Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Karst ★★★★½ 1

  franz rogowski is one of the best doing it. whole movie is pretty great but there's no way it could have achieved what it did without him. love how much attention there is to light in this, looks phenomenal. loved this

• 

  Review by Julian ★★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  'Dearest Hans,
  Of course I love you too.
  More than anything else.
  But what shall I say…?
  I poke letters into a bible with a piece of straw.
  As if that weren't silly enough,
  you'll probably never read my words.
  Since I have no idea how to get the stupid book into your cell.
  I can't get to you and you can't get to me,
  that's exactly our problem.
  It's right in front of us,
  black on white,
  with holes in it.
  We cannot be together.
  You know that as well as I do,
  you're just better at fooling yourself.

  And I don't mean that in a bad way.
  Without you there would never have been an us.
  You found…

• 

  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

  The last of the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945, but not all of their survivors were freed. For many gay men born during the Weimar Republic — who had been disqualified from Hitler’s master race no matter their religion — the end of the Holocaust marked the beginning of another, longer sentence, as both sides of post-war Germany continued to enforce the criminalization of homosexuality under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code (with West Germany adopting the Nazis’ aggressive revisions to the 1871 law). Already hollowed and dehumanized by their suffering in the Shoah, these men were shuttled directly from Auschwitz or Dachau to prisons in Munich or Berlin without so much as a sniff of the…

• 

  Review by Chris 🍉 ★★★★★ 1

  Creating your own version of freedom when the systems in place deny you it; triumphant love in place of defeated submission. An insane balancing act executed to perfection

• 

  Review by Lucy ★★★½ 1

  CIFF 2021: film #3 (57th chicago international film festival)

  “i’ve been on the run all my life”

  poignant in a way that never feels forced or false, and just vulnerable enough to let tenderness creep its way in. franz rogowski is mesmerizing as a man stuck in time, solidifying him as one of my favorite working actors. i can’t remember the last time i saw such a good ending

• 

  Review by Shubhra ★★★★ 6

  Cannes day 2: Forgot to wear underwear so decided not to drink water BUT THEN watched Franz Rogowski naked on screen while Franz Rogoswki in a white suit sat 15ft away from me.

• 

  Review by Kylo ★★★★

  I thought this was so beautiful. So touching. Artfully put together. Franz Rogowski was amazing. Great performances by all. I kinda loved how it took its own pace to tell the story. It did feel a bit long because of that though.

• 

  Review by freya ★★½ 4

  that was the worst saxophone playing I've ever heard in my life

• 

  Review by nabeel ★★★★

  sometimes movies that seem cold from the outside end up having the greatest amount of tenderness portrayed onscreen and this is a perfect example of that. without a doubt, my favourite ending of the year and probably the most overlooked movie of the festival season

• 

  Review by nick ★★★½ 1

  Great Freedom is a decent gay prison drama that's hard-hitting with its theme and story, yet rather stingy with its emotional outlets. It's not one of my favorite queer movies of recent years, but seeing Franz Rogowski offering a bold, layered performance, which may or may not involve spreading his cheeks for the world to see, is enough reason to check this out.

  Chronicling a German concentration camp survivor's decades of dehumanized experiences in jail simply because of his sexuality, Great Freedom is a self-critical, somber look back into a dark period of German history where gay citizens were ruthlessly punished for being themselves. Franz Rogowski is the perfect candidate to pull off the tall order of a loner longing…

• 

  Review by Ady Permana ★★★★½ 3

  we found love (and life) in a hopeless place.

• 

  Review by Will Steele ★★★★½ 2

  Great expectations often wound. Sometimes they kill. So to enter into a film with little to no expectations is a gift. It is rare in the internet age for an avid cinephile to see a film which they no nothing of. Yet there I was, in the company of a friend who chose the film on a miscalculation, and together we became enraptured by the virtue of surprise.

  Many a lighthearted review drifted through my mind. This queer German prison drama left so many avenues leading to easy humour or mild off-handed praise. Yet it truly deserves more: it warrants respect. This film goes places most do not dare to go, and won my heart with such a crucial yet…