Where Fatih Akin Went After 'Head-On'
Variety's review of Fatih Akin's film Ghost Song begins from the director's mid-2000s artistic peak: the back-to-back festival triumphs of Head-On and Edge of Heaven. Since then, the German-Turkish filmmaker has ranged across genre, style and form, and the review credits him with occasionally striking commercially — the Diane Kruger thriller In the Fade and the local hip-hop biopic Rhinegold — set beside that earlier run. It is a familiar shape for a critic's career sketch: the breakout, then the wandering.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Genre-hopping can look like restlessness from the outside, but it is sometimes just a refusal to remake the film that made your name.
It can also be the opposite: a director trying everything because one early run set a bar he keeps getting measured against.