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Prime Video's The Calendar Killer is a German serial killer thriller that keeps audiences guessing until the brutal end. Directed by Adolfo Kolmerer and co-written by Sebastian Fitzek and Susanne Schneider, the 90-minute flick packs a punch with its stars Luise Heyer (All About Me) as Klara and Sabin Tambrea (The Glory of Life) as Jules — two strangers forced to lean on each other while a methodical murderer is on the loose.

The film mainly follows Jules' perspective as a remote, night shift helpline operator after receiving a call from Klara, the next target of an unknown killer who likes to tell his victims the date he will end their lives. Unfortunately for them both, that day had arrived. Klara's only escape from certain death: executing her husband Martin (Friedrich Mücke) instead (and she only has until midnight to do it). Through close-calls, domestic revelations, and eerie happenings at both ends,...

New to Prime Video, The Calendar Killer has taken no time to become a chart-topping hit thanks to its promising premise of a tense, twisting storyline grabbing the attention of millions of viewers. On the surface, the German thriller has all the traits of a great slow-burn movie that puts its build-up and character development above the need for relentless action, and it seems to have paid off in terms of viewership if not reviews.

The movie has surpassed several American movies to grab the top spot after just a few days on Prime Video, seemingly through the usual marketing recommendations, as word of mouth has not been incredibly positive. It is notably the second foreign language title with a middling reputation to dominate the global chart after Spanish drama Culpa Tuya claimed the top spot for a number of weeks. The synopsis offered for the movie reads:

“The Calendar Killer...

Prime Video has some amazing shows and movies lined up for the beginning of the year in January. The streamer brings you a bunch of movies and TV shows along with some Amazon Originals. These original projects include movies like Jennifer Lopez’s Unstoppable and Reese Witherspoon’s You’re Cordially Invited and shows like Dick Wolf’s On Call and a third season of Harlem.

Stills from The Rig Season 1 and Reese Witherspoon’s film You’re Cordially Invited | Credits: Prime Video

Along with the new films and shows, other hit projects like Edge of Tomorrow, Horrible Bosses, How to Get Away with Murder, and The Monk will also arrive on Prime Video this month. This list will get you covered with all the projects for the month.

Prime Video will stream the following new movies in January 2025 January 1 1. A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) Lupita Nyong’o as Sam...

Amazon Prime is ringing in the new year with a fresh lineup of exciting movies and TV shows for January 2025. Whether you’re a fan of thrilling action, heartwarming dramas, or laugh-out-loud comedies, there’s something for everyone this month.

With an ever-growing library of content, Amazon Prime continues to offer a mix of original series and popular films, giving you plenty of options to kick back and enjoy some quality entertainment.

From eagerly awaited new releases to fan-favorite classics, January’s offerings promise to keep you entertained all month long. Get ready to dive into new adventures, explore different genres, and discover hidden gems that you might have missed in the past. Whether you’re planning a cozy night in or looking for something to binge-watch over the weekend, Amazon Prime has you covered.

‘Harlem’ season 3

Prime Video’s comedy ‘Harlem’ returns for Season 3 after a dramatic cliffhanger in...

Exclusive: German drama series I Am Scrooge has landed homes in North America, Europe and Australia ahead of its world premiere at Seriencamp in Cologne this week.

Beta Film has sold the Rtl miniseries, which is from the German producer-distributor’s subsidiary Zeitsprung Pictures, to Mhz in the U.S. and Canada, Sbs in Australia, Dr in Denmark, Tet in Latvia and Rtl in Hungary. Launching on Rtl+ in Germany later this year, it will open Seriencamp tomorrow (June 5).

I Am Scrooge is set in West Berlin in 1988, following Arno Funke, a man operating under the alias ‘Scrooge McDuck’ who becomes the center of one of the most spectacular extortion cases in German criminal history. Funke, a failing artist, uses his talent to build bombs in his kitchen, detonating them overnight at high-end department stories as leverage for extortion. Detectives are soon on the cases, as Funke bags more than...

Love Again is a romantic comedy film written and directed by James C. Strouse. The rom-com movie is based on a German film titled SMS für Dich, which was based on a 2009 of the same name Sofie Cramer. Love Again follows the story of Mira, a young woman who is still grieving over the loss of her fiance, in order to deal with her grief she still sends romantic texts to her fiance’s number not knowing that the phone number has been reassigned to another man, who becomes more and more interested in her. Love Again stars Priyanka Chopra, Sam Heughan, and Celine Dion in the lead roles. So, if you loved the rom-com film here are some similar movies you could watch next.

P.S. I Love You (Rent on Prime Video) Credit – Warner Bros.

Synopsis: Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank stars with Gerard Butler, Lisa Kudrow,...

Germany’s impressive crop of crime drama, mystery, suspense, apocalyptic catastrophe, royal intrigue and tales of the supernatural is certain to attract buyers at this year’s MipTV in Cannes.

The selections of series, TV movies and unscripted shows offer a wide range of content but also remain heavy on crime — a favorite German genre.

Among the new offerings is Beta Film’s fact-based title “I am Scrooge.” Produced by Zeitsprung Pictures, the Cologne-based company behind the hit Netflix spy thriller “Kleo,” “I am Scrooge” chronicles the true story of Arno Funke, a frustrated artist who found fame as a bombmaking extortionist in the early 1990s.

Identifying himself as Dagobert Duck — the German name for the Disney character Scrooge McDuck — Funke targeted some of Germany’s biggest department stores, beginning with Berlin’s KaDeWe in 1988, while continually outwitting police and even becoming a local folk hero. The six-part series stars Friedrich Mücke,...

Exclusive: German public broadcaster’s latest drama is to be a remake of the 2019 Australian thriller mini-series Safe Harbour after a deal with distributor NBCUniversal Formats.

Titled Liberame – Nach dem Sturm (Liberame – After the Storm), the drama is set around a sailing trip on the Mediterranean, an overcrowded refugee boat and a catastrophe that changes the lives of everyone.

All episodes will be available to stream on streaming service ZDFmediathek on July 30and will begin broadcasting on Zdf on August 29.

The original show was produced for Australian cultural broadcaster Sbs and came from Universal International Studios’ Sydney-based producer Matchbox Pictures.

Here’s a synopsis for the Zdf remake: “Jan (Friedrich Mücke) and Caro (Johanna Wokalek) are on a sailing trip on the Mediterranean Sea with Jan’s sister (Natalia Belitski), her friend Daniel (Marc Benjamin) and Helene (Ina Weisse) when they encounter a broken-down boat with refugees in distress. The...

European arms industry corruption, forbidden love in 1920s Berlin and the impact of public outrage on the justice system are some of the themes explored by upcoming Germans TV productions showcased on Aug. 30 on the opening day of the Series Mania Forum in Lille, France.

In collaboration with German Films, the presentation offered a sneak peek at five new high-end shows that look to continue the country’s impressive rollout of recent hit series like “Dark,” “Deutschland 83,” “Babylon Berlin,” “Bad Banks” and “Barbarians.”

The new titles included Zdf and Arte’s ambitious French-German thriller “Algiers Confidential”; Ard’s period drama “Eldorado KaDeWe”; the globetrotting melodrama “Paradiso” and dark comedy “The Wasp,” both from Sky Deutschland; and TVNow (soon to be Rtl Plus) and Vox’s legal drama “The Allegation.”

“Algiers Confidential,” based on Oliver Bottini’s novel, is a political thriller set in present-day Algiers and focuses on the...

Berlin-based Flare Film is ramping up series production with two new high-concept projects in development while currently producing the eight-part “Paradiso” for Sky Deutschland, the first project from the company’s recently launched Flare Entertainment division.

Flare Entertainment is partnering with Beta Film and Deutsche Telekom streaming platform MagentaTV on “The Daughter,” created by Pola Beck and the writing trio known locally as the HaRiBos, Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf and Bob Konrad, with Beck and Kropf serving as showrunners.

The series tells the fact-based story of Tinka, a directionless teenager forced to grow up overnight when her wealthy parents are arrested for running the biggest cocaine ring in Berlin. As she works to free them from jail, she uncovers their secret lives and delves ever deeper into the family business.

Described as “Breaking Bad” meets French cinema, the eight-part family drama examines the shifting power dynamics between a daughter and...

On paper, the plight of a pair of families fleeing 1979’s East Germany in a hot air balloon sounds like fabricated fodder for a spy novel. But as implausible as it sounds, this “The Mysterious Island”-esque grand escape from Deutschland’s then walled-in, oppressive slice really did happen. And nearly four decades after being the subject of Disney’s “Night Crossing,” it is now a tale told in small-screen comedian Michael Bully Herbig’s “Balloon,” a competently made political thriller that sadly mines for suspense in all the wrong places.

Still, “Balloon” is decent entertainment to a degree, and that is mostly thanks to its handsome production values. The quaint environs and row houses of Thuringia as well as the era’s eye-popping costumes by Lisy Christl — well-tailored clothes and floral-heavy fabrics with traces of ’70s cool — are admittedly easy on the eyes. But considering the film’s stretched...

Movies about 20th-century Germany tend to focus on, well, you know. 30 years after East and West reunified, however, “Balloon” serves as a reminder of what the country went through once World War II gave way to the Cold War — and why it still matters.

Unfortunately, Michael Bully Herbig’s film — telling a story previously dramatized in the 1980s Disney movie “Night Crossing” — plays out with such unconvincing drama that you might be left wondering whether its based-on-a-true-story subject matter would have been better served by a documentary.

It begins on Youth Dedication Day, when eighth-graders in the East are loosed upon the world after pledging their allegiance to socialism, and quickly reveals the title’s significance as a handful of floating blue balloons alert a family of would-be defectors that the time has come. Herbig treats it as a given that anyone living in the Soviet-controlled East would risk their lives to escape,...

Michael Herbig’s overwrought drama sucks the thrills out of this story of two families fleeing communist East Germany

You could probably choose a less conspicuous method of defecting than floating across the border in what looks like a giant glowing lightbulb. Yet a spectacular nocturnal breakout from communist East Germany by hot-air balloon is exactly what two families did in September 1979 – the basis of this glossy mainstream thriller released in Germany for last year’s reunification anniversary. Sadly, director Michael Bully Herbig – a well-known German comedy star – does them no favours with a frantic shooting style that somehow manages to render this terrifying endeavour both bombastic and trivial.

Friedrich Mücke and Karoline Schuch play the Strezlks, a disaffected electrician and his wife who, desiring an unfettered future for their two sons, decide to Montgolfier it out of the Gdr. When a northerly wind rears up, they break out the...

"We can make it with your help." Studiocanal has debuted an official UK trailer for a German thriller titled Balloon, or simply Ballon in German. The film tells the true story of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families, who built their own hot air balloon and flew from the Gdr to West Germany in the late 1970s when the country was divided. Günter Wetzel, played by David Kross, was inspired by a magazine article about the balloon show in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "While I’m happy now that we took that decision, if I had the knowledge I have now I wouldn’t do it, because it was so dangerous, but I didn’t recognise that then," he says (via The Guardian). The full cast includes Friedrich Mücke, Karoline Schuch, Alicia von Rittberg, Thomas Kretschmann, Jonas Holdenrieder, Tilman Döbler, and Till Patz. That cool shot with the patchwork colors of the balloon lighting up is gorgeous,...

Winner of the best short film Oscar in 2009 for Toyland, Jochen Alexander Freydank is currently prepping his first feature length project. According to THR, Freydank will adapt the rom-com best-seller Macho Man for Walt Disney Germany.

The film will be based off of Moritz Netenjakob‘s novel of the same name, which tells the story of a sensitive German man who attempts to be macho in order to land a sexy Turkish girl. Friedrich Mücke (Friendship!) will star alongside Pegah Ferydoni (Turkish For Beginners). The Experiment‘s Marc Conrad will produce under his ConradFilm banner with Klaus Dohle of Erfttalfilm.

Freydank isn’t the only recent award-winning short director with the opportunity to make his way into the world of feature lengths. We reported just a few weeks ago that Fox has hired Jesus Orellana to direct the feature length adaptation of his own sci-fi short Rosa, after it went viral back in November.

“My compositions are my life. I would die for them.” It’s not Gustav Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) who says this but his future wife Alma (Barbara Romaner) in this biopic that focuses on the composer’s relationship with her rather than Sigmund Freud (Karl Markovics) as the title implies. Mahler’s desperate visit to the famed psychoanalyst instead provides a framework for revisiting his marriage to a vivacious socialite 19 years his junior.

The film begins at the end: Mahler has discovered that Alma has embarked on an affair with Walter Gropius (Friedrich Mücke), an architect who will later found the Bauhaus school of design. Devastated, Mahler seeks out Freud, who has delayed his vacation for an intense all-night session with the musician. (That Mahler reclines on a cot rather than a couch indicates how unusual their meeting is.) Mahler is wracked by guilt over Alma’s betrayal, and the two...