Critics reviews

The State of Things, one of Wenders' deceptively simple works, can now be viewed less in terms of the autobiographical context described above, and increasingly as one of Wenders' great examinations of the difficulties of sustaining friendship and love, the contradictory need for dreams at the expense of stability, the nature of exile and the way nostalgia hinders one's reading of the past.

Even amid all the proudly mundane wandering, Wenders' movie-buffish script with Robert Kramer gets pockmarked with images of dislocated reality, voices in recorders, snapshots, photos fed into grainy computer screens -- the tone is both post-apocalyptic barrenness and cowboy nomadism.

It is in America where Wenders' film really finds its feet, with a series of stunning compositions and a wonderful burst of what the film lacked to this point—narrative drive.

The autobiographical tease allows Wenders to work in many direct personal statements on Hollywood versus European, narrative versus nonnarrative, and corporate versus independent filmmaking, yet much of the film's artistic interest comes from Wenders's deliberate distancing of the subject: while the material slowly degenerates into self-indulgence and stasis, Wenders's framing (plus Henri Alekan's majestic black-and-white photography) remains rigorously formal.