The homeward odyssey of a disheveled German journalist who, in New York City, gets stuck with the responsibility of escorting back to Europe a callously abandoned nine-year-old girl. (In handling this Paper Moon relationship, the movie flirts constantly with sentimentality but is too low on energy and passion to make …
Pulp thriller version of the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, and directed by Wim Wenders. On one level, it's a withering critique of the male camaraderie ethic (with friends like this, who needs enemies?). On another, it's a conventional underworld adventure refreshingly infused with …
Painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer creates works of art that explore human existence and the cyclical nature of history. The filmmaker sheds light on the work of an artist and reveals his inspiration, processes, and fascination with myth and history. Directed by Wim Wenders, starring Anselm Kiefer.
Interlocked and overlapping stories, joined together through the roamings of a ruminative film director: "I only discovered reality when I began photographing it." (The actor in the part, John Malkovich, can make a hello sound like a difficult thought.) A tensionless collaboration between two compatible Gloomy Gusses, the infirm eighty-something …
Ry Cooder, the eclectic American guitarist, singer, composer, and musicologist, rounds up some old lions (and a lioness) of Cuban popular music, for a series of live concerts, recording sessions, on-camera interviews, and ultimately a debut at Carnegie Hall. (Their sightseeing sidetrips on that occasion are a delight.) Directed by …
It's been 20 years and this reunion film reunites the remaining members of The Buena Vista Social Club minus Wim Wenders. Lucy Walker directs.
The title identifies the room number of the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, in which Wim Wenders entertained a gaggle of his fellow filmmakers one at a time, sat them down in front of a camera and with their backs to a soundless television (the enemy), and confronted them with the …
The traditional French semi-autobiographical first film, set untraditionally in colonial Africa (Cameroon). Claire Denis, the debuting director, had worked as an assistant to Wim Wenders (and received here some support from his production company), and she has something of his placidness and detachment. She also has something of his effortless …
Although it buries the acknowledgment deep in the closing credits and has changed its name in hopes of establishing a separate identity, this is more or less a remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, a crest in the current wave of angelmania. A full-color remake, to be sure, and …
Reunion of the writing and directing team of Paris, Texas, Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, for a similarly slow-moving road movie, which seems to be set in an alternative universe where there still exists in the present day, much as it existed half a century earlier, a class of people …
Losers' Club comedy by Jim Jarmusch, with a befitting small-change budget, about an unemployed deejay and an apathetic pimp who are placed in the same prison cell in Louisiana, soon to be joined by an Italian immigrant with a do-it-yourself English phrase book ("Not enough room here to swing a …
Characteristic piece of Wim Wenders deep-think, or deep-sulk anyway, about the decline of Western civilization, the ascent of Big Brother, the crass commercialism of the American cinema, and similar morsels. To get down to brass tacks: it tells of a successful Hollywood producer (Bill Pullman), specializing in violent movies and …
Going-through-the-motions paranoia thriller that goes through them like greased lightning. Plenty of high-tech whoosh and whirl, in other words, but no emotional impact. The governmental Goliaths, who want to institute a Surveillance Society (the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne and Loren Dean in the cast helps to call to mind Wim …
Wim Wenders’s latest takes us through 12 years in the life of a writer who accidentally ran over a child and the emotional cauterization of feelings the tragedy visits upon all parties involved. Wenders can photograph nothing and make it interesting, which is kind of what he does with screenwriter …
Wim Wenders's first sequel. The work which it continues, after a six-year interruption, is Wings of Desire, the absolute last of the director's movies to warrant continuation, excepting perhaps The Scarlet Letter. But here they come again, those invisible, colorblind, mind-reading, ineffectual angels on patrol in a black-and-white Berlin. Bruno …