Critics reviews

Women are everywhere subsumed into the story of the artist. Kurt’s wife Ellie is a fashion student but apart from the time she makes a suit for Kurt there is almost no on-screen development of her passion. In a film with a run-time of three hours and nine minutes there is little excuse for such omissions.

Henckel von Donnersmarck went back to his homeland for this new movie, which prettifies Nazism and everything else in it, and has far less feel for art than At Eternity’s Gate.

That is not the way von Donnersmarck operates. He is not a man to choose nuance when a statement of the obvious, preferably accompanied by an orchestra and tasteful nudity, is available.

Running at a miniseries pace, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-nominated Never Look Away stretches this template into 188 minutes of historical ironies, sex scenes, soap-operatic twists of fate, and rib-elbowing asides about art-school pretensions on both sides of the Cold War divide—enough to make one think that, man, if this thing had any style, it might seem really self-indulgent.

Some people will say "Never Look Away" is too long. Maybe. Maybe there are some sequences that could be trimmed. But much would be sacrificed, and there's something very gratifying about watching an artist discover what he wants to say and how he wants to say it, even when cramped by the society in which he lives.

Unfortunately, the film’s strongest passages do not redeem its indulgence in Nazi caricatures and prettily staged sex scenes. Part historical epic and part biopic, Never Look Away is mostly lukewarm melodrama.

Donnersmarck’s over-explanatory directorial style sometimes verges on the hysterical, while at other times he absentmindedly tilts towards off-limits areas (he doesn’t even shy away from showing the interior of a gas chamber where mentally handicapped people are being murdered—and cross-cuts that with the bombing of Dresden!).