This is absolutely fantastic and I would be stunned if it didn't end up being one of the highlights of the year. Not a film I think a person could throughly write on based on one viewing, but the structural motif of using dialogue stripped from the original setting of the 1940s and placing it in the present day is simple and ingenious. If it takes time (or a second viewing) to write cohesively on this it's likely because of how well this conceit plays out - making the slightly more melodramatic/romantic turn even more difficult to articulate - though it's no less affecting. Still, I wonder how this film would play without having at least an awareness of the…

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The films of Christian Petzold can be maddeningly perfect at times, to the extent that their flawless construction relies on some form of neat but implausible narrative coincidence. This is what kept me from fully embracing Phoenix, to say nothing of Barbara and Yella. These are films as ideal objects, generated to get somewhere without a lot of extraneous, messy life intruding on their closed systems.

What made Phoenix such a step forward for Petzold, and actually makes Transit something of a great leap, is the filmmaker's broader embrasure of abstraction. In the earlier films, he seemed to be adopting genre templates, if anything, in order to bring them closer to reality. (Jerichow, his best film to date, is…

A man arrives in purgatory, eager to learn his eternal fate. The divine judgement, however, is slow to arrive. The minutes turn to hours, the hours turn to days, and the days begin to blur together in a place where time has no meaning. Eventually, after what feels to him like a hundred years, the man begs for a verdict. “What are you talking about?” comes the reply. “You’ve been in hell since you got here.”

That grim parable is told to Georg (“Happy End” breakout Franz Rogowski) roughly halfway into Christian Petzold’s “Transit,” and yet the poor bastard doesn’t seem to realize that it’s about him. The inscrutable hero of an inscrutable film that unfolds like a remake of…

a ghost story. petzold takes anna seghers' WWII melodrama and brings it into the realm of the uncanny by having it take place in an unspecific, contemporary context. past, present and future all bleed into each other as our knowledge of WWII movies is tested by our awareness of the modern rise (and broader acceptance) of fascist rhetoric and images evoking the current european refugee crisis. petzold’s previous film drew a lot of hitchcock comparisons for its Vertigo inspired narrative and here he wields a similar identity thriller/perverse romance where a lone refugee named georg, out of survival, assumes the identity of a well-known communist writer, using his name to secure a visa and finds himself falling in love with…