The German summer romance is bound to be one of the year’s most literary films, a claim that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the director’s education, but it’s also one of the year’s most romantic films.

| Jul 5, 2024

While its comedic amusement lands with a bemused incredulity, Afire’s discussion around the fragility of male writers is rich with layers, none that feel compelled to untangle themselves from a film that on the surface seems suffocatingly simple.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 4, 2024

The best: its incisive look at the human condition and its unpredictable twist. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 17, 2024

From the beginning, Petzold conveys that under the mantle of tranquility... something perverse seems to hover over the characters. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 15, 2024

A drama hidden within a comedy as dazzling as it is, in its own way, outside of time. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 13, 2024

A moral and catastrophic comedy: another triumph for Petzold. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2024

Afire tries to be small, simple, and intimate but, while there are moments of intelligent and interesting dialogue, the film remains a mere anecdote. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 10, 2024

When tragedy strikes the group via the forest fires burning around them, only then does he become a real artist.

| Mar 18, 2024

Deceptively light at first, the film takes a dark turn while considering what makes great art (partial answer: bearing witness) and the need to step outside oneself.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 16, 2024

Leon is without a doubt one of the most obnoxious characters you've ever seen, something Thomas Schubert plays to perfection.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 7, 2024

Afire is not a romance; rather it is concerned with desire in emergency – that is, desire at the time of a crisis and desire as crisis.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 7, 2024

Petzold has gotten less subtle over the years, and this is probably his bluntest film yet. But his trademark haunting conflicted poignancy is still there in the ending.

| Jan 30, 2024

A good film to end or begin a year with, one that reminds us to hit the pause button every now and then between the play modes and never say no to anything because “work won’t allow it”.

| Jan 23, 2024

In watching them find it, we might find a little peace for ourselves...

| Jan 3, 2024

Catnip for insecure, resentful, bitter, and judgmental writers who are decently talented but not nearly as good as they think they are or want to be.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 1, 2024

In its final act, be prepared to be swept off your feet by a harrowing tone shift.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 31, 2023

Once the tension reaches a breaking point, Petzold, as in his other films, releases pressure through surprising and poignant losses, coloured this time by Leon's voice...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 22, 2023

It could be an Eric Rohmer movie that escaped from the 1970s.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 1, 2023

The isolated anxieties of the writer, the creative artist’s self-absorption and the small but bruising failures in dealing with other people who seem so much better at living than you are: as a satire, [Afire] rings bracingly true.

| Oct 25, 2023

The script, also by director Christian Petzold finds itself full of moments marked by subtle comedy and interpreted by a group of impeccable actors. [Full review in Spanish]

| Oct 4, 2023