| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2011

An honourable effort to illustrate a period in post-war German history that remained conveniently shrouded for years.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 16, 2010

A clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 6, 2009

That rarest of wartime dramas: an intimate, sorrowful glimpse into the heart and loins of the hellish aftermath of war.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2009

No one is guiltless-not the Russian commander (Yevgeny Sidikhin) who takes the heroine as his lover, nor her bourgeois landlady (Fassbinder alumnus Irm Hermann), who welcomes the occupiers for their black market goods.

| Oct 2, 2009

The film is well-acted, with restraint, by Hoss and Sidikhin. The writer and director, Max Faerberboeck, employs a level gaze and avoids for the most part artificial sentimentality. The physical production is convincing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2009

Sometimes a movie based on true events is forceful out of all proportion to its middling presentation.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 21, 2009

[A] brutal, unforgettable film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 7, 2009

Though the story is based in truth, an emotionally removed Hoss feels more like a symbol than an actual person, while her detached narration keeps us at further remove.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 17, 2009

A Woman in Berlin, which is based on an anonymously written memoir of the same name, serves also as a testimony to women who put men in their place.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 17, 2009

However and wherever you see it, A Woman in Berlin is a distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2009

A sprawling, difficult, powerful film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2009

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 17, 2009

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2009

One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II.

| Jul 15, 2009

As quickly as possible, the initial, brutal encounters are concluded and the film is hurried along to its second, plot-heavy incarnation as a healing-and-reconciliation drama.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 15, 2009