The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's true power derives from the weird visual atmosphere Weine and his designers, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig, bring to almost every shot through boldly stylized, expressionistic sets and camera angles.

| Oct 29, 2024

There are many themes to be gleamed from its sociopolitical and psychoanalytical musings.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 27, 2024

[It] revolutionized the medium with its Expressionistic techniques externalizing the nightmarish delusions of a mental patient...

| Dec 8, 2023

It’s fun, spooky, and one of the most beautifully designed movies ever made.

| Jun 17, 2023

The film, made entirely within a studio, has such striking sets that they linger in the mind more than almost anything else, with jagged angles, harsh shadows and intense lines representing the way the characters, and the filmmakers, see the world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 15, 2022

The craziest, wildest, shivery movie that has come wriggling across the silver sheet of a cinema house. [It's] like a collaboration of Rube Goldberg, Ben Hecht, Charlie Chaplin and Edgar Allan Poe -- a melting pot of the styles and technique of all four.

| Oct 3, 2022

We have never believed the movie capable of amounting to anything worth mentioning. This film gives evidence that they can if the men who make them want them to.

| Oct 3, 2022

I recommend heartily this somewhat daring Teutonic dive into the troubled waters of ellipsoids, parabaloids, conic sections, and chiarscura, the terminology of which is quite sufficient to indicate that the bars are up to the normal mind.

| Oct 3, 2022

[A viewer who is] sensitive to the impression value of blurs of shadow and sharp white lights of masses and lines that possess a psychic individuality of the enveloping atmosphere created by the mounting of the scenes will find his perceptions stimulated.

| Oct 3, 2022

The picture sets itself the task of raising your hair from your head, and it succeeds from the moment the actors appear in the prologue.

| Oct 3, 2022

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is undeniably clever. It is most artistically acted. The lightning is a marvel of spookiness. And if you are looking for something different, well -- it is certainly different with a vengeance.

| Oct 3, 2022

The cubist settings in this picture are not only interesting because they are fantastic; they are also extraordinarily impressive when the effect of horrible beauty or of terror or imminent doom is desired.

| Oct 3, 2022

[That Wiene], this outsider, with no knowledge of studio customs, no reverence for studio traditions, should have turned out The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seems a thing almost too strange for belief.

| Oct 3, 2022

Remarkable for Its cubistic art effects is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but I cannot help regarding cubism in art, morals, life or pictures as distinctly unhealthful.

| Oct 3, 2022

Of the actors, it may be said that they most faithfully portray the undiluted horrors set to their tasks. From that point of view they are excellent, indeed, the characterizations are amazing.

| Oct 3, 2022

The result is two hours of nightmare, unrelieved by a gleam of humor. That the work has been well done must be conceded. Whether or not it is entertainment in the normal sense is another question.

| Oct 3, 2022

We could not help viewing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -- which represents artistic radicalism in its most rabid form -- with intense satisfaction.

| Oct 5, 2021

It is important to remember the influence The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has, its place permanently cemented within the dawn of film. A historical classic that may not retain the quality, but still retains the importance.

| Mar 31, 2021

Every intention is achieved. Caligari remains Germany's greatest gift to cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 5, 2020

To today's audiences, the title surely seems simplistic and even banal, yet it evokes a strangeness with its bizarre visuals that still manages to lodge in one's mind.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2020