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A Woman in Berlin
Metascore
74 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 16 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 16
  3. Negative: 0 out of 16
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  1. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    100
    It's intelligent, provocative and intensely dramatic. Its subject matter may be tough but it is as powerfully authentic as anyone could want.
  2. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    100
    That the film manages to be understated, calm and intelligent in spite of its wrenching subject matter is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment. In avoiding sensationalism, it feels very close to the truth.
  3. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    90
    A distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.
  4. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    80
    One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.
  5. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    78
    A Woman in Berlin is like a tour through the blast-cratered psyche of two colliding cultures, each with its own nightmarish tales to tell or acts of violence to experience.
  6. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    The film is well-acted, with restraint, by Hoss and Sidikhin. The writer and director, Max Faerberboeck, employs a level gaze and avoids for the most part artificial sentimentality. The physical production is convincing.
  7. New York Post
    Reviewed by: V.A. Musetto
    75
    A Woman in Berlin, which is based on an anonymously written memoir of the same name, serves also as a testimony to women who put men in their place.
  8. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Walter Addiego
    75
    A harrowing story about the will to survive amid the most brutal conditions imaginable.
  9. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    75
    Joins such wonderful recent films as "The Lives of Others" and "The Baader Meinhof Complex" as a clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.
  10. NPR
    Reviewed by: Mark Jenkins
    70
    A Woman in Berlin doesn't justify retribution, but in such moments it does clarify the horrible logic of vengeance.
  11. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    67
    Like "The Reader," this film treads unsteadily over the terrain of German guilt.
  12. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    67
    Anonyma stands out in A Woman in Berlin not only because of her ragged nobility but also because, alas, Färberböck has surrounded her with a gaggle of Berliners who seem right out of Central Casting.
  13. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Andrea Gronvall
    60
    Director Max Farberbock (Aimee & Jaguar) mainly avoids graphic depictions of sexual assault, but that only increases the tension in this austere, claustrophobic drama.
  14. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Peter Brunette
    50
    The film ends up relying on stating a basic situation over and over rather than developing any sort of dramatic story concerning recognizable human beings, at least until things get moving a little faster in its second hour.
  15. Variety
    Reviewed by: Eddie Cockrell
    50
    A stately, intermittently gripping, ultimately overlong drama.
  16. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    40
    Unfortunately, Färberböck never gives us reason enough to sit through such unremitting punishment. Though the story is based in truth, an emotionally removed Hoss feels more like a symbol than an actual person, while her detached narration keeps us at further remove.
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