Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

movie reviews Maria Schell a famous Austrian actress is filmed at the age of 75 having suffered possibly a stroke living in her ancestral home.This is a semi staged documentary highlighting problems in the last years of her life--her mental dementia foremost--but also her being broke and spending her time ordering expensive items advertised on television---she has 11 television sets on which at least according to the documentary she watches her old movies.Her brother apparently wealthy and also a famous actor steps in and manages her life as creditors close in.There are lots of film clips.This is clearly a movie for fans of the actress. I had never heard of her and her very limited mental abilities allow nothing but the shallowest conversation. But it is still touching and sad.Don't Recommend unless you know this actress

jm10701 This is a creepy movie.It pretends to be a documentary, but it is totally scripted, totally staged, and feels totally false. It also pretends to be a tribute to Maria Schell by her younger brother Maximilian, and it is filled with so many clips from her old movies that it could make even a devoted fan pray for relief - but in actual interactions between the siblings he's so critical of her and so overbearing that it borders on abuse. Even the supposed ravages of her old age are faked and exploited for the camera, which is really infuriating.This is a phony, cloying, suffocatingly obsessive movie that indulges Max Schell's obvious obsession with older German female movie stars. It's much like his equally creepy and equally phony "filmed" interview with Marlene Dietrich (only the audio is Dietrich; the video is faked with stand-ins), made practically against her will a couple of decades earlier, not long before she died.After watching this supposed tribute, I cared less about Maria Schell than I did before, and I lost what little respect I still had for her brother. He was fabulous in Judgment at Nuremberg, but he's come a long way down in the five decades since then.

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) But wonderful nonetheless. Max Schell recreates, with the help of many family members, scenes from his sister Maria's last days. (The film if from 2002 and Maria died in 2005.) The famous movie star is living on the family homestead in Austria in a lucid but irresponsible state, following a stroke. Scenes of her daily life are interspersed with medical commentaries, a discussion of her financial problems and film excerpts from her long list of international hits, films she keeps watching on the many television sets installed in her bedroom. I suspect some of the scenes are reenactments and recreations, some of them consciously involving Maria Schell herself. If that is the case, this is the last instance of Maria Schell's acting and one of the very few DVDs featuring her work on this side of the Atlantic. Because it is a very sad fact that very few of her films (in English, French, Italian or German) are available in that format today. As this documentary is already three years old and has just made it to DVD, there is little hope this situation will ever change. But you never know...

Robbie One of the hardest tasks in filming any plot is to keep dignity when it comes to taboo subjects.One of those is "getting old". This film offers a close perspective to the come-into-years Maria Schell. Old-time-stories alternate with the difficulty of coping with everyday problems. After all, the film is about anyone...it is our own future. The film's words and pictures are poetry of a very special kind. Its tenderness - which only a brother can film - is without compare: 10!