Critics reviews

Beautifully acted, and making equal demands on our intelligence and on our hearts, [The Lives of Others] is a significant act of historical reckoning... [It] is a magnificent and unmissable tribute to the power of liberal humanism.

"The Lives of Others" is a powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires... It shows how the Wall finally fell, not with a bang, but because of whispers.

[Mühe's] performance is a study in artful stillness, yet there’s amazing intensity in his calculated efficiency... [His] creation is an enduring achievement.

The film turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Muhe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common.

A fierce and gloomy drama... The Lives of Others is a very different experience to Good Bye Lenin!, the funny and much-admired satire from 2003 on East Germany's collapse which, frankly, came close to indulging the shabby communist regime.

Wiesler's gradual transition from loyal drone to actual human being is where the film is most powerful. The love story between Dreyman and Christa-Maria doesn't pull the heartstrings with quite the same force... [Yet,] even when the pace lags slightly, you just cannot help but watch...

It’s all the more remarkable that [The Lives of Others] is the work of a first-time writer-director, given the emotional precision of its screenplay and the perfect balance it achieves between thriller and drama.

The Lives of the Others may be fiction, but its authenticity and fidelity to the time in which it is set are beyond doubt, ensuring that von Donnersmarck treats one of the most sensitive periods in Germany's recent history with proper respect. Just as importantly, it features superb performances... and it boasts a finely nuanced screenplay into whose naturalistic dialogue an intricate array of suggestive symbols and recurring motifs are subtly folded.

Mühe... is brilliant [in The Lives of Others], capturing each minuscule step in his character’s subtly growing recognition of the human potential for joy and emotional freedom... [His] magic comes out most in its tiniest moments: a raised eyebrow here, a slight upturn of the lips there. It’s a triumph of muted grandeur; it’s like watching someone being born.

The fictional story here, set between 1984 and 1991, focuses on the investigation of a popular and patriotic playwright (Sebastian Koch); that the captain assigned to his case (touchingly played by Ulrich Mühe) is mainly sympathetic and working surreptitiously on the playwright's behalf only makes this more disturbing.

A suspenseful, ethically exacting drama... [The Lives of Others] never sacrifices clarity for easy feeling. Posing a stark, difficult question — how does a good man act in circumstances that seem to rule out the very possibility of decent behavior? — it illuminates not only a shadowy period in recent German history, but also the moral no man’s land where base impulses and high principles converge.

Tepid reduction geared as an important look into a dismaying not-so-distant past, The Lives of Others remains utterly bloodless except for the obviously symbolic crimson ink Dreyman uses to type his subversive manifestos.