the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I will admit that I watched this film having previously, repeatedly, watched and loved the later "Ripleys Game" with John Malkovitch as the eponymous eminence gris. So I cannot consider the Wenders version without comparison. Really though there is no comparison.I am staggered at how Wenders fans at this site seem to be preoccupied by the directors brilliance...as indicated in other work.I prefer to try to see what is before me. It isn't impressive.Compared to the Malkovitch rendition, Hopper is utterly unbelievable. Malkovitch is the cool, manipulative, patrician sophisticate and sociopath that fits Ripleys form. When he talks art we believe it. Hopper is just a bumbling joke. In no sense can we believe the proposition that such a flake could succeed as a player in the world of fine art dealing. He wouldn't get through the door. Ray Winstones clubland villain in Ripleys Game is totally believable. The French guy in this movie is just a vacant nothing, the echo of a fart that Winstone might deposit in passing. The American gangland henchmen are utterly ridiculous. They don't have a muscle between them and are as menacing as a tea lady. The fight scenes are a pathetic joke, reminiscent of something out of a Sixties spy spoof, one tap on the head and a guys dead. Yeah! The movie is padded out with empty scenes that serve no discernible function, such as Hopper playing with a polaroid camera. One senses Wenders trying to create "iconic" images, Ganz leaning bout of a train cab screaming...but they just don't work. How the heck would he gain access to the train cab anyway? The whole thing is amateurish, pretentious and glib. Nothing has substance. Its badly edited. Sloppily shot. Inconsistently lit. The music is dire and doesn't segue properly with the cuts of each scene.Ganz is superb, but Hoppers "performance" undermines that. He looks like he thinks the film is some funny foreign farce that he will take part in just for the fee but indicates his disrespect via various tells in expression amounting to a suggestion that he is playing "tongue in cheek" yet flatly without irony. I greatly enjoy him in other movies, even B-movies, but in this he was embarrassing to watch.I suspect that most of the high scorers here would agree with at least some of my opinions had they seen the movie without knowing its author.

A very own adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, where Wim Wenders mixes the American thriller with a European existential universe. The film can even be considered a tribute to Hollywood cinema, though others see a veiled criticism of Americanization of Germany and Europe.The film shows us a very different Ripley and is more focused on the action antagonist, Jonathan. A strong feature of the film is the existence of rich characters and realistic human relationships and abrupt changes of the action energy.But the film is also an intelligent psychological study, cleverly presenting fear, envy, selfishness and friendship, which define the relationship between the two men, each of them, in a different manner, doomed by fate. And that is one more approach to film noir. The wonderful camera work of Robby Muller and the subtly pressuring soundtrack by Jurgen Knieper contribute to the atmosphere of suspense and paranoia that we feel throughout the movie. Finally, highlight for the wonderful sequence of Jonathan's escape from the subway, seen through the battery of televisions that broadcast images from the security cameras.

I'm pretty sure by now that Wenders is not a filmmaker for me to adopt. He tends to process appearances too much, while grasping in the blind what lies behind them. So, what's left is a synthetic beauty of images framed around space and usually a moderately above-par wrap-around into narrative. Oh, surely he's one of the most talented cinematographers we have. I guess that's enough to appreciate in one filmmaker.But all that is refuted by this film. I'm not sure how much it is that I bring to it, but no matter. It is one of the greatest narratives on karma.It's all tied together between these two people; one who lives in emptiness, another - a frame artist, charged with restoring - who works in form. Together, these two figments, comprise the one consciousness. Indeed, Wenders often frames them as dual counterpoints that complete into one.An artist is who he is, because he trusts the eye, the hand. Ripley is who he is, a hollow shell, because he trusts neither. So, we have the frame artist become framed inside an illusion operated by the other, a narrative that unfolds as gangster stuff around Europe. It's a wonderful film-within device; the movie illusion generated by the deceived mind's eye (he sees a telegram, but is it what he thinks?).Wenders is such a distinctly Western filmmaker though. Notice the notions. Ripley is empty, but empty in the sense that something essentially vital is missing. And the artist is not replenished by his work in form but frustrated for ambition and money, again our Occidental idea where an artist's worth measures in success and not the joy of work itself. It is a world reeled in by craving for things that are not there, implying a dissatisfaction with what is.Empty space is the balancing element, where we can flow into for release. It's magical in the two scenes of crime, extended wanderings in a subway and onboard a train, silent like Melville would have it. Le Samourai seems to be the inspiring visual text. It is about walls that enclose - whereupon we track and lose and find again, and life becomes this game of hide-and-seek, The poignant revelation of karmic wheels? Near the end, when Ripley reveals why the scheme, why the hapless stooge was dangling on unseen strings the whole time. However far-fetched it may seem or paint Ripley in a diabolic light, it is all about sowing seeds. And for Ripley as well, who realizes only too late that what completes him (who can, forgive the literal word play, 'frame', thus contain, his emptiness) is the connection with the man whose fate he has already set in motion.But the thing is this karmic connection that bounds these two together, the setting in motion. Having realized he values the connection, Ripley swoops - like the hand of god - inside the created narrative to assist him. Eventually, the connection is shown to wire them together across space, implying now a metaphysical communion.It's this that may keep the film at a distance; although effective in the sequences that resemble a thriller, it is a film metaphysically heavy and long with silence. It is not comfortably bittersweet, nor quirky like other Wenders films. This is why I value it so as opposed to those others, because it is a lucid picture.

Let's start with the good news: Bruno Ganz, in the part of a tragic hero tricked into felony, will make it worth your while. But pretty much everything else about "The American Friend" will please only the most dedicated followers of art-house director Wim Wenders. Although this is one of his earliest feature-length movies, it is already riddled with his trademark allusions to the history and theory of moving images, ranging from a Zoetrope toy and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to the lead character putting himself "in frame" by hanging a picture frame around his neck. Against the backdrop of Hamburg's grimy port, Wenders indulges his obsession with American culture in the guise of Dennis Hopper. Posing as a fake cowboy, he feeds fake American paintings back to the American market by way of a German auction house. The final third of the story, from the moment Zimmermann gets on the train, is completely incomprehensible without prior knowledge of the book it is based on, "Ripley's Game". What little action we see is awfully shot; most of the time, it's slow-moving people mumbling lines from Bob Dylan songs as they go about their somber business in a parallel universe heavy with misery and meaning. What we need is filmmakers who care less about movies and more about life.