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 a serious pass at it.) Wim Wenders fashions a subtle and sedate narrative surface that deals only in humdrum events and that has an unerring sense of the stale taste of life on the road. Meanwhile, the really big subjects underlying this movie (the homogenization of Western culture, the rootlessness of the individual, and other such whoppers) are passed over lightly, felt but not examined, as if they were buried under a layer of ashes. With Rudiger Vogler. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd
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