Great Freedom
MUBI | Release Date: March 4, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
89
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 18 Critic Reviews
Positive:
16
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanApr 20, 2022
Gradually, a story of bittersweet beauty and unexpected tenderness emerges. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleMar 11, 2022
A film that both treasures the life span of a lit match and respects the patience it takes to endure a prison term, “Great Freedom” makes an exquisite case for the impossibility of caging the heart, even when love itself is criminalized. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 3, 2022
The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm. Read full review
100
VarietyGuy LodgeOct 14, 2021
Meise’s film is an exquisite marriage of personal, political and sensual storytelling, its narrative and temporal drift tightened by another performance of quietly piercing vulnerability from Franz Rogowski. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMar 7, 2022
If Great Freedom is a subdued film more interested in studying old scar tissue than licking up fresh wounds, the rare instances when it draws blood . . . are all the more bruising as a result. Read full review
91
The Film StageZhuo-Ning SuOct 14, 2021
Great Freedom asks a lot of its viewer and offers no rousing Hollywood ending. It’s not a film you see on a whim, but lovers of truthful, humanistic cinema should take note. This one is the real deal, surely to be given a chance. Or two. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternMar 11, 2022
The film, written by the director and Thomas Reider, is often brutal in content and spare in style, a celebration of unquenchable tenacity and the sustaining power of love. Read full review
90
Screen DailyLee MarshallOct 14, 2021
While it smoulders with indignation for the injustice that was perpetrated for so many years, Great Freedom is also a love story, a remarkable character study, and an absorbing meditation on what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyOct 14, 2021
Chronicling an ignominious chapter in queer history, Great Freedom is also a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzMar 4, 2022
It's one of [Rogowski's] most moving and fully imagined performances, anchoring a drama that tries to do a bit too much for its own good in terms of structure. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineDiego SemereneMar 1, 2022
In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeMar 12, 2022
The power of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls. Read full review
80
CineVueChristopher MachellMar 11, 2022
Great Freedom’s non-linear narrative is a worthy device for character development, allowing us to piece together a friendship that begins in suspicion and homophobia but develops over decades into something approaching love. But more than that, it is an expression of the shadows that the past casts over the present, the way that time and place weave themselves together, and their inevitable inescapability as well as how to resist them. Read full review
80
Time OutAnna SmithMar 11, 2022
Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise manages to find romance amidst the dirty needles and dirty toilets, delivering as many memorable tender images as he does unpleasant ones. Read full review
80
Little White LiesLillian CrawfordMar 11, 2022
While other men move through then out of the picture, Rogowski holds everything together with an exquisite deftness that is often emotionally overwhelming. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMar 9, 2022
Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing. Read full review
60
TheWrapDan CallahanMar 3, 2022
The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic. Read full review
58
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodOct 14, 2021
Despite a very frank and welcome illustration of gay sexuality rarely seen in modern media (in this manner at least), Greater Freedom continually teases us with storylines and subject matter by choosing to frame this era through a relationship that it cannot rationalize. Read full review
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