75
From its engagement with genre tropes (particularly film noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.
75
Washington Post by Gary Arnold
An absorbing but rarefied, introspective variation on traditional thriller motifs, it's probably not the synthesis between the personal and traditional that Wenders needs but it's a fascinating compulsively watchable experiment.
80
The New York Times by J. Hoberman
Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.
75
Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
80
Bruno Ganz is excellent as the victim deceived into committing murder.
100
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]
60
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
Wenders' unsettling compositions are neurotically beautiful visions of a disordered world, but the film doesn't have the nasty, pleasurable cleverness of a good thriller; dramatically, it's stagnant -- inverted Wagnerism.
75
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
There's something cheerfully perverse about filming a thriller and then tossing out the parts that would help it make sense, but Wim Wenders has a certain success with the method in The American Friend.