{"id":618845,"date":"2026-06-03T12:07:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T12:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/618845\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T12:07:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T12:07:23","slug":"koln-75-review-scrappy-stylish-sometimes-self-indulgent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/618845\/","title":{"rendered":"K\u00f6ln 75 review: ‘Scrappy, stylish, sometimes self-indulgent’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teen promoter Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) battles chaos and the tempestuous Keith Jarrett\u2019s (John Magaro) resistance to stage the legendary 1975\u202fK\u00f6ln\u202fConcert performance.<\/p>\n

In jazz, the magic happens in the silences. Miles Davis\u202fonce suggested that true genius lies in \u201cthe notes you don\u2019t play\u201d.\u00a0Fittingly, K\u00f6ln\u202f75\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a film about the\u00a0story behind\u00a0The K\u00f6ln\u00a0Concert, Keith Jarrett\u2019s improvised 1975 performance that\u00a0went on to become\u00a0the bestselling solo piano album of all time\u00a0\u2014\u202fis\u00a0ingenious\u00a0in how it riffs around one striking omission: none of Jarrett\u2019s music appears in the film.<\/p>\n

\"Koln<\/p>\n

Rather than awkwardly dance around that absence, director Ido\u00a0Fluk\u202ftransforms it into the film\u2019s central idea. In place of Jarrett\u2019s music comes the frantic, infectious energy of Vera Brandes, the teenage concert promoter who somehow convinced the notoriously difficult pianist to take the stage in Cologne and ended up\u202fcreating\u202fjazz history.<\/p>\n

[Ido] Fluk\u00a0attacks the material with restless formal energy.\u00a0Fourth-wall\u00a0breaks, rapid-fire editing and knowingly absurd pop-culture detours give the film a self-aware swagger that occasionally strains for profundity.<\/p>\n

Crucially, Jarrett himself is barely the point. The film belongs entirely to Vera, played by Mala Emde\u202fwith charming, kinetic verve. Though older than the real-life teenager she portrays, Emde captures the reckless obsession of someone utterly consumed by art, throwing herself into jazz culture with the kind of evangelical earnestness that feels almost alien today. Vera\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0simply organising a concert;\u00a0she\u2019s\u00a0chasing transcendence. John Magaro (Past Lives<\/a>), meanwhile, plays Jarrett as a man permanently teetering between artistic purity and total exasperation, giving the film a prickly counterweight to Vera\u2019s idealism.<\/p>\n

Fluk\u00a0attacks the material with restless formal energy.\u00a0Fourth-wall\u00a0breaks, rapid-fire editing and knowingly absurd pop-culture detours give the film a self-aware swagger that occasionally strains for profundity. There are moments where the film tries a little too hard to mythologise jazz as a near-spiritual force, while Michael Chernus\u2019 rambling critic character often arrives to dump exposition rather than\u00a0add to the narrative. Some of the film\u2019s broader comedic flourishes also sit awkwardly alongside its more sincere emotional beats. Still, the film\u2019s sheer, chaotic momentum usually carries it through.<\/p>\n

That momentum becomes exhilarating in the final stretch, as Vera scrambles through a mounting series of disasters threatening to derail the concert entirely. A faulty piano, Jarrett\u2019s exhaustion, backstage chaos\u2014\u00a0Fluk\u00a0stages it\u00a0all\u00a0like a ticking-clock thriller. Even knowing the outcome, the film builds genuine suspense from the logistical nightmare. Then comes the elephant in the room: the missing music. The now 81-year-old Keith Jarrett\u2019s lack of involvement with the production means the climactic performance unfolds without a note of The K\u00f6ln Concert itself. For some, that will be an unforgivable anticlimax. Yet\u00a0there\u2019ssomething strangely fitting about a film that rolls with\u00a0the punches around that limitation. By the end, the missing music feels less like a flaw than part of the magic.<\/p>\n

Scrappy, stylish and occasionally self-indulgent,\u202fK\u00f6ln\u202f75 turns backstage bedlam into jazz-infused drama. Mala Emde conducts the chaos and her performance, like the film, is most alive when everything threatens to collapse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teen promoter Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) battles chaos and the tempestuous Keith Jarrett\u2019s (John Magaro) resistance to stage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-618845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}