The Lives of Others (2006)

Instant Favorite.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

best movie i've ever seen.

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

In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. The Lifes of Others or also known as Das Leben Der Anderen is a movie that i was not excited for and to be honest it's not for my taste. Some people will like it for sure and that's why it's even in the Top 250 of all time but that doesn't mean that i have to agree with those viewers or the critics in general. This was a very bland and slow paced movie also i didn't like any of the perfomances that much and the storyline wasn't that much interesting either. The running time of 2hrs and 14mins was also not that needed either. (0/10)

I just love cold war movies, but this one is seen not from the American/British perspective, but from the people who were on the other side of the Iron Curtain.In the movie, we get an idea of how it was to live in a country that feels like a prison (first rule: if you try to emigrate, they will probably arrest you, torture you, and even kill you or if you succeed, go after your family and friends). Despite so much oppression and terror, there is some intellectual life, with plays, music, books and some discreet bohemian life. But the problem is that the secret police is everywhere, and being a freethinker will cause you trouble. The movie is essentially about an efficient police operative, who slowly regains his humanity tries to help a couple that is going to be arrested soon, and he is the one responsible for spying on them. The movie is a piece of fiction (we don't know whether there were cases of good Samaritans among East German police), but it feels almost like a documentary. I was happy that they won the Academy award for best foreign movie.

Honestly, judging by the cover, I did not expect much from this movie. Wow was I so wrong. It blew me away and more. The movie was crafted so seamlessly and is interwoven so beautifully. It is a drama of character development and the importance of staying true to what you believe in. This movie is inspiring, encourages to fight for what you believe in and is a total tear jerk-er. Will forever be one of favorites for a very long time.

"Your missing this film means you necessarily did not live another human dimension of life". That's my simple suggestion,if expected,when it comes to this film.This probably is one of the films directed from first to last minute with the highest degree of intelligence and consciousness a human being can afford or perhaps have ever attempted to exercise. It's worth almost of fifty other films combined and you will feel that glint of humanity that is sublime,instinctive yet here is in distress and being challenged in such an overwhelming way that has only to be felt,ever represented in a film perhaps in the whole of film history.It can test one's breaking points,shake one's core principles that one snuggles deep inside.It teaches what humanity is with grueling and sometimes deeply undermining a test.It can break and penetrate one,it can lacerate one,it can consume one if one believes himself to be a human and;even if he doesn't believe himself to be human,this film will recommend that,that disbelief or desensitization is artificial and imposed thus is not inherently human and can afford to let a man be wavered.It is capable of stirring one's human feelings irrespective of the extent of exposure,hardening to inhumanity one has been or can be imagined to have been subjected to.