A dying teen draws his own comic-book world and tries simultaneously to win over his dream girl.

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Donald is in the middle of puberty – and dying of cancer. His bitterness about the lack of a future leads him to draw his own comic-book world in which he is an invincible superhero. His parents don't know what to do with him until the grumpy psychiatrist Dr. Adrian King and a headstrong girl from school named Shelly manage to help Donald forget the sadness of his situation for a while.

Diagnosis: cancer at the movies. The path of film history is paved with too many sanctimonious tear-jerkers to approach Death of a Superhero with anything other than distrust. However, even though the genre – with its cycle of illness, suffering and death – itself has been declared dead before, Andreas Dresen's Halt auf freier Strecke was an urgent, radical masterpiece this year. Ian Fitzgibbon's film is none of these, but still is emotionally moving and worth seeing.