A German boy who witnesses Nazi horrors grows up to become a painter in this overcooked but affecting melodrama
At a key early moment in German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed art-drama/suspense-thriller hybrid (which reportedly received a 13-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival last year), a young boy confronted by a terrible sight holds his hand in front of his eyes. At first, we think he’s doing it to blot out the spectacle of his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) being bundled into an ambulance in Nazi Germany. But the truth is more complex. As young Kurt (a wonderfully wide-eyed Cai Cohrs) holds his palm a few inches in front of his face, we see what he sees – the hand coming into close focus, rendering what’s behind it slightly blurry. When his hand drops down, the awful truth beyond remains momentarily fuzzy – creating...
At a key early moment in German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed art-drama/suspense-thriller hybrid (which reportedly received a 13-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival last year), a young boy confronted by a terrible sight holds his hand in front of his eyes. At first, we think he’s doing it to blot out the spectacle of his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) being bundled into an ambulance in Nazi Germany. But the truth is more complex. As young Kurt (a wonderfully wide-eyed Cai Cohrs) holds his palm a few inches in front of his face, we see what he sees – the hand coming into close focus, rendering what’s behind it slightly blurry. When his hand drops down, the awful truth beyond remains momentarily fuzzy – creating...
- 7/7/2019
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
Oliver Masucci as Professor Antonius van Verten, in Never Look Away. Photo by Caleb Deschanel, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Art and history meld in the Oscar-nominated Never Look Away, a German-language epic tale that begins in 1937 Nazi Germany, and follows Kurt, an artistically-gifted young German, from his boyhood under the Nazis, to life in communist East Germany, and finally in the West in the 1960s. The personal story is used to explore life in eastern Germany under two repressive regimes, and those regimes shifting views on modern art under those regimes. Naturally, the drama also touches on Nazi war crimes, the war itself and its aftermath under communism but the lens is this child’s experience in wartime and then as a young artist.
Never Look Away is an Oscar nominee in this year’s Foreign Language category and also in the Cinematography category, for Oscar-winner Caleb Deschanel’s stunningly lush work.
Art and history meld in the Oscar-nominated Never Look Away, a German-language epic tale that begins in 1937 Nazi Germany, and follows Kurt, an artistically-gifted young German, from his boyhood under the Nazis, to life in communist East Germany, and finally in the West in the 1960s. The personal story is used to explore life in eastern Germany under two repressive regimes, and those regimes shifting views on modern art under those regimes. Naturally, the drama also touches on Nazi war crimes, the war itself and its aftermath under communism but the lens is this child’s experience in wartime and then as a young artist.
Never Look Away is an Oscar nominee in this year’s Foreign Language category and also in the Cinematography category, for Oscar-winner Caleb Deschanel’s stunningly lush work.
- 2/15/2019
- by Cate Marquis
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Just nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign-Language Film and for the extraordinary cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, Never Look Away concerns itself with love and war and the limitless reach of art. These are big themes and easy to bungle over the course of this three-hour-plus epic from German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In his third film, after the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others and a misbegotten 2010 merging with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie to create The Tourist — a mega-flop for the ages — von Donnersmarck returns triumphantly to form.
- 1/24/2019
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on Milan Kundera: "He says great novels are written where history is kind of alive. In a way, I think that goes for Germany also." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
In the second installment of my conversation with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on his now Oscar-shortlisted Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen), spoke about his longtime editor Patricia Rommel, who also worked with Angelina Jolie after Jolie starred opposite Johnny Depp in Florian's The Tourist.
Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer)
Little Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) sees the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition with his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). A museum guide (Lars Eidinger) proclaims his Nazi ideology, but neither of them buy it. This sets the tone in Never Look Away, co-produced with Jan Mojto, Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann,...
In the second installment of my conversation with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on his now Oscar-shortlisted Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen), spoke about his longtime editor Patricia Rommel, who also worked with Angelina Jolie after Jolie starred opposite Johnny Depp in Florian's The Tourist.
Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer)
Little Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) sees the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition with his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). A museum guide (Lars Eidinger) proclaims his Nazi ideology, but neither of them buy it. This sets the tone in Never Look Away, co-produced with Jan Mojto, Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann,...
- 1/20/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
In 2006, a 33-year-old German director named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took Hollywood by storm with his Oscar-winning debut, a manipulative and wantonly middle-brow spy drama about a heartless Stasi captain’s long road to redemption. Told with a watchmaker’s precision and finished off with a tear-jerking gut punch of a finale (complete with a freeze frame for good measure), “The Lives of Others” offered a seductive peek at a shadowy part of history, and seemed to herald the arrival of a filmmaker who might be able to class up some Hollywood fare, or even sell American viewers on the idea of reading subtitles. Then von Donnersmarck made “The Tourist,” and that was the end of that.
Now, eight years since his disastrous — but Golden Globe-nominated! — dalliance with the studio system, von Donnersmarck is ready to walk his own long road to redemption (even if his most grievous crime was...
Now, eight years since his disastrous — but Golden Globe-nominated! — dalliance with the studio system, von Donnersmarck is ready to walk his own long road to redemption (even if his most grievous crime was...
- 11/30/2018
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) Sony Pictures Classics Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Screenwriter: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Cast: Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer, Saskia Rosendahl, Cai Cohrs, Oliver Masucci, Ina Weisse, Rainer Bock, Johanna Gastdorf, Jeanette Hain, Hinnerk Schönemann, Florian Bartholomäi,Hans-Uwe Bauer, Jörg Schüttauf, Ben Becker, Lars Eidinger […]
The post Never Look Away Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
The post Never Look Away Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
- 11/16/2018
- by Harvey Karten
- ShockYa
In 1933 an exhibition of so-called “Degenerate Art” — as in art that the newly empowered Nazi party considered antithetical to its values — took place in Dresden. Transposed slightly to 1937, this show, complete with stiff-necked tour guide (Lars Eidinger) explaining the worthlessness of the paintings to a crowd caught between socially-mandated disapproval and private titillation, provides the perfect opening for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s return to the welcoming embrace of Germany’s historical past. Coming after a brief, best-forgotten dalliance with Hollywood with “The Tourist,” after “The Lives of Others” won the foreign-language Oscar in 2007, “Never Look Away” has already been selected as this year’s German Oscar hopeful. And it is all about the three-way tussle between art, history and politics, though in form, Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, as classical and dignified a three-hour-plus, generations-spanning drama as you will meet, could not be less “degenerate.”
Visiting the exhibition are...
Visiting the exhibition are...
- 9/4/2018
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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