| Music Box Films | Release Date: March 1, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
28
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Mar 1, 2019
Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?
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Mar 14, 2019
A more threatening embodiment of that idea, of new times that seem like old times, comes to subtly provocative life in Transit, one of the most intriguing films of the new year. Written and directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s an audacious reminder that there’s more than one way to adapt a so-called “period” novel for a new era.
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Feb 28, 2019
The filmmaking is taut and skillful and Petzold largely succeeds with his double-track gambit: As a nightmarish but somehow comfortingly familiar thriller about fear, persecution, and mistaken identity. It also disturbs as a prophecy of the consequences of Europe's resurgent neo-fascist politics and anti-immigrant politics.
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The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.
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Feb 25, 2019
Sitting through Transit is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg.
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Be prepared to be challenged by the glittering, allusive and often bewitching “Transit,” but also to be frustrated on discovering that even if you manage to piece it all together, in this particular crazy world the problems of three little people ultimately don’t amount to a hill of beans.
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Mar 14, 2019The TelegraphAug 17, 2019
While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.
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Like all of his work, the writer/director’s fourth film in Berlinale competition is elegantly made, ingenious and intellectually challenging. Yet it’s also too much like hard work to be entirely satisfying and, dramatically, it suffers from the same condition as its protagonists: inertia.
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