Popular reviews

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  Review by Dave Eves ★★★ 1

  Ever been the only sober person at a party where you don't really know anybody and you just want to leave but you can't because your car's not there? That's sort of how Baal feels.

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  Review by Liz ★★★★ 1

  Could almost pass for a documentary about Fassbinder, featuring most of his rep company and a central performance that blurs the line between Brecht's character and the persona that Fassbinder himself would inhabit throughout his career. The way that Schlöndorff restages
  the play in a Germany that's both modern and ancient reminds me a lot of Fassbinder's own The Niklashausen Journey.

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  Review by Vincent Winther ★★★★½

  Baal (1970) directed by Volker Schlöndorff, based on Bertolt Brecht’s play Baal (1923), starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is a fever dream expressed in acting, editing and camerawork. 

  For the most part, Baal is filmed like a drunken haze, camera unrestful, blurred and foggy. Baal is edited as if it was a collage of moments from the titular Baal’s mind.

  Some regard Baal as being a genius others perceive him as being a madman. In some way, this might be how people will think about the film. Some might think of it being a mess without direction, inconsistent and obnoxious, while others will praise Schlöndorff for making this film. It’s all about where you come from and what your frame of…

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  Review by Dante ★★★★½

  mostly just a bunch of scenes of RW Fassbinder getting drunk and being an awful person who somehow manages to seduce every woman (and a few of the men) around him and i think that it slays

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  Review by Oscar Lau ★★★★

  Baal is a God, rebellious and anarchistic; 
  Baal is a womaniser, unsparing and misogynistic; 
  Baal is a poet, peculiar and magnetic; 
  Baal is a nonconformist, impudent and symbolic; 
  Baal is a beast, carnal and vulgar;
  Baal is an artist, extraordinary and instinctive;
  Baal is a legacy, prophetic and unprecedented;
  Baal is Fassbinder, fierce, dazzling, incendiary and formidable. Fassbinder is Baal.

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  Review by DANIEL ★★★ 4

  I dunno what the fuck even, man. sometimes you just gotta let these artsy types just be artsy types and let it wash over you like someone describing their d&d character’s backstory or a video game side quest, like hell yeah man, didn’t even notice, barely know the fucking game, love your enthusiasm. this movie is like being drunk in between two theaters while a ghost yells at you in german about poetry. so all in all, more experience than movie. sometimes that’s a fucking cop-out, but, sometimes that also be how it do.

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  Review by Sam P. ★★★★

  Fassbinder is Baal is Fassbinder.

  Ragingly episodic, until recently suppressed screen adaptation of Brecht's first play (written at age 20) wherein Fassbinder portrays an acerbic asshole-genius poet (the Baal of the title) far more concerned with his own pursuit of stylish braggadocio than the measurable success that comes w/ the approval of the art elite (a snobbish sort).

  Given a choice of publish or perish (that old adage), Baal chooses the latter. Literally.

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  Review by Quiller ★★★½

  “Stories you understand were just told badly.”

  The central paradox anyone who adapts or produces a work by Bertolt Brecht faces is whether to follow the letter of that work or its spirit. So many of Brecht’s pioneering techniques — characters breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, not hiding but actually incorporating the technologies of theater (the lights, the mechanisms that change backdrops, etc.) into the staging of a play, and so forth — have proved so influential that, if you stage some Brecht plays exactly as they were written, you risk losing what makes them “Brechtian”: the audience is so used to the techniques that they are now essentially mainstream instead of alienating. But if you…

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  Review by Nicolas Pedrero ★★★★½

  No one wears a jacket like Fassbinder.

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  Review by evan ★★★★★

  “I try to sell myself but I am really laughing,
  Because I just love the music, not the bling.”
  -Lady Gaga, ARTPOP

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  Review by Dante ★★★★★

  as a guy with a girlfriend who would risk it all for Rainer Werner Fassbinder,

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  Review by Kern ★½

  Ugly in form, uglier in content, but most egregiously, dreadfully shallow. I'm not at all familiar with Brecht's work, so maybe I'm just fundamentally missing something, though I'm confident that a deeper understanding of the film's relation to the material, if there indeed really is much to explore, wouldn't improve my viewing in the slightest. The slapdash filmmaking and empty poetic language grated on me. Rarely interesting, mostly monotonous and nauseating.