SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

eckleind "Germany Year Zero" is just one notch above a snuff film. Why an acclaimed cinematic artist would revel in depicting and amplifying the misery of people is beyond me. The posing of any child murdering his father is contrary to natural behavior even under stress, according to my wife, a pediatric psychiatrist. Yet this child is built up before the act as a normal boy, even exemplary in his familial relationships. A totally disgusting display of Rossellini's twisted soul.

Robert J. Maxwell Berlin the immediate aftermath of World War II. (Kids, that would be about 1947.) The city is a wreck, with only the essentials of life available. Food is difficult to come by. Bits of clothing are valuable. Rosselini follows the fortunes of one family living in an apartment that makes even mine look good.Papa is sick in bed, suffering from malnutrition and devitaminosis. He's not filled with despair exactly but there are times when he wishes himself to be out of the way. It's a family of four but they are trying to survive on only three ration cards because his older son, who fought the war to its bitter end, is afraid to turn himself in, despite reassurances from others that he won't be punished by the Allied occupation authorities. He's in his 20s and he's bitter as hell about it all. There is a blond daughter too, and she takes care of Papa when she's not out banging soldiers for a few cigarettes.But the story centers about Edmund, the younger son, who is about twelve years old. He's just at that age at which people begin to form a more enduring pictures of themselves but his particular self image has a multitude of lacunae. He absorbs what values and ideas he can from his family but they're all screwed up by poverty.Then, among his Dickensian adventures, Edmund runs into his former teacher, who does him little favors and caresses his cheek lasciviously. Herr Professor seems to have a thing going with a stern, authoritarian figure who apparently has a thing going with several young boys.The teacher is not merely a pimp but a philosopher and as he guides Edmund around through the streets that have only recently been cleared of broken granite, he begins to spout a kind of Social Darwinism, as much to himself as to Edmund, and without passion or even much conviction. You know, the weak must die and get out of the way for the strong; the survival of the fittest; dog eat dog; it's a zero sum game.Edmund, though, is a kid and he takes this bushwa seriously because he doesn't know the difference between philosophy and everyday life. Shakespeare, for what it's worth, new the difference. In "The Merry Wives of Windsor," he has Falstaff remark sarcastically, "There never was philosopher could bear the toothache patiently." But Edmund is too young to know. So he goes home, poisons Papa, and the old man dies. No one knows what Edmund did, so he's taken aback by all the grief shown by the family and the neighbors. Not that the sadness of Papa's passing prevents the neighbors from speculating about what will be done with Papa's shoes.There is also the problem of the body. What do you do with a corpse when you don't have money for a casket, let alone a funeral? You can't just let it lie there. (For me, the most horrifying episode on "Crime and Punishment" was when a man dies in Raskolnikov's apartment house and, the family having no money, the body deteriorates and causes a smell.) The neighbors haul the body out onto the balcony and leave the family to deal with it.I wonder if, in a way, the story of Edmund's development is not meant as a summary of the evolution of Germany before, during, and after the war. He begins as a naif. Then, under the tutelage of a reckless and unthinking lunatic, he embraces a dangerous philosophy. And then he suffers the same fate as his nation.

Koundinya The last of Roberto Rossellini's 'War Trilogy' movies and it couldn't have been better. The movie is filmed in the backdrop of an obliterated Berlin where the survivors of the war fight for survival. The center character is that of a boy who makes a futile attempt to get a job and make money and keep his family of 4 meet the bills. They live at the mercy of the Rademakers. The boy, having failed to get a job, meets his former teacher who makes the boy trade his goods to the Americans. The boy befriends a girl, who despite being in her early teens, solicit to make a living(though not explicitly shown). The women in his house, his sister and the daughters of the Rademakers too date the Americans to earn a little money. The gullible boy gets persuaded by his pedophile teacher to end the life of his ailing father, how only the fittest deserve to survive; plants a sapling in the brain of the boy the Nazi principle of eugenics. The boy poisons his father to his death. After having realized what heinous crime he had committed, the boy commits suicide due to guilt.The movie is well-written and the director's attempt to bring to the silver screen the struggle of those who'd lived through the war only to live in dilapidated buildings, no fixed job, no steady income and stricken by poverty is laudable.

jzappa Roberto Rossellini's grim, though disappointingly flat melodrama Germany, Year Zero opens with a boldly written preface that attempts to make clear the reasons for the movie's existence. Attempting to place the film as something closer to a sociological artifact than a fictional drama, it rambles on about where it was shot, what it aims to do, the tragic location of the production and an implication of humanist ideology.It's not an entirely convincing argument for the film to make, since there's a fair amount of dramatic artifice on display here, and it bares its weakness as insecure with the possibility of differing interpretations, which will happen anyway. Certainly, for someone whose extensive disclaimer emboldens its apparent aim to be completely objective, Rossellini is not being objective in this movie. There's an obvious ideological agenda astir in telling this story of a twelve-year-old German boy who does what he can to simplify his family's suffering in Germany's post-war bane. The director includes a pungent Christian moral that is prompt chiefly so audiences can be expected to have heavy hearts when it becomes distinct that owing to the boy's severe way of life, a strand of faith is not enough to pull him back from the height of condemnation. Rossellini also has no problem using his style to denounce most of his characters. Whatever he might include in the film's opening paragraphs, he is without a doubt cognizant that using an overhead shot or a close-up here has a clear inborn judgmental intention, and he doesn't arrest his style from including such cinematic language. Nothing demands that a film be necessarily impartial, so this one's emphasis on its own objectivity is dubious.Even as Germany Year Zero promotes a definite agenda, it remains admirable, because it forfeits or forgets no technical and storytelling virtues, although . Rather than sets, real locations are used, but the film feels a bit less documentary-like than many other neorealist features. There's a strong sense of structure present in the plotting that makes the events feel more deterministic and less capricious than they should if a breeding of reality was this rubble film's decisive aim. By happy chance, this narrative coarseness comes off like a succession of lamentable twists of fate, and as such it doesn't blister the credibility of the film, even as it makes it feel more like a written piece. Fiction is by no means an art form to feel one is above, so Rossellini's beginning pretense might have more to do with his unwillingness to accept his material for what it is than his lack of understanding as to what he was doing in the film.The cold sober atmosphere that dominates this transparent moral tale never allows the audience to take for granted how agonized conditions were while the movie was being made. The boy's father is withering on his death bed from malnutrition. A trip to a congested hospital is seen as a blessing, not only because it staves off the threat of his death, but because when he's not at home there's one less mouth to feed. Doses of grim truth like that seep past any innate contrivance in the film-making and coarsen the film with a sense of immediacy. It's about the hope of transcending the natural law of survival of the fittest as a way of ennobling the human race.