Alice in the Cities

Back on the big screen for the first time in 33 years (and it didn't get much of a distribution then) is Alice in the Cities, the 1974 road movie that confirmed Wim Wenders's place as one of the leaders of the New German Cinema. Shot in the grainiest black and white by Wenders's regular cinematographer Robby Muller, it stars Rudiger Vogler, a key German actor of the time, as the appropriately named Philip Winter, a journalist rendered emotionally numb after an abortive assignment driving around an alienating America. He can only confront reality through the Polaroid photographs he obsessively takes, but starts to thaw out when a wilful hippie mother dumps her nine-year-old daughter on him.

Taking care of the girl on a return flight to Europe, he becomes a surrogate father as the pair search for her grandmother's home somewhere in West Germany. Yella Rottlander is unforgettable as Alice. This film couldn't be made now, partly because of the invention of the mobile phone, partly because of our obsessive fear of anything that might be interpreted as paedophilia.