Veronika Voss

Sunset Boulevard, Fassbinder style. Veronika (Rosel Zech, both chilling and alluring) was a major film star during Hitler’s reign—her friends were said to include Joseph Goebbels—but a decade after the war she finds herself hard up for work and addicted to morphine. She starts an affair with a sportswriter (Hilmar Thate), but her need for drugs keeps her in thrall to a malicious physician (Annemarie Düringer). Shot in evocative black and white by Xaver Schwarzenberger, Fassbinder’s penultimate film (the culmination of his BRD trilogy) won him the coveted Golden Bear at Berlin—his first, accepting the prize barely three months before his death. Look for Armin Mueller-Stahl (Lola) as Veronika’s ex-husband and Lilo Pempeit—Fassbinder’s mother—as a jeweler.