Yella Directed by Christian Petzold Cinema Guild Opens May 16, Lincoln Plaza and Cinema Village more film most popular most commented Lincoln Center Throws its Spotlight on Slovenia by Vadim Rizov David Gordon Green Moves to the Mainstream? by Nick Pinkerton The Human Condition Is Very Long by Aaron Hillis Lou Reed's Berlin is All New York by Camille Dodero Mamma Mia! Drains the Fun Out of ABBA. Reviews by Ella Taylor Ray-Gun Kelly by Nat Hentoff Letters 7.16.08 by Various Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls and Statues of Limitations by Lynn Yaeger Nas's Untitled CD Review by Katie Hintz Painted Into a Corner Over a 6-a-Month Chelsea Apartment by Maria Luisa Tucker Runnin' Scared: NYPD's Busts Get Busted (2) Runnin' Scared: Sean Gardiner Rap's 2008, Beyond Lil Wayne (2) CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN West of Eden (1) Gary Indiana Triumph of the Lipstick Lesbians (1) Jennifer Vanasco Seun Kuti Carries the Afrobeat Torch (1) Michael Hoinski

The gifted German filmmaker Christian Petzold (Wolfsburg, The State I Am In) wrote and directed this tightly controlled metaphysical horror movie, which begins with an upwardly mobile corporate accountant and her if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can ex-husband careening off a bridge and plunging into the icy waters of the Elbe. Miraculously, Yella (played by the excellent Petzold regular Nina Hoss) manages to extract herself from the wreckage and skip town, just in time to start her new job in Hanover, where—in between embezzlement schemes and hostile takeovers—she finds herself stalked by the specter of her possibly dead ex. In Hollywood, these would doubtless be the makings of a cookie-cutter woman-in-distress shocker—a supernatural Sleeping With the Enemy. But Petzold, whose avowed inspiration was Herk Harvey's Lawrence, Kansas–lensed cult classic Carnival of Souls, is less interested in ectoplasmic apparitions than in the equally disembodied eeriness of poker-faced power brokering and glass-and-steel boardrooms. (Hardly accidental is Yella's journey from the former East Germany to the new West.) Like Laurent Cantet's Time Out and Nicolas Klotz's recent Heartbeat Detector, it's a corporate ghost story in which the undead are scarcely (and scarily) indistinguishable from the living.