A punky, noisy romance full of life and emotion and ideas that captures the moment in the style of contemporary classics such as My Beautiful Laundrette and Trainspotting.

| Apr 1, 2019

That this marriage of convenience between two cultural misfits will eventually lead to love may sound like a contrivance, but that's not at all the way it plays. Akin's raw, powerful, multileveled movie takes us places we never expected to go.

| Mar 13, 2018

Ultimately more provocative than insightful.

| Original Score: B | Apr 10, 2006

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

The power of Akin's film, which is considerably aided by the two lead performances ... comes from the spectacle of people developing feelings for each other even through numbing layers of mutual narcissism, self-loathing and raging terror of intimacy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 17, 2005

Violent and sexy and funny and sad.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 17, 2005

There is an addictive quality to Akin's bizarre but heartrending film ...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 4, 2005

A riveting love story that never flinches from the unsettling reality of a specific social issue or the universal joys that two people can bring to each other's lives, no matter how hard they try to bring agony to their own.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 6, 2005

By the time the film concludes, you will likely feel better for having gone the distance, for having faced all this head-on.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 15, 2005

This is a gritty drama about self-destruction. On a basic level, its title refers to an early scene in which a man floors his car and plows into a brick wall. In a more general sense, it reflects the protagonists' fatalistic approach to life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 14, 2005

... Well and fearlessly acted, and the writer-director (Fatih Akin) is determined to follow her story to a logical and believable conclusion, rather than letting everyone off the hook with a conventional ending.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 8, 2005

It's an arresting new work by an obviously gifted and commanding moviemaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 7, 2005

This is not just pliable filmmaking; it is an exercise in worldliness, in a feel for the cracks and warps of circumstance, which is all the more startling when you learn that the director is thirty-one.

Full Review | Apr 2, 2005

Head On understands the tension between wanting to have nothing to do with the place from which you came and yet still, deep in your heart, somehow yearning for it.

| Apr 2, 2005

This is a film experience that stays in the mind.

| Mar 31, 2005

A major artistic breakthrough.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Akin calls this his most personal movie. Every frame bristles with authenticity and honest emotion. He's the real thing. His movie is stunning.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Where too many films depict redemption as a divine right, Head-On has the courage to track a process that generally makes for rough traveling.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 4, 2005

No matter what is going on in the story, these star-crossed lovers are always fascinating to watch.

| Feb 25, 2005

They might be marginal, they might misfits, but we actually care about those two crazy kids.

| Feb 25, 2005