A tale of conflicting identity or revenge? Or both? You decide. This all leads to arguably my favorite ending to any film all year...

| Aug 2, 2024

The story sometimes pushes the bounds of implausibility yet it is never a problem within the film’s parable-like framework.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Petzold's direction is simple and natural, far removed from the expressive formal styles of Hitchcock and Frankenheimer in their respective films about a facial transmigration.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 23, 2022

Petzold plays around with the idea of forced forgetfulness in this tale of inversed Vertigo.

| Feb 14, 2021

Phoenix is beautifully constructed and melancholy piece of cinema but its implausibility means that it can only be admired from a distance.

| Jan 14, 2021

Hoss gives a startlingly impressive performance as a Holocaust survivor entangled in a devious arrangement where love and hate resides within the same amorphous shadow.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2020

Petzold's dark cinematography bolsters the film's portrayal of a devastated society...

| Aug 13, 2020

[A]n allegory has to string together coherent narratives in two distinct registers at once in a high-strung balancing act. Phoenix manages this remarkable feat[.]

| Jun 30, 2020

Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss return for their sixth collaboration in Phoenix, a well-done post-WWII German drama.

| Jun 15, 2019

The far-fetched concept isn't established thoroughly enough to support the weight of the remaining film, and the script - bafflingly - dwells on the most boring part. Nowhere near as good as it thinks it is.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 31, 2019

While Phoenix's Vertigo-meets the-Holocaust plot line leads to a final scene that will be on many critics' year-end highlights reel, that scene features one good dramatic revelation in a film that doesn't quite sustain its drama.

| Original Score: 3.75/5 | Aug 28, 2018

Petzold establishes a strong sense of time and place, from the seedy, dimly lit confines of the Phoenix cabaret to the ticking of the clock in Lene's bedroom. He brings postwar Berlin to vivid life without calling attention to period trappings.

| Aug 21, 2018

This is a delicate, incisive, spellbinding movie from a filmmaking team with no reason to stop anytime soon.

| Aug 3, 2018

But as Petzold's film slinks toward this metaconclusion, all the artistry - the ingenious allusiveness and the Russian-doll plotting - finally upstages whatever larger point he wanted to make about history and identity, Germans and Jews.

| Apr 17, 2018

Truly elevating the pulpy source material, Petzold swirls the pot of suspense, revenge and guilt with not only a Hitchcockian but also a Fassbinderian touch. Films don't get more psychologically complex than this.

| Nov 15, 2017

"Phoenix," Christian Petzold's allegorical story set in post-war Germany, is almost indescribably deep, layered and complex.

| Sep 15, 2017

Filled with inky blues and blacks, the look of [Phoenix] recalls Jean-Pierre Melville's masterful Army of Shadows, except this is a more intimate effort about two war-traumatized individuals.

| Aug 21, 2017

[Nina] Hoss's step-by-step transformation from trembling and small to straight-backed and ready to perform is a marvel, a fascinating performance to behold.

| Aug 14, 2017

The film is more of a companion piece to noir thrillers of the late '30s and early '40s, with its German Expressionist skeleton looming over the frame.

| Original Score: A | Aug 1, 2017

This is Vertigo territory, but with an insidious twist.

| Jun 27, 2017