...sadly stuck in a film that becomes its own dichotomy of sorts, unable to stick to its politically direct or ambiguous guns; I wish the film felt a little less dichotomizing...

| Original Score: B- | Jul 2, 2024

For those who didn’t think Petzold could improve after Phoenix, you might have to reconsider after experiencing Transit.

| Dec 12, 2023

Christian Petzold’s boldly experimental approach to a WWII story makes for an eerie masterpiece.

| Nov 18, 2023

…(Transit) brings a classic text to life in a way that never puts it behind glass to admire…’

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 1, 2023

The world Petzold defines is girded by fear, paranoia, and uncertainty yet his direction and the performances show a confident restraint.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 27, 2022

Transit is another masterpiece from the German director and an urgently relevant symbolization of the contemporary refugee crisis.

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

Episode 35: Triple Frontier / Climax / Black Mother / Transit

| Original Score: 88/100 | Sep 14, 2021

By stripping away the historical context of the story, Petzold has created a daring, radical, melodramatic thriller that taps into the fundamental pains of displacement and exile.

| Jul 2, 2021

An on-the-road tale of stolen identity that's imbued with suffocating urgency and paranoia, Transit uses many of the conventions of noir to weave a Kafkaesque narrative about how memory functions in the face of trauma and political oppression.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 8, 2021

Franz Rogowski had a fascinatingly off-kilter presence that helped make Christian Petzold's enigmatic Transit one of the best films of the year so far.

| Oct 15, 2020

Part bureaucratic head-scrambler and part sweeping romance -- difficult to pin down, but always intriguing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2020

An outlandish experiment that gets just about everything right.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2020

Transit exploits audience intuition and ties its plot threads with a needle to the chest. It's an anesthetized -- albeit wavering -- nightmare.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2020

I find the narrative treatment that the German director Christian Petzold gives to this film smart and very sober. It has a tragic, twisted, fabulesque atmosphere, as if it were a kafkaesque nightmare. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 20, 2020

So many of the plot points and characterizations that make the film such an absorbing experience would ... fall apart without Petzold's .. control over the destabilizing mood.

| Jun 30, 2020

Christian Petzold's stripped back melodrama takes not the slightest effort to recreate its World War II setting, yet it's all the more politically potent for that fact.

| Jun 26, 2020

In updating the story from World War II to a mysteriously Fascist-occupied present-day Paris, director Christian Petzold transforms Anna Segher's 1942 novel into both a Philip K. Dick-esque 'alternate history' thriller and a Kafkaesque neo-'Casablanca.'

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 22, 2020

Transit is most powerful emotionally during sequences where the main character puts his own grief and confusion on hold to look after a small boy in need of a substitute dad.

| May 29, 2020

Phenomenal as an intellectual exercise, a piece of storytelling, a dive into a mysterious, dream-like world, and as a Kafkaesque character drama.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 7, 2020

Transit is a thrilling and unsettling film that tangibly recreates a nightmare of displacement and uncertainty, but in such a way that could appeal to a broader audience.

| Original Score: 84/100 | Dec 20, 2019