Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Germany · 2012
1h 28m
Director Jan Ole Gerster
Starring Tom Schilling, Marc Hosemann, Friederike Kempter, Justus von Dohnányi
Genre Comedy, Drama
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
This black-and-white tragicomedy follows Niko, a melancholy twenty-something weighed down by possibility, as he meets the many kooks and characters of Berlin. An ironic and recognizable portrait of prolonged adolescence: the aimless college dropout wandering a major city, always in search of a cup of coffee, with slapstick humor and a jazzy score.
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.
Gerster and Schilling are more successful when they allow Niko's behavior to be their main subject.
Sporadically amusing and sprinkled with a fine silt of truth that helps elevate Niko above the movie around him, A Coffee In Berlin is at its best when it rolls up the blueprints and lets its hero figure things out for himself.
A snappy, quirky German indie that will thrill fans of early Jim Jarmusch.
The Guardian by Leslie Felperin
This debut for German writer-director Jan Ole Gerster seemingly aims to transplant a mumblecore aesthetic into Berlin, with all the requisite aimless hipsters, whimsical touches and rambling narrative dips and dives; but someone forgot to add spontaneity or edge.
Jan Ole Gerster’s deceptively slender character study has a complex undertow, subtly linking its wallflower anti-hero’s acceptance of his failings with his country’s wider atonement for its World War II past.
A tedious exercise in tedium.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
An engaging take on a drifting character at an age when we’re all adrift.
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
A delightfully unforced comedy with a sure grasp of character and setting.
Time Out London by Trevor Johnston
It’s all rather charming, though, since leading man Schilling remains affable while never underselling this kindly yet feckless dropout’s sheer spinelessness.
During World War II, a German woman named Maria struggles to live and to love.
There's someone for everyone.
A woman falls in love with the son of a man she killed in a hit-and-run.
13-year-old Sinikka vanishes on a hot summer night, in the same spot where a girl was killed 23 years ago.
The last chapter of music history.
A speechwriter for France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs must navigate the treacherous waters of the Quai d'Orsay, the ministry's home.