Metacritic Film

Run Lola Run

Starring Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Nina Petri, Armin Rohde, Joachim Król, Ludger Pistor, and Suzanne von Borsody

MPAA RATING: R for some violence and language

Sony Pictures Classics
Suspense/Thriller
80 minutes | Color
Germany
Released In Theaters June 18, 1999

In a breathtaking race against the clock, a young woman has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marks or her boyfriend will be killed.

WRITTEN BY
Tom Tykwer

DIRECTED BY
Tom Tykwer

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

77 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Washington Post
Fabulously kinetic.
100 Christian Science Monitor
Tykwer's style gives the movie an explosive energy that never quits, marking him as the most ingenious new talent to hail from Germany in ages.
100 Los Angeles Times
As essential in its own way as Anton Karas' celebrated zither work was to "The Third Man," Lola's music is perfectly suited to the film's aims and just about addictive in its throbbing, insinuating rhythms.
100 Entertainment Weekly
An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.
100 Film Threat
I can't rave about this film enough -- this is passionate filmmaking at its best. One of the best foreign films, heck, one of the best films I have seen this year -- go see it!
91 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The formula has rarely been done as well as it is in this goofy, audacious, visually stylized omnibus of what-ifs that operates on its own peculiar logic, and powers along with the force of a truck on the Autobahn.
90 Newsweek Andrea C. Basora
With her Doc Martens and her spiky, fire-engine hair, Franka Potente makes a perfect Lola. Like the film itself, her tough, flashy exterior cloaks a warm emotional center.
90 Variety
A highly accomplished, compact feature, which, while it may be light on depth, is rich in humor, rhythm, energy and inventiveness.
90 New York Magazine
A movie that really zips along; it offers some of the same pleasures as the silent slapstick comedies, particularly the Keaton films, with their sense of how sheer velocity carries its own wit.
90 Film.com
MTV, comic books and gangster flicks are all in Lola's cinematic family tree; it's a heady, breathless ride.
90 Film.com
The kind of thing Franz Kafka might have dreamed up, had he only had access to a daily dose of MTV.
88 San Francisco Examiner
A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.
88 ReelViews
Has as much depth as it has energy and action.
80 LA Weekly
It doesn’t add up to much, which is part of the point as well as the fun, but what makes the film noteworthy is its pure pop adrenaline.
80 TV Guide
The film's extra-special trick, the one that kicks in under your radar because it's so busy with all the flash, is that it makes you care deeply for Lola and Manni.
80 New Times (L.A.)
Wisely, Run Lola Run lasts something under 80 minutes; any longer, and it would have been as exhausting and boring as a half-hour Donna Summer track.
80 The New York Times
Tykwer deliberately blows away all traces of the mundane and the familiar, so that not even the closing credit crawl moves in the expected way.
80 Slate
It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.
78 Austin Chronicle
The rush subsides, however, the minute the movie ends, and leaves the viewer with the faint aftertaste of a processed sugar high.
75 Chicago Sun-Times
I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.
75 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Fun, fun, fun. Take the title at its word, because this movie is nothing less than a flat-out, lung-pumping, 76-minute sprint.
75 San Francisco Chronicle
The action is so fast that the viewer almost breaks out in a sweat...Ultimately vapid. Lola never does develop as a character, and the fuss seems ultimately pointless.
75 New York Daily News
Furiously paced.
70 Salon.com
Potente pumps strong and true from the first frame to the last.
60 Time
Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.
60 Village Voice
An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.
50 The Onion (A.V. Club) Joshua Klein
May be all Eurotrash flash, but it's not often that a film packs this much visceral punch.
50 Chicago Reader
About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be--a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like "Speed," and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste.
40 Washington Post
Kind of like watching a John Waters film on fast forward with all the good parts cut out. It's empty of charm and meaning, but it certainly kills time, for those who wish it dead.

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