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Germany, Year Zero

Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero)

1948

Roberto Rossellini

Edmund Moeschke, Ernst Pittschau, Barbara Hintz, Franz-Otto Krüger ...

8.0

8,324

Drama Edmund, a young boy who lives in war-devastated Germany after the Second World War has to do all kinds of work and tricks to help his family in getting food and barely survive. One day he meets a man who used to be one of his teachers in school and hopes to get support from him, but the ideas of this man do not lead Edmund in a clearer or safer way of living...

	Author	Review
United States	Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"There is a strange emptiness of genuine feeling (...) There is plenty of desolation in 'Germany Year Zero', [but] it is presented in an oddly passive way."	NEU
United Kingdom	Kim Newman Empire	"Short and very downbeat, this hits the irony buttons rather too much but is still an uncomfortable, powerful film."	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"[It] is both documentary and a hallucinatory voyage through a stone age city, the perfect illustration that realist film can also forge fantasy."	POS
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"It now appears as Rossellini's first mature work, pointing to his masterpieces of the 50s"	POS
United Kingdom	David Parkinson Radio Times	"The documentary footage of a decimated Berlin is still enormously powerful (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"[It deserves] recognition for empathizing with ordinary Germans in the days after fascism’s fall and capturing the ruins of a bombed-out Berlin before reconstruction."	POS
United States	Richard Brody The New Yorker	"Rossellini was also one of the great symbolists ever to wield a camera (...) Rossellini’s notion of the physical power of ideas comes to life with a sardonic irony"	POS
United States	Bill Weber Slant	"The director finally succeeded in draining his 'real-life' template of sentimentality (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

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