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Phoenix

Phoenix (2015)

July. 24,2015
|
7.3
|
PG-13
| Drama

German-Jewish cabaret singer Nelly survived Auschwitz but had to undergo reconstructive surgery as her face was disfigured. Without recognizing Nelly, her former husband Johnny asks her to help him claim his wife’s inheritance. To see if he betrayed her, she agrees, becoming her own doppelganger.

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Exoticalot
2015/07/24

People are voting emotionally.

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Micransix
2015/07/25

Crappy film

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Aubrey Hackett
2015/07/26

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

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Isbel
2015/07/27

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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barberic-695-574135
2015/07/28

If you have trouble sleeping slip this one in the DVD player, Slow to the point of being dam near static. The acting was generally awful and the story line ridiculous. Avoid at all cost. We will not be watching it again in the future.

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A.W Richmond
2015/07/29

Hubert Monteilhet's novel has been filmed three times I saw two of them. The 1960's Return From The Ashes and this one, Phoenix (2014) - the one I haven't seen is a TV version from the 1980's Le retour d'Elisabeth Wolff, but now I really want to see it. Phoenix is a moody, painful journey to a rebirth. Nina Hoss is lovely as the survivor, Ronald Zehofeld plays the husband, object of her obsession. He's an interesting actor, a mix between Benicio del Toro and the young Orson Welles. Their scenes together have a realistic, tangible suspense. But Christian Petzold, the director of Jerichow (2008), gives the whole film a severe pace and tone, the 1964 version has a sharp, sophisticated script by Julius J Epstein with titles like Casablanca to his credit and J Lee Thompson at the helm, Thompson directed films like The Guns Of Navarone, Cape Fear and What A Way To Go. So his version, Return From The Ashes, is a whole other experience, at time it's even funny. With a superlative international cast cast, Maximilian Schell, Ingrid Thulin and Samantha Eggar - So one can see both films as it they weren't even related.

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mike goodwin
2015/07/30

awesome film.....good depiction of post-war Germany, but premise was hard to buy....how could a man not actually recognize his own freakin' wife? Sure, her face is completely different, but he would come (quickly) to recognize the rest of her for god's sake. The ending was, by every means, anti-climactic.

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Movie_Muse_Reviews
2015/07/31

Christian Petzold explores the trauma of the Holocaust in a deeply psychological way in "Phoenix," a drama that unfolds in the aftermath of World War II as a woman with a new face and the opportunity for a fresh start after surviving the death camps must attempt to actually put concept to practice. Petzold regular Nina Hoss stars as Nelly Lenz, a Holocaust survivor who returns home to a demolished Berlin after the war following successful facial reconstructive surgery. She lives with her close friend, also Jewish, named Lene (Nina Kuzendorf), who talks of a plan to start a new life in what will shortly become Israel, but Nelly is preoccupied with finding her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), the non-Jewish jazz pianist whom she was taken from during the war, but who Lene says actually betrayed her to the Nazis. When Nelly finds Johnny, he doesn't recognize her, but the resemblance is uncanny enough that Johnny conspires to make her look like her old self in order to get her family fortune out of a Swiss bank. Nelly goes along with the ploy, hoping for the truth — and that Johnny might realize it's actually her.The premise borrows from parts of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," but there are no thriller elements in "Phoenix," just psychological drama and a good deal of suspense between Nelly and Johnny as she becomes more and more like "the old Nelly." This premise provides a brilliant juxtaposition with the Nelly character on the whole, someone who desperately wants to become her old self and have her old life back, but of course, having lived through one of the worst horrors in human history, it's not so simple.Hoss hauntingly puts on this persona of a woman oddly hopeful yet deeply traumatized. Nelly is a shaky, uncomfortable character to watch, yet fascinating all the same. In her encounters with Johnny, we have the benefit of knowing what she knows and getting to see how she handles being so close yet so emotionally far from the man she loved. We see her hopeful that Johnny will connect the dots, and despondent as she struggles to inhabit the woman she once was. Petzold writes so much emotional subtext into this story and Hoss hits every note — no pun intended (as her character was a singer before the war).Music plays a rather critical role in the film as well. In addition to Johnny and Nelly's past as musicians and their reunion in the film at the aptly named Phoenix night club where we hear lots of music, Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's "Speak Low" figures prominently into the story, setting a distinct tone that echoes throughout the soundtrack. Its lyrics, as well, prove all too relevant to the story without being heavy handed at all. It is one of the better and most memorable uses of a song in recent memory."Phoenix" plays out uneventfully, but Petzold allows the drama to unfurl in poignant fashion, revealing a story about identity and love and how time can change it all, seemingly on a whim, causing irreversible changes in our lives. It's a sobering message, but one with a truth that runs deep.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

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