Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Sabah Hensley This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

tomgillespie2002 It isn't difficult to see why Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl caused a bit of a headache for the censors back in 1929. Even for a movie made during the Weimar Republic era, a revolutionary time for cinema when directors were consistently pushing the boundaries with controversial tales of debauchery and Germany's seedy underbelly, the themes and social insight feel unnervingly modern. Teaming up once again with his muse Louise Brooks, the Kansas-born starlet plays Thymian, the naive daughter of a wealthy pharmacist who, in the opening scene, watches their maid leave the family home in shame when Thymian's father (Josef Rovensky) gets her pregnant.Although it's clear to the audience, Thymian is puzzled as to why the girl has left. Her father's assistant, the creepy and much older Meinert (Fritz Rasp), invites her to the pharmacy that night on the promise to tell her everything, but instead takes advantage of the young girl and gets her pregnant. When the baby arrives, Thymian refuses to reveal who the father is but her family learn the truth from her diary, and insist that the two marry to avoid damage to the family's reputation. When she refuses, Thymian's baby is taken from her and she is packed off to a reformatory watched over by the intimidating director (Andrews Engelmann) and his tyrannical wife (Valeska Gert). After rebelling against the school, Thymian and a friend escape and join a brothel,Like many films made during the Weimar era, Diary of a Lost Girl depicts the decay in almost every aspect of German society at the time. The lives of the rich are stripped bare, and their motivations are heavily questioned when the family send Thymian away not with her 'rehabilitation' in mind, but simply to save face. The reformatory itself is a cold and bleak place, where the director's wife bangs a rhythm for the inhabitants to rigidly eat their soup too. They are less concerned with helping the girls fit back into the society that has failed them, and more about satisfying their own sadistic desires. In one particularly effective close-up, the wife seems to be achieving some sort of sexual gratification from her monstrous behaviour.The one place Thymian feels accepted on any sort of level is the brothel, a place where she can be herself without any kind of judgement or fear of social exile. While Thymian can at times be frustratingly naive and swoonish whenever she finds herself in the arms of a man, Louise Brooks delivers a tour de force performance that helps the audience maintain sympathy for her put-upon character, even when the film is at its most melodramatic. Even though the film is now 87 years old, Brooks's acting feels completely modern. Where most silent actors switch between rigid and operatic in their performances, Brooks is naturalistic and subtle, making it clear just why Pabst was so eager to work with her again after Pandora's Box, made the same year.

mishaa7 "Diary of a lost girl" - the second film adaptation of the novel, supposedly based on a true story, the writer of the last century, Margaret Bome. Received by the press in 1905, is the most famous and best-selling book of women. By the end of the twentieth of its sales has exceeded more than a million copies, making the novel one of the top bestsellers of its time. One modern scholar has called "Diary of the Fallen" "Perhaps the most notorious and, of course, commercially the most successful autobiographical story of the early twentieth century.Literary sensation. According to the author tells the true story of a young woman forced into prostitution circumstances. At the time of publication, believed to be an authentic book is a diary, but argued only Bome that was its editor. Likewise there has been the emergence of the myth of some novel effects on social reform at the time.The first screening took place in 1918, director Richard Oswald «Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen». To date, the film is considered "lost" and no one in the audience has no opportunity to see it.The second film adaptation was the work of the so-called "historic duet" Georg Wilhelm Pabst filmmaker and an American actress Louise Brooks. According to rumors, he asked her did not even know, seeing only her picture with a charming and powerful features, a mysterious look. That same year she appeared before him in a few ambiguous psychological drama "Pandora's Box." Both films are emblematic of the German cinema of the late twenties and this despite the fact that the young Brooks at home in the states acted in film punchings, second-rate bands, however, after the Commonwealth with Pabst has signed a lucrative contract with film company «Paramount».Their duet was a success for both of them. Brooks joined the amazing image of her heroine, expressing regret and despair with a rare subtlety of nature, while Pabst reel filled with memorable, vibrant and accentuate the culmination of events moments, particularly a scene in a brothel, where circling in the dance of prostitutes and their clients share a daughter and a fallen selfish father in a sudden encounter. The story itself, as the film is filled with meaningful scenes. In the episode where the assistant girl's father clings to Meyner Thyme, after which the heroine of Louise Brooks, faints and he was a "dirty" smile carries her into his bedroom, symbolizes the suppression of pure kindness naive girl in front of vicious evil bastard lust. Georg Wilhelm Pabst film can also be partly compared with the early work of director Charles Chaplin. One of the scenes of the film in the penitentiary, which enters the main character, is very ironic and ambiguous context. Girls taking place in this institution re-education, and in fact every day tolerate violent attitude on the part of both the moral and ugly teachers, arrange one evening in a dormitory rebellion, lashing out at their supervisors throughout the crowd with his fists. Similar scenes are in movies of Chaplin, it is in his films where he played the director, when he kicked his foot heroes stupid and evil members of the order, thus showing their relationship to government authorities at the time as a whole, whose policies have complicated the lives of many people."Diary of the Fallen" - a psychological drama with realistic events, which is a blow to the selfish bourgeois society in the face of vicious character depicted in the film. The story of the preservation of resilience, kindness, courage, compassion, and love the girl, despite all the troubles through which she had to go through.

Michael_Elliott Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) *** (out of 4) Fairly raw German silent from director G.W. Pabst. A young woman (Louise Brooks) is raped and is eventually thrown out of her house when she has a baby. From here on the girl goes to a reform school, becomes a whore but will she find redemption? I was somewhat letdown by the film since I felt it did have a few flaws. I thought the men characters were really one sided and the second half of the film drags somewhat but there are certainly more positives than negatives. Brooks is terrific in the lead role and does a great job at showing off the virginal younger girl and the eventual sluttish, if mature, older woman. There's a scene where she's working and her father notices her. Within the same scene we see Brooks "slut" slide melt away into that virginal girl we saw at the end of the film in some of the best acting I've seen. The mood and atmosphere is very strong at the start of the film and the morality ending actually works quite nicely.

dreverativy The is the best film that Louise Brooks made. It is far better than the overlong "Pandora's Box", and the more I have thought about it the stranger it seems that "Dairy of a Lost Girl" should not be more famous than its overblown predecessor.The fame of "Pandora's Box" is attributable to the image and presentation of Louise Brooks as an archetype - not unlike a mannequin or fashion plate for a generation of 'liberated' German girls. "Diary of a Lost Girl" is forgotten despite its artistic superiority and the revelation that Brooks was not just a sensational beauty but a very fine actress to boot. In most of her films Brooks was called upon to pose, and perhaps to smirk - and she did it very well, but she was not asked to do any more, which might have explained her mounting frustration with the American movie business.After she completed "Pandora's Box" she sailed back to the U.S.A., perhaps expecting to be treated with greater consideration by the Paramount executives who had been driven to distraction by her uncompromising (selfish?) working methods. The long suffering managing executive B. P. Shulberg offered her a much higher salary in order to turn her last American silent, "The Canary Murder Case" (which I have not seen) into a talkie. Oddly, she viewed this as an insult and treated Shulberg with undeserved contempt. Having destroyed her relationship with Adolph Zukor's Paramount she returned to G. W. Pabst in 1929 - she presumably hoped that Hom-Film would be a more accommodating employer. Accommodating, that is, of her increasingly erratic and temperamental work habits, which were lubricated by a heroic consumption of alcohol.Pabst obviously had a great affection for her (who wouldn't, even allowing for her often lamentable behaviour?), and he famously remarked on the last day of shooting that 'Your life is like Lulu's, and you will end the same way'. That was almost prophetic, and her failure to register (to Pabst) that she was in any way aware of the consequences of her folly, was discreditable. So when I look at a film as good as "Diary of a Lost Girl" I am as conscious of her striking ability, as I am appalled by what she threw away through sheer wilful arrogance. The story, by Margarete Bohme, caused a great scandal in 1905. It replicated the tale of the baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who committed suicide in 1927. It was not just the subject (a very candid treatment of prostitution that revealed a sordid and - worse still - undisciplined underbelly to Wilhelmine society), but the outspoken attack on the reformatory system, on the conditional and de haut en bas nature of charitable provision, and the strong suggestion of feminism that was highly offensive in a rigidly paternalistic social system.Attitudes towards manners and morals changed emphatically with the establishment of the Weimar regime, and Bohme's novel was first filmed in 1919. A decade later, and having established herself as a poster child for sexual liberation, the role of Thymiane Henning seemed ripe for fresh treatment by Brooks.Brooks performs the role of the wronged daughter who has suffered a 'fate worse than death' at the hands of a repellant apothecary's assistant (an excellent performance by the great Fritz Rasp); brutal treatment at a reformatory (more great stuff from Andrews Engelmann and a sadistic Valeska Gert - a differentiated reprise of the Sapphic character of Countess Geschwitz played by Alice Roberts in "Pandora's Box"), to further disappointments in the brothel, etc. The entire ensemble turns out a first class performance, and Pabst and Sepp Allgeier ensure that the photography complements the power of the story.