Black, white and grey Berlin

Superbly acted and beautifully shot, The Lives of Others is a tale of rebellion against the crushing fist of the state, while The Good German is as good a neo-noir as Chinatown, says Declan Burke

A  comforting twist on George Orwell's 1984, and set in East Germany during that year, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (15A) is a powerful fable of how the tics and foibles of the human condition can subvert any ideologically-based organisation, even one as pervasive as the East German secret police, or Stasi.

Playwright Georg Dreym an (Sebastian Koch) enjoys the benevolent support of the East German state, unaware that he has been targeted for surveillance on the basis that a high-ranking official wants him discredited, so that the official can pursue an affair with Dreyman's live-in lover, the actress Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). But the state has reckoned without their Big Brother, Hauptman Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), identifying with Georg, envying him his freedoms and his life, and slowly but surely compromising himself by filing false reports on the activities at Georg's apartment, which include preparations for the publication of a subversive article in Der Spiegel. 

The winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others is directed with a stately air by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the events – relatively minor and often squalid in themselves – given an epoch-defining (or era-defying) tone by dint of the superb performances. Chief among equals is Muhe as the eyes and ears of an administration he comes to loathe; his subtle thawing and subsequent rebellion against “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is a tour de force, and he receives strong support from Koch and Gedeck. Given an eerily lifeless tone by cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski, the film's drab greys, browns and blues ironically camouflage the boiling-point passions of the various protagonists, which coalesce in a heart-breaking finale and then play themselves out in an extended coda that ends with a killer kiss-off.

Also set in East Germany, albeit the various zones of which Berlin was composed in the wake of the Second World War, is The Good German (15A, pictured), Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of Joseph Kanon's bestselling novel. A lovingly composed noir that is intentionally reminiscent of a grittily realistic version of Casablanca or The Third Man, it stars George Clooney as Captain Jake Giesmer, a war correspondent covering the Potsdam Peace Conference who finds himself drawn into a web of intrigue concerning the fate of a death-camp overseer when his driver, Tully (Tobey Maguire), is murdered. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, stars as the obligatory femme fatale, seizing the once-in-a-lifetime chance to showcase her impressive Marlene Dietrich impersonation.

An unusual narrative arc (there are three separate narrators, all providing voice-overs) blends with a fabulously detailed depiction of the bomb-blasted Berlin, in which Soderbergh bleaches his blacks, whites and greys to the point where it's difficult to tell where documentary footage ends and the movie begins. The plot might be unnecessarily labyrinthine in places, and the superbly callous Tobey Maguire exits face-down in a river far too soon, taking with him some much-needed irreverence, but The Good German is almost as good a neo-noir as its Los Angeles alter-ego, Chinatown.

The Lives of Others ***** (opens 13 April)

The Good German **** (opens 6 April)