This German import, titled Der Vorname in its native language (literal translation being the first or given name) is one of those comedies where an innocent dinner party gets out of hand from a conversation. Somewhat insecure professor Stephan (Christoph Maria Herbst) who prides himself on being right all the time is married to Elisabeth (Caroline Peters). Elisabeth's underachieving brother Thomas (Florian David Fitz) and her longtime friend Rene (Justus von Dohnanyi) arrive at their house one evening for dinner, and Thomas announces that his girlfriend Anna (Janina Uhse) and he are expecting a son to be born soon. Everyone wants to know what they plan to name him, so he first makes them guess a few hundred potential names before revealing that they've decided to name him Adolf. Yes, as in Adolf Hitler. I don't know the history of that name myself but it seems ever since that particular perso...Read the entire review

The year is 1936. The Hungarian Prime Minister has just come back from Germany in a pine box and tensions are high when it comes to Jewish refugees. Zsigmond Gordon (Kristian Kolovratnik) has recently left American and returned to Hungary, picking up his crime beat for the local paper, but a bit wearier and more jaded. When a young woman turns up dead in the part of town where the sex workers make their money, everyone looks at it as an open-and-shut case, but something about it bugs Zsigmond, and it's not just his own brief connection to the deceased. With the help of his old photographer girlfriend Krisztina (Reka Tenki), back in Hungary after a brush with the Nazis, Zsigmond starts to kick over some rocks looking for the truth.

Budapest Noir is often admirable but rarely exciting, constructing a fairly standard tale of wrongdoing among the upper class with skill but no panache. Director E...Read the entire review