G.W. Pabst’s silent classic Pandora’s Box may show its director’s obvious expertise, but its arresting performances are the reason to watch it almost 100 years later.

| Mar 19, 2025

Its immense impact comes from the overwhelming magnetism of Louise Brooks as Lulu, the irresistible woman at the center of events.

| Feb 13, 2024

Posterity did for Pandora's Box and Louise Brooks what the world of 1929—in which silents were already beginning to seem passe—could or would not do.

| Jun 2, 2023

Brooks's energy, enhanced by the expressionist vision of G. W. Pabst, even energizes scenes from which she's absent[.]

| Jul 1, 2020

The way the camera lingers on Brooks is voyeuristic; she, in turn, is oblivious to the fact we're there - the scene where she swings on the arm of muscle-head producer Rodrigo Quast is a classic example.

| Jun 16, 2020

Pandora's Box is a richly atmospheric work, and Pabst is equally at home in Berlin high society or in London's impoverished East End, where Lulu encounters Jack the Ripper.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 16, 2020

GW Pabst's extraordinary, erotic and tragic adaptation/conflation of two Wedekind plays, 'Pandora's Box', owes to the electrifying, photogenic and iconic presence of Louise Brooks

| Jun 16, 2020

The film is laid out in a strange, semi-successful eight-act structure (just like von Trier's Nymphomaniac), and right from the start, Pabst lets us know this will not be a strident tale of a good girl who falls from grace.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 5, 2020

There is something hypnotically unbridled about Brooks's performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 8, 2018

How did the silent-era actress Louise Brooks, 94 years ago, produce a performance of such arresting and unfussy modernity that it not only eclipsed her contemporaries but remains to this day unerringly relevant?

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 1, 2018

Full of striking imagery which, once seen, will stay with you forever, this is a highly accomplished piece of work which brings together some of the greatest talents of the era.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 1, 2018

With Pandora's Box you forget that it's black and white. You forget that the internet has yet to happen... You forget that more than two hours have gone by. You forget because it's completely modern... 100 per cent gripping and involving.

| May 31, 2018

The film was adapted from a stage play, but possesses a strictly cinematic vocabulary that was heretofore unseen within the young medium.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2018

[VIDEO ESSAY] ["Pandora's Box"] can be construed as the first international LGBT film ever.

| Original Score: A+ | Nov 4, 2014

The movie's horrifying and beautiful conclusion becomes more poignant and powerful with each passing year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2013

Louise Brooks, especially imported for the title role, does not pan out, due to no fault of hers. She is quite unsuited to the vamp type which was called for by the play from which the picture was made.

| Feb 27, 2013

There is so much of modern movie life here that the picture, like Brooks' beauty, defies the ravages of time.

| Feb 27, 2013

If ever an actor was born to be seen in black-and-white it was Louise Brooks, who is as luminous as ever in this new restoration of GW Pabst's silent nightmare-melodrama.

| Feb 27, 2013

One of the classic films of the German silent era.

| Feb 27, 2013

Full Review | Original Score: A | Nov 4, 2012