superlative performance by Bogarde as Hermann Hermann, a prosperous Russian chocolate manufacturer who takes desperate, deadly measures in his attempts to deal with changes overtaking Berlin between the wars. A blistering account of a slide into insanity, both individual and societal.