80
Time Out London by Cath Clarke
It works and then some, making for a noirish and complex emotional thriller. And Hoss is incredible, playing Nelly with the shuffling gait and haunted expression of a dead woman walking.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
A gripping study of treachery, identity and survival.
91
Hoss' portrayal of a woman at odds with her surroundings is in a class by itself.
100
Slant Magazine by James Lattimer
Christian Petzold never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
80
Petzold's Phoenix is a high-concept premise executed as a heart-wrenching character piece.
100
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
Both a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration and a rich Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity, Phoenix once again proves that German filmmaker Christian Petzold and his favorite star, Nina Hoss, are clearly one of the best director-actor duos working in movies today.
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Nathalie Atkinson
With a riveting performance-within-a-performance of subtle physicality by Nina Hoss, the charade in which a woman plays her own doppelganger certainly borrows tension, look and conventions from postwar film noir.
91
The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic
Petzold distills a familiar atmosphere to create a work veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power.
90
Because Petzold is such a gifted storyteller, with the lean, driving narrative sense of the film noir masters, he also keeps those twists and turns chugging smoothly along, building to a climax so expertly orchestrated that one imagines he started with it in mind and worked the rest of the movie backward from there.
100
Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek
The director's last film was the superb 2012 Barbara, also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld, another romance with a mystery built in; Phoenix is an even finer piece of work, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect.
Probably the greatest performance of the 2010s is in this film by Nina Hoss