Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★ 5

  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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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  "- He is not my son.
  - What difference does that makes? She is not my wife."

  Walking through the ruins of the European project be it 1940s or 2010s. A series of echoes. Dreaming of a new world that doesn't really exist. Haunted by other dreams, other fictions, other movies (sometimes Petzold's own movies). History on loop. As almost always with Petzold, it is a conceptual ghost story. Perhaps a little too neat, but there's something thrilling about watching it gain flesh.

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★ 4

  [8]

  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…

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 2

  “who is the first to forget: he who is left, or she who left him?”

  inconspicuously captivating. the last half hour was so calmly stressful that i could feel my own heartbeat. i need to rewatch phoenix

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 3

  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…

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  Review by iana ★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  georg’s little smile at the end, oh god, why do the tiniest things destroy me

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½ 3

  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…

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★★ 1

  É muito absurdo a maneira como o Petzold constrói um universo ultra rigoroso, mas que está sempre à deriva. Uma ambiguidade entre o que é concreto e o que é espectro, o que é presença e o que é lembrança. Não é simplesmente um cinema de sugestões (como são os Coen, por exemplo), mas sim de uma indeterminação concreta e possibilitadora.

  Um constante entre-tempos (ninguém chega aonde deveria chegar, ninguém está onde quer) que cria um mundo de projeções. Acho que o cara continua refilmando Vertigo não porque quer, mas porque talvez seja a única história possível nos dias de hoje. A indeterminação e o autoengano como uma espécie de falsa esperança que te mantém vivo. Sem condições...

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 2

  Petzold steps outside his influences to craft a thematic and stylistic follow-up to Phoenix that may top even that film for thoughtful yet vibrant consideration of Germany's unpayable moral debt. Blending the contemporary migrant crisis with the Holocaust, Petzold makes a powerful case that the rejection of refugees reflects the worst of his country's history, yet he illustrates this through the eerie calm of a kind of ghost story where people are constantly disappearing either out of good or bad luck and you only find out what kind of luck it was if luck is on your side as well. Petzold makes such calm thrillers, but they feel so profoundly urgent.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★ 1

  German Joaquin Phoenix is even better than German Brendan Fraser.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 4

  Living in fiction, a suspended state of being. Most of Petzold's work is about negotiating a life in a world of ruins, Transit just make all the historical process and the strings it pulls more clear. Among the film many achievements is that despite how much the dispositif is reinforced, how the images always bring the contatant echoes Transit is after, Petzold is such a strong dramatist he never let the WWII specfics of the drama disappear.

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★

  Waiting for a miracle while living an illusion. What year is this?