Perhaps the most salient and unsung thread in last year’s arthouse comedy epic “Toni Erdmann” examined the shifting economic frontiers in Europe. This becomes the point of departure for “Western”—the third feature of fellow German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach—which further scrutinizes the human scale of these permeable borders. This, however, is where the similarities end; as its title suggests, Grisebach’s film takes on the classical American genre of the Western as a template for its thematic preoccupations.

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