Popular reviews

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 5

  "We're late, darling, we're late
  The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon"

  One can't stop history. Come for Vertigo by way of Fassbinder, stays to be complete emotional devasted. Literally physical painful to sit through at times. The best thing about Petzold spare staging, the way his images can both feel charged with history and emotionally naked might have never been put to such good use. Also, Nina Hoss is beyond words (Zehrfeld is pretty great in a tricky role as well);

  Literally greatest drop the mic ending ever.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 26

  Wow, I was in tears for almost the entire last five minutes of this film. And it's funny, because after reading many of the reviews of Phoenix, I was really anticipating an extraordinarily executed ending, something truly special - and my god, that's exactly what I received x 1,000. Beyond the masterful suspense that the film retains throughout the duration of its runtime, it's also strong thematically. There are the obvious themes of war and the Holocaust and the notion of returning from a concentration camp, but the more abstract themes that it presents are equally as fascinating. I enjoy the way Phoenix, much like the recent Under the Skin, approaches the idea of surfaces and what is beneath them,…

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  Review by brat pacino ★★★★

  "When you were sitting in the dark, I thought you'd shot him and needed my help. And honestly, I'd have preferred that."

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  Review by Aaron ★★★★½ 39

  “I am alive and will return soon.”

  I was born, and then I died. It was but a moment to the world; the world took no notice. And so I sought to be born once more, that I might be noticed. For, like most people, all I wanted was to be seen, if only for a moment.

  To reconstruct my life was not what I wanted. Reconstruction was the wrong word, implying rubble, the piecing together of a sad approximation from the remnants of something better. Not reconstruction—recreation. Something new, but the same. Something fresh and alive, redolent not of the past but of my desire for what the past might have been.

  But it was not to be. And…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 1

  Petzold merges a European Holocaust drama art style with an emotionally perverse face-swapping Hitchcockian premise resulting in a devastating examination of the illusion of identity, and the ways in which we truly are the performances we put on for others, or, sometimes, have put onto us. Equally mesmerizing, agonizing and tragic. I'm honestly at a loss for words. Maybe the greatest dramatic irony payoff ending since... Ever?

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★★ 1

  Acho que é um dos melhores filmes dos últimos anos que concilia subtexto histórico com subtexto cinematográfico. Parece que quanto mais ele se limita a um espaço, mais poderoso é o gesto, mais frontal é a sugestão. É uma economia que tá muita interessada nesse jogo de poder entre imagens, que parte de relações cênicas e históricas muito elementares mesmo, quase primitivas, pra atingir um grau de encantamento narrativo sempre sublime. O mais simples plano e contra-plano entre personagens sentados à mesa consegue remeter a todo tipo de mitologia audiovisual implícita.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 3

  88/100

  Phoenix, in a word, is spellbinding. I was shaken awake by its haunting melodies throughout the soundtrack and a splendid evocation of post-war Berlin. However, its fascinating central relationship, performed beautifully by Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld, avoids the typical thriller roles of mystery and intrigue. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Vertigo have been tossed around, but it isn't just to point out the surface similarities.

  Phoenix, in a tantalizing way, buries its sexuality far lower than Hitchcock would've ever dared, and the tragic playfulness of the entire story feels rooted in an entire history of Hitchcockian horror. The audience knows everything, but that sudden reaction of shock comes just as swift as an unknown surprise. It is this way of…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 2

  what's Petzold is Petznew, again.

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  Review by Tasha Robinson ★★½ 7

  Recommended to me by one Scott Tobias because of the ending, which he described as possibly the best of the year; the ending of this film is powerful, but boy, does it take some contrivance getting there, and it leaves an awful lot of frustrating threads dangling along the way. In particular, there's a key side character who seems more compelling and likely to produce a better story than the lead character, but she disappears offscreen late in the film, as if she had to get back to her own, better movie. But also, so much of the narrative here just didn't pass the Roger Ebert Stupidity test for me, in terms of people making choices that don't make sense, except to forward the narrative. There are a few vague attempts to explain away what's going on, but for me they weren't convincing or compelling arguments; you almost have to take the whole thing as metaphorical to buy it.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★½

  “It’s a metaphorical movie and it’s also not a metaphorical movie.” - Harun Farocki

  The comparisons to Vertigo are apt, but also silly & probably missing the point. Clearly this is inspired by Vertigo, absolutely. But Vertigo, in fact no film by Hitchcock, is quite as political as this.

  Outstanding, a reflection on 20th Century Germany and also on the nature of fiction-performance-narrative, making this a film equally past and present. It’s remarkable how condensed yet complex this is, without leaving classical narrative means. A truth becomes lie, then almost truth, then lie again, before finally truth. And in the meantime we see a Germany which wants to forget the Holocaust, pretend it never existed, (in-fact, most of this movie is…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★

  Suggested alternate title for this satisfying thriller: VERTIGOY.

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  Review by Lucy ★★★½

  "this is fucked up" -me for 98 minutes