Frank Ripploh appears as an oleaginous con man, one of a rogue’s gallery of criminals, sociopaths, and blighted romantics (others played by Heinz Emigholz, Carola Regnier, and Fritz Mikesch) that populate Elfi Mikesch’s sui generis underground underworld movie, a trance-like work about a female crime writer (Werner Schroeter regular Magdalena Montezuma) and the seedy universe she creates, which in turn will be explored by Taxi zum Klo actor Bernd Broaderup, whose amateur detective “Max Taurus,” in thrall to evil and in search of a crime that has yet to be committed, becomes lost in the labyrinth of a dilapidated building marked for demolition. “The most beautiful film about crime made by a woman.” —Rosa von Praunheim