The opening chase scene – when street urchins Shiro (White) and Kuro (Black) playfully bound through chaotic traffic to lure two rival streetkids into a trap sprung by a giant clock, with Hindu elephant god Ganesh as the cuckoo – is a quick introduction to the central character of Tekkonkinkreet: Treasure Town, a cosmopolis equal parts seedy and sublime, where pagodas poke out from neon jungles and mosques jostle with steampunk slums. The imagination and effort behind the detail, colour and shape of this epic behemoth is stunning, and well worth forking out for on its own. The story isn’t so bad either: orphaned teenager Kuro lords over the streets as the black-hearted Batman of this Gotham until the yakuza muscle in on his turf, but even they can’t stop the aliens behind the construction of the biggest racket in town – the mega-Disneyland that threatens the integrity and history of what everyone calls ‘my city’. Noirish boss Suzuki is the best of the crooks: one step ahead of everyone else, he issues his commands based on horoscopes. Though a little saccharine at times, the themes are universal – innocence and experience, reason and madness, good and evil – and ultimately question the possibility of balancing any binary opposites in a world of plurality.

Incredibly, all the surveillance in East Germany couldn’t stop confidence trickster Torsten S. from organising a bogus NATO conference. But the country is where any similarities end between Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and Mein anderes leben (aka Con Man Confidential), essentially a series of candid interviews from behind bars with four of Germany’s most talented grifters. The headshots are broken up occasionally with short stabs of footage – perhaps from the courtroom or prison, or during the heady boom days – but these affable and charming swindlers are capable of speaking so effortlessly and improvising such engaging and astonishing stories, they always own the camera. It’s a wonder nobody’s ever thought to make a film about such natural performers before. But are they reliable? Who cares – in 84 minutes I learned in detail half a dozen classic cons and got a real lesson in method acting and psychology. The cockiness and calculation that allowed Peter to concoct the ‘life-lies’ that defrauded millions of Deutschmarks also gave him ‘the moral sleeping pill’ he needed each night. (It would only have been time, he justified to himself, before someone else would have punished his ‘customers’ for their greed and stupidity.) Presumably the same arrogance that can still take pride in the bigger stings gave Alexander Adolph the leverage to prise out the frank stories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, behind every con man lay a trail of trauma, rejection or personal tragedy, festering like an angry creditor.—Joe Sheppard