Popular reviews

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  Review by dani ★★★★★ 10

  believe it or not but bruno ganz and dennis hopper are gay in this movie, and no, I will not elaborate on that.

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★ 16

  Tom Ripley takes his Purple Noon self to Germany, and befriends a talented art picture framer. However, all is not what it appears. The art picture framer fella, Mr Zimmermann, has a dire medical condition, and doesn't have long to live. He needs to go all Heisenberg, and make some fast cash to leave for his wife and child. So, what happens when a sinister underworld baddie makes Mr Zimmermann an offer he can't refuse? Well, there's no such thing as easy money, right? The American Friend is another tale in the life of Tom Ripley. This time he's played by Dennis Hopper, under the directorial supervision of Wim Wenders, and damn, this film looks fuckin' beautiful.

  Dennis Hopper looks…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 20

  The "art" of killing. Stupendous suspense and merging of cinematic styles, and that's the thing that takes me to my main point of the film.

  The most interesting debate surrounding this film is the influence of "American" values to the rest of the world through both real fictionalized media. What first caught my attention, not before, but halfway through the running time, is that the original German title, which English translation remained loyal, makes reference to the foreign, "American" influence, even if the real moral protagonist is Bruno Ganz, and not Dennis Hopper. Even under screentime criteria, this holds to be true. Nevertheless, the main name to be credited is that of Hopper's. It's not that most of the film…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 3

  an american sociopath teaches a thoughtful european how to rock in the underworld is a premise that could've very easily been turned into an exciting paperback thriller but is instead rendered here by wenders in a sense of style that emphasizes a much slower, sicker existential feeling of corruption. brutal ending, and ganz and hopper are incredible.

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  Review by Nakul ★★★★½ 3

  Wim Wenders' neo-noir, The American Friend is an existential play disguised as a thriller. This film is just dripping with mood, tone and atmosphere. Shot with perfection by Robby Müller, it's one of the most visually pleasing movies I've ever seen. I wanted to live inside the palette of this film. Bruno Ganz gives a really beautiful performance, tinged with melancholy and Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley was wonderfully peculiar.
  Those train & subway sequences were so great.

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  Review by spap1 ★★★★½ 15

  liars! they’re all liars! 

  someone around must have something of value to say… surely(?). 

  what about you? what is your darkest secret? that you left your dog in the car? but it’s a lie!

  and what about you? your darkest secret..! quick! you forgot to buy your grandma’s final birthday present? another lie! why must everyone lie! 

  there’s got to be someone here (anyone!) who will tell me the truth! what about you? no! don’t walk away from me! all you do is lie to yourself even more… at least the others had tried! 

  (this road is longer than i remember)

  and you? what is your darkest secret? are you not going to answer me? 

  i like your hat. it…

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  Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★

  Wenders' play on Patricia Highsmith reminded me a lot of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player in its defiance of genre convention: The emphasis on atmosphere over conventional plotting and payoffs, Zimmerman's comic ineptitude as a hitman, the unexpected texture in the relationship between Zimmerman and Ripley, the loaded soundtrack, the cameos by Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller and Jean Eustache, etc. Gets a little too loosey-goosey in the final half hour or so, but one of those movies you want to live in.

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  Review by j. kwiatkowski ★★★★★ 1

  Dennis Hopper in a cowboy hat is best Dennis Hopper.

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★½ 14

  "What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?"

  A chronically ill man betrays his instincts through desperation.

  Wim Wenders' films are generally characterized by an incipient quality, a gradual and cumulative accretion of detail that comes to define a mood. Often he works without a script, moving nomadically and gathering the sense of a life as he goes. In interviews Wenders has explicitly noted his hostility to plotting: "In the relationship between story and image, I see the story as a kind of vampire, trying to suck all the blood from an image." I mean it as a compliment when I suggest that Wenders' oeuvre is something of a cinematic equivalent to Frank O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" poems;…

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  Review by ghostdinosaur ★★★

  I love the way Wim Wenders handles violence in this film. It's so clumsy and strange looking that it becomes at once absurdly comical and also horrifying. It highlights how meaningless and weird the act of hurting another person is.

  Also there's a scene where Dennis Hopper lays on a pool table taking selfies with a Polaroid and crying that feels eerily prescient.

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★

  Much like a baby or dim child, I really liked this movie for its use of the color red

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★ 3

  Adapted from the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, The American Friend has gone on to become appreciated as one of Wim Wenders’ most highly regarded films, and it's a beautiful study of male friendship from the German filmmaker.

  Starring Dennis Hopper as professional art forger Tom Ripley, it's an excitingly creative and skilfully executed suspense thriller with some tremendous off-balanced editing captivatingly delivered by Peter Przygodda.

  It observes events set in motion by Ripley after he recommends an innocent picture framer, Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), he knows who may be able to be convinced to commit a contract killing after believing he previously disrespected him at an art auction.

  Hopper and Ganz have some marvellous back-and-forth together as antagonists, and there's an apparent enthusiasm for the filmmakers and movies who Wenders shares favourable inclination towards such as the set pieces in a Paris Metro station echoing the practices of Hitchcock.