Popular reviews

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★½ 8

  Cinematic paranoiac, the great philosophical science fiction mindfuck noir of 1973. As far as connecting with me mentally, this is right in my wheelhouse and pulverizes all the ‘not for me’ slop movies I’ve been suffocated by over the last few weeks here in weirdo 2020. 

  
  Even better on a revisit.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 9

  I fell asleep during The Matrix. Its themes seemed to me, at the time of its release, more or less just trite ideas that I had already read about in various intro philosophy texts and whatnot, and the areas it touched on were never my areas of interest in philosophy anyway. It muddled its religious undertones, and the ethical questions were given short shrift. Fifteen years later, I watched a movie nearly twice as long, which eschews action in favor of psychological intensity, and tackles many--but not all--of the same questions.

  It was much better this time around.

  The first and best difference is aesthetic. Fassbinder has created a science fiction world that looks schlubby. It's populated by suits and…

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  Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★★ 4

  Fassbinder's science-fiction/noir hybrid was really years ahead of its time. Not only in its ideas but in its aesthetic as well. This was such an obvious influence on The Matrix. The Wachowski siblings even modeled the "what does chicken really taste like" scene after a sequence included here.

  Its 3,5 hour runtime might deter some modern day viewers from watching it, but they should at least give it a chance, because it's a very rewarding watch.

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  Review by Branson Reese 4

  Some obvious inspiration for The Matrix but I wanna give a special shout out to the Wachowski Sisters for expanding those two blonde guys into the albino twins in The Matrix Reloaded. And then for coming back to this well years later to use Stiller’s car as the inspiration for Speed Racer.

  Speaking of which, I had the damndest time trying to figure out if this inspired Blade Runner or not. Possible that this movie was simply inspired by Philip K. Dick. But the main guy sort of looked like a German Harrison Ford, you see. So you can understand why I’m over here like “uhhhh okay??”

  The movie kept a really smart narrative distance from Stiller and his troubles.…

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  Review by Rafael Jovine ★★★★½ 4

  Watching a movie nearly four hours long can be intimidating. Especially when the director isn't one of your favorites, and I wasn't exactly impressed with the filmmaker's last miniseries. Hence my reservations going into this.

  And as you can see, based on my rating, none of those concerns were warranted. This is perhaps the most underrated and most genre-bending sci fi work brought to screen. This felt like a better version of Alphaville and a cross between The Prisoner and the Goddard film. The philosophical approaches presented in the series are quite interesting and fit into the overall narrative without causing the series to pause for such discussion. Although the scope is equally broad, there is a certain simplicity about…

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  Review by laird ★★★★★ 3

  I Am Curious Orange and Teal (Aren't I?)

  I love how nervous the camera is in this. Searching the room for clues, fixating on mirrors and reflections and spheres, scanning along walls and corridors. It really invites you into the paranoid headspace of the protagonist in a horrible way. I have to go now, someone is watching me (from above...or is it below?).

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  Review by braden ★★★★½

  “‘World’ is an exaggeration, currently we’ve some 10,000 identity units. That’s all we need for now. The world in a nutshell, you see?”

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s stunning World on a Wire is a constantly absorbing sci-fi noir that follows an engineer’s gradual discovery of a conspiracy surrounding a virtual world; steadily creating its intense paranoia with frequent twists and a distinctively cold, gorgeously rendered futuristic setting. Featuring minimal action and keeping its scale relatively low-key, the sense of mystery is built through the innovative atmosphere; looking aesthetically fantastic with beautiful designs and bright, elegant cinematography, while keeping a gritty edge with the noir-ish tone of its story and characters - making for such a uniquely captivating world that feels increasingly isolated as the film develops. Even with its leisurely pace and lengthy run time, Fassbinder’s wonderful filmmaking keeps it thoroughly engrossing and thematically rich; influencing the genre and still feeling so modern and original 50 years after its release.

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★½ 9

  Conspiratorial sci-fi paranoir shrouded in a thick fog of existential dread. World on a Wire is about reflections—how we see ourselves vs. how other see us, our world as a canvas for a greater power—a modern sophistic, Platonian cogitation; probing the deepest layers of the human mind, searching for answers. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Who put us here? Rainer Werner Fassbinder steps out of his comfort zone by creating an profoundly epic masterwork that is equal parts genre piece and philosophical rumination. This film examines concepts of simulation, governmental and industrial corruption, scientific advancement and experiential being with a tender and utterly schizoid touch like only Fassbinder could. It also works wonders as a science fiction, noirish…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  Fassbinder gets the jump on decades of philosophical sci-fi with this miniseries. His penchant for reflective surfaces and obscuring glass is taken to an early extreme here, with countless shots incorporating reflections into blocking or framing characters through glass that often warps dimensions and even at its least intrusive makes it clear that everyone is being watched. (The adjective "cinematic" is used freely and almost always emptily in current discussions of TV, but Fassbinder, like the other European auteurs who experimented on the small-screen, comes closest to cinema by expressly foregrounding the format of their television productions with an aesthetic that shows them adapting to its different demands and even the implications of its alternate screen.)

  There's way too much…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★★ 15

  Living inside a false reality inside a facsimile reproduction of a facade. And tucked within this replica is a replica… another (un)reality. Only mirrors hold the truth, but even their verity is a blurry obfuscation, leaving only beclouded corrugations in time.

  Fassbinder’s 16mm shot-for-television master stroke blows many auteur’s best theatrical work out of the water. World on a Wire is, simply put, one of the best sci-fi films ever made, and one that gets better with every revisiting, and it is more than worthy of a perfect score. After my cherished The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant—a picture which just so happens to also be one of my all-time favorites period—World on a Wire is a close second for my most fancied Fassbinder.

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★½ 10

  Absolute top-tier proto-cyberpunk seventies science fiction. Existence is simulations all the way down and there’s only one master programmer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

  Reflections and affectations and permutations and the director’s world-class blocking all lean into the idea of an artificial world that’s, in turn, imagining an artificial world.

  It’s the neurotic, surveillance obsessed, Eastern Bloc science fiction masterpiece that could only have been made in the West... and for television too (the real medium of the future).

  Fortunately for us, Fassbinder is settling our own real world debate over whether we live in a simulation or not. Here he suggests that our world is not a simulation, for if it were, we would’ve created technology to build a simulated world…

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  Review by Jay Cheel ★★★★½ 3

  I’d never heard of World on a Wire before Criterion’s announcement of its re-mastering and subsequent theatrical re-release in 2010. The trailer they’d put together hooked me immediately, based mostly on the retro-future set design and the promise of a strange, hard sci-fi thriller full of intrigue and mystery. The picture did not disappoint. With the recent blu ray release, I was thankful to be able to sit down with this epic film once again and try and make sense of any details I’d missed the first time around.

  In the not-too-distant future, a supercomputer called ‘Simulacron’ provides scientists with the ability to simulate and study a virtual society comprised of 10,000 ‘identity units’. When the technical director of the…