Synopsis
German artist Kurt Barnert has escaped East Germany and now lives in West Germany, but is tormented by his childhood under the Nazis and the GDR regime.
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Cast
- Tom SchillingKurt Barnert
- Sebastian KochCarl Seeband
- Paula BeerEllie
- Saskia RosendahlElisabeth May
- Oliver MasucciAntonius van Verten
- Cai CohrsSix-Year-Old Kurt Barnert
- Ina WeisseMartha Seeband
- Evgeniy SidikhinMajor Murawjow
- Mark ZakMurawjow Interpreter
- Ulrike C. TscharreMiss Hellthaler
Recommendations
- 88
RogerEbert.com
At a daunting 188 minutes long, Never Look Away takes its time, doesn't force its themes. Like one of those novels that follows a family through multiple generations, Never Look Away follows Kurt from Dresden, to Düsseldorf, to Berlin. - 85
Film Journal International
Never Look Away, a cohesively integrated collage of many genres (history, war, crime, medical drama with romance and spectacle), is also a feast of fine acting and magnificent visuals. But with so much going on, viewers, as if confronting impressionistic paintings or pixel-based photorealistic portraitures, need to step away to get a better picture. - 80
Los Angeles Times
The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated at the outset and remain more or less fixed as the story progresses, a strategy that in no way compromises the filmmaker’s ability to mine fresh complications and surprises from his story. - 80
Screen Daily
Never Look Away is an often moving, thoughtful drama about the correlations between personal experience, politics and art. - 80
TheWrap
In the end, Donnersmarck has it both ways: He’s sentimental and he’s provocative, a craftsman who has something to say and it going to take his time saying it. - 70
Variety
One of the subtler strengths of Never Look Away is the canny evocation of a war-weary, defeated population who did not experience communism as a revolution but a substitution. The insignia and the catechisms changed, but the underlying attitudes remained grotesquely similar in their callous prioritization of dogma over decency. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
The work’s considerations of the intimate connection among being, art and life finally feel quite superficial. - 58
IndieWire
In emphasizing how art allows us to make sense of the past, and consecrate even the most banal of sins, Von Donnersmarck loses his grip on the emotional payoff of the present.
