Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

calvinnme ... and it makes me want to buy the Criterion version with the commentary to see if it answers my questions. I watched it on TCM the other night, and there were wrap-around comments, but nothing that really touches all of the questions I have about this work.Was Fritz Lang, who directed and co-wrote this film, anticipating the Nazis, or were some of the attitudes of the characters just coincidences? We know Lang detested for the Nazis, because he left Germany in 1933 and did not return for 26 years.The story picks up where the earlier Mabuse film left off, with master criminal Dr. Mabuse in an insane asylum where for years he was comatose, but then his hand began to make scribbling motions. He was given paper. The scribblings turned to words over time. The words then turned to sentences that grew more logical with time, outlining the plans for a crime wave. At the same time, there is a crime wave going on in the city that seems to mirror Mabuse's scribbling. But with nobody but caretakers entering or exiting Mabuse's cell, how are these crimes being coordinated? Thus enters police commissioner Lohmann, to solve the crime wave.Lohmann is an interesting character. He picks up on details, but fails to pick up on something that will be obvious to the viewer and even to Police Squad's Frank Drebin. When Mabuse dies but the crime wave continues, and then somebody who has seemed fascinated by Dr. Mabuse the entire time practically stands on a chair and talks about "Mabuse the genius" in glowing terms, you'd think it would set off alarm bells in Lohmann's brain. It does not. Then there is the reaction of the criminals to the name "Lohmann". When some members of the gang are cornered in an apartment, they are brazen enough to shoot it out with what they think is a whole squadron of police. Lohmann arrives, gets impatient with this shootout, and just climbs the stairs with bullets still flying - one shoots off his hat. He pounds on the door with his cane and announces himself. "IT'S LOHMANN!!" cry the now panicked gang members, and they surrender. Huh?? They are not afraid of the police and their bullets but they ARE afraid of one man with a cane??? Then there is the criminal gang, always referring to "the boss". They themselves scratch their heads at the lack of profit in their crimes- for example pulling jewel robberies, taking the money to buy dope and then just giving it to people rather than selling it, per the instructions of "the boss. But when one fellow mentions it, another is quick to pipe in - you're getting a steady paycheck, why should you complain? This simplistic logic seems to keep the gang in check and carrying out orders to commit crimes they do not understand that are fraught with danger without question.Then there is the injection of circumstantial criminal gang member Kent. He was sent to prison for five years for killing his girlfriend and the man he thought was his best friend, the implication being he caught them having sex. Out of prison, the only job he can get is with "the boss" and his gang. Then another head scratching moment. When at the unemployment office, prior to joining the gang, he rants about the pointlessness of looking for jobs that are not there, and a girl who works there follows him out of the office and gives him some money - she practically has to force it into his hands - and with only a brief conversation between them, she shows up at his apartment probably weeks later claiming she loves him? Why??? Well, all of these characters come together in a suspenseful and satisfying conclusion, I will tell you that much. It does seem that Lang is trying to say much about the folly of unquestioning respect given to strong authority figures both good and bad - Lohmann and Mabuse, the importance and scarcity of a paycheck in Weimar Germany, and maybe even the redeeming power of love. I highly recommend this complex little film that gives us a fantastic tale with Germany immediately pre Third Reich as a setting.

gavin6942 A new crime wave grips the city and all clues seem to lead to the nefarious Dr. Mabuse, even though he has been imprisoned in a mental asylum for nearly a decade.Interestingly, the film is a sequel to both "Mabuse the Gambler" and "M". The "M" connection may only be implied, but there are enough references to think they must exist in the same world. (And some stylistic choices draw a line, too, such as both Lohmann and M's killer identified by their whistling.) The film marked the end of Lang's collaboration with his wife, Thea von Harbou (and the end of their marriage). This was his second film with producer Seymour Nebenzal (the first was "M"). Nebenzal is not as well known as the directors he financed, but maybe he should be: Lang, Pabst, Sirk and more...The Criterion disc is loaded with special features, not least of which is commentary from film historian David Kalat. Strongly recommended for anyone who has a love of film. I do not think they have transferred it to Blu-Ray yet, but I find it hard to believe they could improve on what they have already done...

pwoodstock23 The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is a fascinating film, filled with neat moments and some great, hallucinatory camera-work.Lang really knows what he is doing with the camera shots, as the film is filled with great amounts of really memorable imagery, such as the car shooting, where all the traffic moves except for one car. Another great moment is the ghost of Dr. Mabuse (with some truly freaky eyes) haunting the halls of the mental institution.While the movie has great imagery, it feels like there should have been more of it. Large parts of the movie are given over to inspector Lohmann (hope I'm spelling that right) as he gradually tracks down the person behind the crime syndicate. Mabuse gets little screen time, as it should be, but he feels largely forgotten as the police go down plot tangents.But still, the film is based around such a good central concept (A hypnotist controlling behaviour from behind prison walls, and writing instructions for others to follow), and the Nazi parallels so interesting that it is definitely not a bad movie at all. See it.Also: Creepiest movie poster ever. Google it.

chaos-rampant I rate the silent Mabuse from '22 as one of the most important films we have, in hindsight one of the most influential as well. It laid all the groundwork for film noir, the visible space of the story as the stage of some chaotic spiel manipulated from above and the players who act it out tied with strings to where the manipulation is taking place.The notion is largely the same in this sound incarnation; the criminal mastermind who under various guises controls the world we experience as the narrative of the film, and our frustrated attempts to apprehend him. But it fails in one important aspect. In that first Mabuse, we could see from both sides of the mirror, both the manipulator and the world he held on strings. In one fantastic scene taking place in what looked like a movie theater, and so referencing the movie illusion we were seeing from our position as viewers, these two perspectives aligned even. Here Mabuse is obscured by another remove, the various gangs who do his bidding around town.So instead of spending time with the illusionist, we follow common crooks. A man led astray, but who is basically good and saved by love. The inspector and his cronies as they try to disentangle the thread. It's like M all over again, for the most part a crime movie as a clockwork game of checkers between different groups of people that fight to be in the right place first.But it's successful, to the degree that it is, for the same reason. No, it's nothing to do with the cinematic. Lang was talented with hard allusions - there's a famous scene at a crossroads here - but otherwise simply hard with actors and camera. It's exactly that Mabuse is transferred out of sight that provides the extra layer, or at best that he flickers like some spectral emanation.What film noir did with these films when it finally reached America, is that it transferred Mabuse out of sight so that our focus was guided to the chaotic world below, where easy money beckoned, but which was now felt - no longer seen - as being controlled from somewhere. Here we can actually see the very process, how Mabuse is transmuted from a human being to a force that pervades everywhere and anxiety dissolves in the air itself.Two images are astounding in this sense, and however clunky the middle part about cops and crooks you should ultimately see this because of these two.One is the place where the henchmen receive their orders, a voice and a shadow addressing them from behind a curtain, and so a mysterious presence, a force, an emanation from a higher level, but no longer a person you can identify or put behind bars. And if we peel the curtain, we get what? But of course the cinematic illusion.The other is one of the few instances we actually see Mabuse. Locked inside the mental asylum, he's writing from his bed what is essentially the plot of the movie we see, heist movie stuff. We see him perched on the bed, taut, motionless, eyes fixed nowhere, as though withdrawn in malevolent meditation. His masterplan is to send the world wheeling into mindless chaos, destruction, finally the ashes from which it can be reborn. Lang couldn't have grasped the full implications of this, this was after all the part that was supposedly meant to reflect the contemporary insidious evils of Hitler, but this particular Mabuse, no longer a simple criminal mind as in the first film, not merely content to contort reality for the sake of money or a woman but with ultimately reassembling it as his highest aim, and so a cosmic Mabuse, is what in Eastern philosophy was rendered as the universal destroyer aspect of Shiva.Mabuse is interpreted for us as evil, because what he represents - here the dissolution of order - we understand as terrifying, have to. Likewise images of Shiva in his incarnation as Bhairava, the destroyer, are always meant to strike fear. The ghastly eyes of Mabuse immortalized in movie posters is that graven image. But that is, of course, only one aspect of him. It's the same Shiva that creates the world all over again. Mabuse by comparison is the corrupted human who would like to play god, he has mastered the mind but is none the wiser.