Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

mukava991 The print of "Germania Anno Zero" discussed below was hard to watch because although it takes place in the post-WW2 ruins of Berlin, the German cast is overdubbed in Italian and the subtitles are in English. As if this weren't enough, the abundant dialogue is delivered very rapidly, in the Italian style, so the eye and attention are constantly darting from the actors to the subtitles and missing the emotional and visual element. And if you don't follow the subtitles you miss telling details of what's going on. Reviews from the period of its initial release indicate that it was once screened in German with English subtitles. Perhaps that print has been lost; if so, a shame. The Italian language, being so very different from German in its feel and cadence, not only disorients us but dilutes the essence of the experience. Another problem is the acting, which is mostly on the wooden side so you never get under the characters' skin. At the heart of the film is a little boy, and simply because he is a little boy he touches our hearts – but only to an extent; his acting is so robotic that it's hard to tell what he is feeling so that the film's resolution comes as quite an arbitrary shock. The whole film, in fact, has a perfunctory and contrived structure like a diagram hastily drawn on a blackboard brought to life.That said, this film is worth seeing simply because of where and when it was filmed. It's a quasi documentary showing the price of war on human beings. But it's not the only one of its kind. "The Big Lift" and "A Foreign Affair" were also filmed in post-WW2 Berlin and dealt with the effect of war on the populace. I think what added to the impact made by neo-realist films of the late 40s was their immediacy, use of actual - and usually harsh - locations and non-professional actors. Those elements seemed refreshing and bracing to audiences who had been accustomed to the artificiality of the Hollywood template.

Richard von Lust As a child of the post war Berlin ruins myself, I confess this film had a special relevance. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer impact that Germany Year Zero has upon the soul. Roberto Rosselini captured a tragedy that has been largely ignored and his haunting work screams the pain of post war civilian suffering in Berlin louder than any documentary.Not only filmed in the very streets where a million died only months before, all those appearing in Stunde Null were quite clearly living the very experience they were enacting. These were not actors. Their performances are clumsy and strained without the polish of professional training or Hollywood editing. But that was the magic of this production. This was not drama but rather a window of reality. Their faces were scarred by the terrors they had just survived and one can only wonder at their courage to enact their own daily suffering for the entertainment of others.The essence of the plot is simple enough. It is the story of ordinary German civilians trying to survive the starvation and deprivations of 1945 Berlin. The central character is a 12 year old boy, Edmund, who has to endure anything and everything in order to provide for his family. And in the end.....Well nobody knows what really happened to Edmund Moeschke, the ex Hitler Jugend who was playing himself. After filming the external shots in Berlin the entire cast were taken to Rome in 1946 where the interior scenes were put together. And of course most of them attempted to remain there. Edmund disappeared from history and probably met his end somewhere in the Roman streets. Certainly he has never emerged to claim the accolades that would undoubtedly be poured upon him were he to only mention his name.But Edmund will never be forgotten because his tragic story touches the soul and speaks for millions of other youngsters who were so cruelly sacrificed in that terrible conflict. This is not a film: it is a masterpiece.

valadas This movie is one of the three Rossellini's neo-realist movies that make the trilogy of war of his direction. The other two are "Roma Città Aperta" and "Paisà". Despite having won the First Prize at the 1948 Locarno Festival it was a commercial half-failure. In 1947 in Berlin, Germany, a city destroyed by the war, full of ruins and rubbish everywhere, with people and families living in awful conditions of poverty and housing squalor, a 13 year old boy resorts to petty thefts and tricks to get money and food to help to support his family composed by him plus an old and ailing father, a sister who wins money at night by going to dance and drink in nightclubs with the allied men and a brother who lives half-hidden and unregistered for fear of being arrested and sent to a prisoners camp since he had fought there till the end of the war. The best of this movie is its documentary value since it shows in a very realistic way the images of a Berlin almost totally destroyed by the war and the life conditions of its population. The story is not bad itself but in the end it introduces an unnecessary too dramatic ending by the boy poisoning his father to death partly out of pity and to put an end to his suffering and partly to alleviate the family of the burden he represented. It's however one of the best movies of the Italian neo-realist school that flourished in the forties and fifties of last century.

Robert Bloom Masterful work of Italian neo-realism by the grand old man, Roberto Rossellini and filmed in war-torn Berlin and widely regarded as the precursor to Rossellini's 50's masterpieces.A young boy is manipulated by his teacher who later turns out to be an appalling Nazi sympathizer who manipulates the boy into murdering his father.Mesmerizing and always stylized and breathtaking form. This film conveys the horror and destructive inevitability of war far better than the gross Hollywood extravaganza's of the Longest Day variety.Rossellini was criticized by the neo-realists for injecting greater melodrama and lighting control than was though appropriate, but the film still exists in a magnificent documentary style, and it runs circles around DeSica's Umberto D.