We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we’ve been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we’ve been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn’d walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill to Neues Off. It’s always packed in the tiny little atrium there with small groups of friends chatting on the pavement outside, even in the freezing cold. Once we pushed our way through to have our tickets checked, it transpired I’d brought us to the wrong cinema and that we should be at Passage Kino on Karl-Marx-Allee. It is not the first time I’ve made this kind of mistake. We took the U-Bahn down there and still sat down before the movie started, comfortably.

It was a good time. There’s not much more to say abot it other than it was relatively well-written, a little predictable in places, and very comfortable in its being a movie-by-formula. It seems to say it’s a murder mystery, you know what you’re here for. Josh O’Connor is a good call for a comic and suspect protagonist. Benoir Blanc is sorting fading into the background of this series, knowingly, happily. Glenn Close and Josh Brolin are having a lot of fun, I think.

When we got home again, I reflected that this is the kind of thing that was the meat and potatoes of the cinemas’ income before the home video and streaming cataclysm. It’s franchise but only gently. It’s made for grown-ups, pretty much. I could easily watch a bunch more and not feel like I was getting bilked. It’s enough to get me happily and thoughtlessly out to the movies every week or so. Not everything has to be a special presentation.