Popular reviews

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 1

  Post social democracy Europe afterlife. A movie about moving around dead space on a society on its last breathe. It is very likely the closest a western filmmaker come to make a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie. Hoss is amazing of course in a movie that is very much about how she positions herself in every space and situation she is put in and I'm very impressed by how transparent Petzold's images are, the Carnival of Souls narrative is treated as a given, so he can just focuse in finding a very specific description of a way of non-living.

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  Review by V. Lepistö ★★★½

  German capitalism, poor east and rich west, ghosts of the past, loneliness and existentialism... it feels as if Edward Yang was Alfred Hitchcock and if he would have been inspired by a tad of Weerasethakul, a film like this could have been made. But no, it's not Yang, Hitchcock or Weerasethakul but Petzold himself. Again Nina Hoss gives voice to thousands trapped inside their lives which are in half trapped in society. Are these people alive or dead?

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  Review by Rafael Jovine ★★★ 3

  It seems like the more odd and unique a director is, the more difficult it is to place his films in a particular genre.

  As an example, Christian Petzold's first film was sold as everything but what it truly was. Although it's marketed as a remake of the surreal horror movie "Carnival of Souls", it only shares the basis of its premise. Wikipedia calls it a psychological horror, but I think MUBI described the film better by calling it a Drama with some Thriller sprinkled throughout. In addition to that, RT consensus has described it as "bone chilling," so you have all the ingredients for disappointment.

  Now, maybe because I am a bit mental or I still have some hope…

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  Review by JMOursler ★★★½ 2

  I'm pretty much obsessed with Nina Hoss

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★½

  Go west, to a ghost world, delve in the branches of business, in drowned modernity, find sex amid all the constant anxiety (not as a palliative but as a natural unfolding of this tense structure), and finally live your life in this intermediate state, between Germany's unification and existential ostracism. Petzold's rhythm and framing was never as acutely modulated as here, haunted by a constant crisp light shedding on empty spaces, between Chabrol and Kurosawa, its mood allying a suspenseful thriller and a horror film.

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  Review by shookone ★★★★½

  a ghost story with the subtle and ironic touch of a lynchian ride into the subconscience, billed as thriller, but hard to pigeonhole it, offering to grasp it along the way. this beautiful and effective take on capitalism offers many layers and levels and packages it as an oddly harmonious and coherent genre garment, exhilarating in understatement.

  ones disappearance in society, represented in empty spaces and extensive landscapes in connection with the ghostly, crumbly and fragile soundscape, stand next to the story dynamics of protagonists being victims and villains at the same time, falling in their self-definition of materialistic values.

  genre hybrid and subtle shifter of layers - Petzolds hands down masterpiece was the best german movie of 2007 and the best one of the Berlinale festival of that year.

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  Review by Ashlea 🌈⭐️#StandWithUkraine ★★★★ 6

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

  "It was more than just not being able to hear anything, or make contact with anyone. It was as though - as though for a time, I didn't exist. As though I had no place in the world, no part of the life around me." - Mary; Carnival of Souls, 1962

  Oh Yella, what have you done or haven't done? Christian Petzold's magical realism and subconscious cinematic threads spellbind in this often terrifying domestic violence thriller and straight-shooting, cut-throat business acumen romance. Money is on their minds, but to be obtained for an unclear and uncertain future that never feels a tangible reality; driven by both situational stress and greed. Yella tumbles into the water and whether or not she ever emerged is bound by a fate that seems predetermined and out of control. Greed breeds violence, and innocence mutates into evil. Dead or alive makes no difference.

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  Review by Paul Hibbard ★★★★½ 3

  After not loving and even downright trashing some of Christian Petzold's early shorts on here, but remembering how much I love Phoenix, I needed Yella to make me realize he wasn't just a one-masterpiece anomoly of a filmmaker.

  A semi remake of Carnival of Souls, but heavily grounded in realism, Yella is a story of a woman being stalked by an ex and through happenstance of tragedy meets a new man, who seems to be the same type and general appearance of her ex and he has a business proposition for her.

  Slowly a haunting cloud comes over the story, along with some supernatural premonitions on her part, that makes Yella hard to place in one particular genre. It's simply…

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★½

  Bizarro como é um filme objetivo, um filme muito concreto, mas que ao mesmo tempo consegue ir preservando toda uma ambiguidade com o seu meio. Me remeteu muito ao Kiyoshi Kurosawa, essa abordagem sólida mas que sempre consegue se manter aberta. Um filme onde o signo parece que nunca é exatamente uma alegoria, mas parte de um pesadelo material da realidade.

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  Review by laila ★★★½

  i’ve read it somewhere a long time ago that a poet writes the same poem all their lives, that every written word comes from the same place within a person, that no matter how different the form the essence of the works is always the same. this idea kept coming to mind as i watched yella.

  petzold paradoxically veils ambiguity in banality in order to conceal the simplicity of the film’s main concept: life is always in a transitory state and these journeys always go to the same place and achieve the same result, the result that’s meant to be. that idea is applied in a broader, communal sense, in the geographical and historical differences shown between east to west…

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  Review by maneleeo ★★★★ 7

  Christian Petzold really fooled me with this one. I couldn't really put my finger on what was happening until the very last minute. "Yella" uses a convoluted plot to tell a story of an unhappy women who lives with the scar of an psychologically abusive relationship and her attempts to escape from such a part of her life. And it's amazing how Petzold makes us forget these things in the first place. He introduces complexity to the story like it was nothing, I'm not really sure how he did it without making the audience, a.k.a. me, confused and looking up and down to see if it missed something.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★

  Thought process in watching ‘Yella:’ 

  Men are the worst.

  Money is the worst. 

  Capitalism is the worst. 

  Men are the worst. 

  Men are the worst. 

  .... what if - everything - is the worst? 

  Much love to Christian Petzold — he knows how to make a girl feel good.