Lola has to come up with 100,000 marks in the next 20 minutes. If she fails, a Berlin racketeer will kill her boyfriend, a bagman who screwed up and left the loot in the metro. Three sequences show Lola’s three attempts to get the money. The first involves a store robbery, the second a bank robbery. On the third run-through, Lola heads to a casino.<br /> A fairy-tale motif meets the dramatic structure of a video game. The three variations are slightly time-shifted, and the three plot twists have life-altering consequences, including for secondary characters. Playing out the three scenarios as breakneck flash-forward photo stories is part of a post-modern bricolage for which Tom Tykwer tapped all the resources of cinema. Driven by trance and techno tracks, <em class="film">Run Lola Run</em> is a cinematic loop, with video and 35 mm film, colour and black-and-white, split screens and slow motion, jump cuts and match cuts, animation and 360-degree dolly shots all wed together in a playful exploration of parallel realities – and in the first German film for the 21st century. The editing gives us a metropolitan Berlin in which East and West have merged into an imaginary playing field.