Hoss carries the film with a highly controlled performance, appropriate for a character who has learned how to survive by being very careful about showing her true feelings.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 8, 2024

The film owes a lot to its lead, Hoss, who has become a staple of Petzold's career, with her stoicism and towering presence as Barbara – a symbol of obstructed mobility.

| Original Score: 83/100 | Nov 24, 2023

A film that harmoniously and eloquently handles subtlety, emotion, and imagery. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 15, 2023

Barbara finds Petzold at his best, questioning borders and exploring human melodrama under the shadow of politically charged contexts.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 3, 2022

While the film ends with Barbara facing uncertain future, unlike Petzold's other films, it ends on a hopeful note. Deeply moving and humanistic, Barbara concentrates on the small heroism of one person rather than looking accusingly at a failed ideology.

| Feb 28, 2021

Christian Petzold's latest film is a marvel of modern romantic cinema, precisely written and directed with a keen sense of time and place.

| Nov 12, 2020

The directorial power of Barbara constantly shines through, helping certify Christian Petzold as one of Germany's best directors working today.

| Original Score: 8.2/10 | Jun 29, 2019

Nina Hoss as the title character Barbara gives a sterling, complex performance, convincingly combining wary guardedness with steely determination.

| Apr 17, 2019

A gripping and extremely compelling example of new German cinema at its very best.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 5, 2019

You'd think the story of a woman trying to escape East Germany in 1980 would have plenty of thrills, but "Barbara" is disappointingly bland.

| Feb 22, 2018

Conventional thrillers operate by being stingy with details. Petzold does the opposite; the result is a tense, controlled film that never feels constricting.

| Jan 9, 2018

...where there's a rough, stormy beauty to this seaside village, it's also something of a prison without walls, which is not lost on this inmate.

| Feb 12, 2016

Hoss is such a star, one of the finest actresses in the world. Her work with Petzold is exceptional, but I find myself wondering what Fassbinder would have done with her.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 19, 2013

A quietly tense drama ... builds slowly to its conclusion, as subtly powerful as it is inevitable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 13, 2013

It persuades us early on that its aura of political tension and suspicion, its taciturnity, its very strictness of silent observation as it begins, are fostering an intelligent thriller.

| Jun 17, 2013

Barbara offers us historically motivated immorality offset by some heartfelt sensitivity, a side order of depression, and finishes off with some ennobling hope. It's definitely one of the best foreign films of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2013

This is a remarkably subtle movie, spending most of its energy zeroing in on the clenched face of its heroine, looking for cracks.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 3, 2013

A low-key, tenuous romance characterised by its sparse, deliberately paced storytelling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 9, 2013

Petzold handles personal, formal and political concerns in such harmony that it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 21, 2013

A quietly absorbing character study.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2013