until the end of the world movie review

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Wim Wenders filmed “Until the End of the World” in five months in 15 cities in eight countries on four continents, following two lovers played by actors who were reportedly not on speaking terms with one another. I’d love to see the behind-the scenes documentary.

The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.

The story takes place in 1999, a future world only a little more shabby, violent and technologically advanced than our own. It lives under the shadow of death, after an Indian nuclear satellite has fallen out of orbit and is spiraling toward the Earth’s surface.

People have put their lives on hold, including a young woman ( Solveig Dommartin ) who has left her boring British boyfriend for a fling in Venice, and then encounters a mysterious stranger ( William Hurt ) on the road. He is involved with some dangerous characters who at first seem like important plot factors; later, we suspect Wenders was just throwing in some film noir elements to keep up the interest before getting to his real story, which comes toward the end of this very long film.

Wenders is the master of the road movie. Good road movies, like “Kings of the Road” and “ Paris, Texas ,” and inexplicable ones, like this one. His screenplays have a tendency to begin with enigmatic figures appearing out of nowhere, and to continue with a series of random events which eventually surrender an insight.

Sometimes that works. “Until the End of the World,” alas, plays like a film that was photographed before it was written, and edited before it was completed; at the end, the insights will mostly have to be our own.

Anyway. As the satellite inexorably spins toward its final resting place, the William Hurt character continues his secret personal mission, which takes him from European locations (Venice, Paris) to San Francisco and points in Asia before finally leading him to that mecca of metaphysical motherlodes, the Australian outback. In love with him and determined to discover what makes him tick, Dommartin tracks him from one destination to the next, while the bad guys bounce around in the background, promising a plot fulfillment they never deliver.

After setting itself up as a road movie crossed with a thriller or whodunit, “Until the End of the World” eventually finds a genre it is comfortable with: the visionary fantasy. In the outback we discover Hurt’s father and mother (official cinematic icons Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau ) living in an underground laboratory where von Sydow is attempting to provide sight for his blind wife through an array of high-tech, High-Def television inventions. Hurt’s travels are thus explained; he was either (choose one) in search of urgent materials for his father’s experiments, or racing aimlessly around the globe in obedience to Wenders’ creative brainstorm.

A great many scenes in this movie, I am afraid, can be understood only in terms of the way the film was shot. Wenders gathered around him his actors and a core crew of 17 technicians, flew from one city to another, picked up local crews, and shot on the run. His longtime cinematographer, Robby Muller , spoke of trying to maintain a certain visual consistency through framing and lighting, but Wenders was essentially at the mercy of local shooting conditions, and many of the scenes feel as if they were altered to cope with unforeseeable circumstances. There is none of the narrative urgency that would help in drawing us through to the end of the 157 minutes.

At the end, there is, perhaps, a moral to be found. The movie arrives at the Outback, a place where oral traditions have survived for centuries, where the aborigine people tell stories to one another and move in and out of dreamtime. To that place, von Sydow has brought his laboratory, which is like a mad scientist’s vision of future means of communication. The film has already introduced us to picture phones and cars that call their owners by name; now we find technology that allows machines to visualize human dreams. And just when it all looks like it’s about to work, wouldn’t you know the nuclear satellite fries half the world’s computer chips? The moral is clear: We humans should remain centered in our traditional storytelling skills, and not allow technology to dictate the way we communicate and dream. It is a wise lesson; one, indeed, this film might have profited from.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Until the End of the World (1992)

Rated R For Language and Sensuality

157 minutes

William Hurt as Sam Farber

Solveig Dommartin as Claire

Directed by

Wim Wenders

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William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World.

Until the End of the World review – visionary techno-futurist nightmare

Starring William Hurt, the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’s 1991 global road-trip movie seems even more miraculous than the leaner original

T he end of the world won’t come from a nuclear blast, but from an abundance of selfies. That’s part of the message gleaned from Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, the 1991 film that is only now getting a US theatrical release for its full, almost-five-hour version. Back when smartphones, GPS devices and open European borders were considered sci-fi, the two-and-a-half-hour version of this futurist’s detective story was impressive. But this movie has always had its eye on the future’s potential.

The multinational co-production was enormous in its scope, especially considering the director’s roots as an arthouse film-maker. Budgeted at more than $20m (£13m) and shot all over the world, it was conceived as the “ultimate road picture”. It was a logical progression for the travel-obsessed director of Alice in the Cities , Kings of the Road and Paris, Texas ; a planet-wide victory lap for the German auteur after Wings of Desire , his masterpiece set in a divided Berlin. Until the End of the World takes place in late 1999, with most of the globe in a panic about an out-of-control nuclear satellite. But our protagonist Claire (Solveig Dommartin, who co-authored the story with Wenders; the film was later scripted by Peter Carey) is unfazed. We meet her at a decadent Venetian party that is raging into morning, Talking Heads videos swirl on large Nam June Paik-style televisions as women adjust their Jean Paul Gaultier-like gowns. While driving home to Paris – where her nice-guy boyfriend, Gene (Sam Neill), struggles to write a novel – she crashes into two bank robbers. She ends up agreeing to smuggle money for them, but meets Trevor McPhee (William Hurt), an American straight out of a film noir who is being followed by an Australian in a similar trench-coat get up.

The first half of the film is, essentially, Claire hunting Trevor down – from Paris to Berlin to Lisbon to Moscow to Beijing to Tokyo to San Francisco, with other stops along the way. The film has an eye on then-futuristic technology, most of which has come to fruition. Wireless devices, easily searchable electronic footprints, voice-activated word processing, video faxes and computerised maps are ubiquitous in the film, even if they don’t look quite like they do now. (Lots of data on thin plastic cards; Bluetooth and Dropbox are less cinematic.)

Joining Claire is Gene and Rüdiger Volger’s Phillip Winter, a crappy private investigator seen in some of Wenders’s earlier films, and goofy bank robber Chico (Chick Ortega). The whole gang ends up in the Australian outback just in time for an atomic explosion – and for the movie to take a wild detour. Trevor (whose real name is Sam) was on the road collecting images with a strange device his mad scientist father (Max von Sydow) had created for his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau). The camera records images while plugged into a wearer’s brain. When that person rewatches the tape, a processor compares the two brainwaves and spits out some sort of cognition, which can then be plugged into another person’s head. He has invented a way for the blind to see.

With satellite and radio transmissions down, the assembled westerners and tight-knit Indigenous Australian tribe bunker down for months, playing music, doing science experiments, creating a community that is inclusive of all customs. Things get weird, though, when it is discovered that the technology can be used to record a person’s dreams. Scrutiny of these images becomes psychologically addictive, and eventually physically destructive, to the dreamer.

The second half of Until the End of the World always felt a little lopsided to me. Now, in this full version, it’s the first half that’s less interesting. The lengthy sequences of pixellated , almost inscrutable images that project ecstatic glee and existential frustration on to the characters are breathtaking. What begins as a natural desire to understand one’s own past becomes an addiction to nostalgia. In 2015, their zombie-like wanderings, as they clutch handheld screens, take on new meaning. Of all the predictions Wenders made, this is by far the most striking.

I was lucky to be at the perfect age when the shorter – and still remarkable – version came out in 1992. As a budding cinephile in New Jersey, I rejected the mainstream and embraced anything “alternative”. Laugh now, but at the time the soundtrack album, with artists including REM, U2 and kd lang, still fit that bill. I was idealistic and about to leave home for college. It was a wonderful moment to be into the arts: Nirvana were vanguards at destroying popular rock music; the first Sundance graduates were revolutionising independent American film; the fall of the Berlin Wall erased the nuclear panic of childhood. “World music” – best represented by folks such as Sting and Peter Gabriel, who were then considered cutting edge – was going to lead us to a borderless, global utopia.

Rewatching the film’s third act, light on narrative as our characters tussle with the heartbreak of their lost youth, brought all these memories back. The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.

Of course, Wenders could not have known about any of that when he made this film, which was a financial flop on its initial release. (The soundtrack album did much better.) But watching it now, even with its dull patches, it seems like a miracle. Today, a director of evocative arthouse cinema would never be given such a wide canvas to make such a sprawling and undefinable film. But 1991, as this portrait of 1999 shows us, was a different time.

Science fiction and fantasy films
Drama films
World cinema

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Movie Review: 'Until the End of the World'

Sure to become a cult video favorite, this visionary, intense, and complex epic from Wim Wenders ( Wings of Desire ) follows a man (William Hurt) across four continents as he transports a camera that will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to see. Set in 1999, with a nuclear satellite about to plunge to earth, the film has a renegade poetic spirit, mostly embodied by an obsessed woman (Solveig Dommartin) who, in addition to several other interested parties, chases after Hurt.

At almost three hours, on video End of the World loses in scope and gains in manageability. Wenders’ weird and wired view of the near future tempts replay as often as the sensational soundtrack (U2, Talking Heads, Patti Smith). The only liability is the sluggish Dommartin, the director’s companion, confirming that nepotism seldom pays.

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Until the End of the World

A dream project about allowing other people to see one's dreams, Until the End of the World is a dream partly realized and partly still in the head of the director. Described by director Wim Wenders as 'the ultimate road movie,' the $23 million production was intended to shoot in 65mm in 17 countries, but the format proved too unwieldy for all the location work and budget limitations forced a cutback to nine nations.

By Variety Staff

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A dream project about allowing other people to see one’s dreams, Until the End of the World is a dream partly realized and partly still in the head of the director. Described by director Wim Wenders as ‘the ultimate road movie,’ the $23 million production was intended to shoot in 65mm in 17 countries, but the format proved too unwieldy for all the location work and budget limitations forced a cutback to nine nations.

Film conveys the feeling of an abridgment, as narration by Sam Neill wallpapers the gaps in the globetrotting of William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin and other characters. Set in 1999, script by Wenders and Aussie writer Peter Carey [from an idea by Wenders and Dommartin] presents a world threatened by a nuclear satellite careening toward Earth. Party girl Claire Tourneur (Dommartin) is given stolen money by some bank robbers and, for kicks, she picks up a stranger, Trevor McPhee (Hurt), while transporting the loot to Paris.

Pursuing Trevor to Lisbon, Claire gets him into bed, but he takes off again. One step behind him to Berlin, Moscow, China and Japan, with the assisitance of detective Philip Winter (Wenders regular Rudiger Vogler), Claire finally wins Trevor’s trust and learns his true agenda. Detouring to San Francisco, pic comes to a rest after 78 minutes in Australia’s outback.

In the logistically taxing effort to get all this on screen, Wenders has sacrificed some of his customary poetry. And the grand emotion and obsession needed to carry the two lovers around the world isn’t apparent in Hurt and Dommartin. Pair strike no sparks, and Hurt seems blank most of the time.

[Version reviewed ran 178 mins.]

Germany - France - Australia

Production: Road Movies/Agos/Village Roadshow. Director Wim Wenders; Producer Jonathan Taplin, Anatole Dauman; Screenplay Peter Carey, Wim Wenders; Camera Robby Muller; Editor Peter Przygodda; Music Graeme Revell; Art Director Thierry Flamand
Crew: (Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1991. Running time: 158 MIN.
With: William Hurt Solveig Dommartin Sam Neill Max von Sydow Rudiger Vogler Jeanne Moreau

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Until the End of the World Reviews

…more of a mood piece than a compelling story…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2023

[A] sci-fi masterpiece.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2018

The film is funny, and the story has all the logic -- or illogic -- of a dream. It never aspires to anything more concrete.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2018

What appears to be a cosmopolitan picaresque moves from moment to moment to momentousness,.. Wenders' dream is only just now released in an integral, near-5-hour walkabout... A great and poetic and caring film has arrived at last.

Full Review | Nov 18, 2015

Before, one left the theater befuddled; one now leaves the theater equally befuddled but also moved, even genuinely disturbed.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2015

Watching it now, even with its dull patches, it seems like a miracle.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 27, 2015

Much of Wenders' sprawling saga is absurd, and some of it pretentious, yet set in 199, this film, like all of his previous work, raises interesting questions about the role of modern technology and its impact on identity and interpersonal communication.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jan 11, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 5, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 18, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2003

Thought-provoking romp by German film director Wim Wenders, a global hopping cinematic philisopher.

Full Review | Jul 18, 2003

Contains a few spectacular moments, but feels misguided overall.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 4, 2003

Long, slow, and pretentious

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2003

A bit lumpy (with so much left on the cutting room floor, that was probably inescapable), but it's the kind of glorious lumpiness that only comes from a great filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 2, 2002

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 26, 2002

The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The material looks tailor-made for a whimsical fantasy but Wenders has a curiously practical approach

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Until the End of the World

Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
December 28 2019

See more details, packaging, or compare

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger (William Hurt) in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life. With an eclectic soundtrack that gathers a host of the director’s favorite musicians, along with gorgeous cinematography by Robby Müller, this breathless adventure in the shadow of Armageddon takes its heroes to the ends of the earth and into the oneiric depths of their own souls. Presented here in its triumphant 287-minute director’s cut, Until the End of the World assumes its rightful place as Wenders’ magnum opus, a cosmic ode to the pleasures and perils of the image and a prescient meditation on cinema’s digital future.

Picture 8/10

Extras 8/10

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This 30-Year-Old Sci-Fi Epic Is a Saga for Our Times

In 1992, German filmmaker Wim Wenders released an epic, globetrotting cinematic adventure called Until the End of the World . Set in the “near future” of 1999, the film follows the path of a mysterious traveler named Sam Farber (William Hurt) and an assortment of pursuers that include an obsessed French love interest, an Australian-aboriginal bounty hunter armed with truth serum, a tech-wielding detective, and the love interest’s ex, a writer who’s been friend-zoned but remains captivated by her exploits.

But it’s the background of the film that gives Until the End of the World a distinct current timeliness: A global panic develops after an Indian nuclear satellite goes out of control, threatening its as-yet-unknown reentry point like a radioactive lawn dart. Political, social, and economic meltdowns spiral as its orbit deteriorates. The United States, ever the bad guy, threatens to shoot it down, sparking even greater global horror at the prospect of the damage extending far beyond a localized impact. The film mutates from spirited intercontinental caper to one that mulls the impact of isolation, fear, and uncertainty in the face of a spreading, unseen menace. No, you’re not the only one who thinks this all sounds too familiar.

It’s a grim premise, but Until the End of the World —a fully restored, five-hour director’s cut of which was released in December by the Criterion Collection —remains witty, playful, and imaginative nonetheless. As it follows the stylish wanderers, all amiable misfits in some fashion or another, it gamely predicts search engines, GPS navigation, and the human race’s addiction to electronic devices. Its 20 filming locations on four continents are sprinkled with futuristic concept cars cast as daily-drivers in Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, Venice, and elsewhere. Wenders was also one of the first directors to make use of then-primitive HD video, even though he subverted its true goal of unsparing clarity by using it as the technological centerpiece of the film, an experimental research project. It’s revealed that Sam is traveling with a high-tech camera, invented by his father, that can record brainwaves and reproduce the images they generate in the mind. He’s using it to capture greetings by his relatives that will be shown to his blind mother in an unprecedented experiment, and Wenders used HD to both generate the images themselves for the film and convey the fictional camera’s own product. The process feels true, and the implications palpable. When the reason for the bounty on Farber’s head becomes clear—the US government, which commissioned the device, wants it back—viewers can certainly see why.

At the time of its release, and despite an A-list cast that also includes Max von Sydow as Sam’s earnest but slightly megalomaniacal scientist father Henry, Jeanne Moreau as his infinitely wiser mum Edith, and the great Sam Neill as the writer Gene, the film was basically a flop, roundly criticized for its incoherence and its unfulfilled ambitions. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the studio distributing the otherwise independent film insisted on a 2.5-hour final product. At the time of its original release, Wenders was highly regarded for his 1984 film Paris, Texas and 1987’s Wings of Desire , both thoughtful, artistic tone poems. Until the End of the World should have been a commercial crossover success, but instead it was cut too short to relay its intended meaning and still didn't find a wide audience. Only now can it be regarded as what it should have been—and in 4K glory, to boot.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here .

But beyond the fact that a five-hour movie is a natural fit for a quarantined and social-distanced population of cinephiles—and its astoundingly good soundtrack is a pitch-perfect mood-setter—this particular project’s arrival at the dawn of a global pandemic represents remarkable re-entry timing. It lands with the precision of a nuclear satellite that’s out of control yet still obeying the laws of orbital mechanics and hitting people where they’re most vulnerable: their frayed, anxious collective psyches . The undercurrent that the world might actually come apart to some extent feels, now, quite familiar, but average citizens keep motoring along, much like the characters in Wenders' film. This happens initially in San Francisco, when Sam attempts to pay cash for a used car for he and his now allied pursuer Claire, played by frequent Wenders collaborator Solveig Dommartin. Sam ends up in an awkward fist fight with the dealer, who will only accept credit. There’s rage and raw survivalism in the dealer’s eyes as he steals their cash and taunts them about the lack of police they can turn to, and shock in Sam’s eyes that the world has become so quickly perilous and uncivilized, even as the bar down the street remains a relatively calm oasis.

This easily aligns with today’s reality, wherein the world feels as though it’s on the brink of chaos, even as people try to stay pacified with Netflix queues and TikTok benders. In public, everyone gazes furtively from behind surgical masks while in line at Costco, yet remain their jovial, bemused selves on Zoom. When those in either timeline—the present reality or the film’s—see the news, macro-scale fear takes root, while on a personal level the fight for normalcy persists. Tensions rise, and the cracks start to show in small ways first, larger ones later.

In Until the End of the World , that tipping point comes when the US follows through on its threat to shoot down the nuclear satellite, causing an electromagnetic pulse in the upper atmosphere that wipes out all electronics globally, isolating everyone precisely where they are. It doesn’t quite reflect the same lockstep parallelism as Steven Soderbergh’s 100 percent spot-on 2011 film Contagion , but it gets fairly close to what many people are experiencing today.

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In the case of Sam and Claire, they’ve been cultivating a cautious romance in their encounters around the world before eventually converging with that EMP while on the last leg of their journey, flying in a small airplane to Henry’s secret laboratory in the Australian Outback. Their airplane loses power and they have to glide down to Earth, barreling headlong across the desert scrub as Peter Gabriel’s “Blood of Eden” plays, the whole scene intercut with the other characters elsewhere simultaneously realizing what’s happened. Sam and Claire must then walk for days until reunited with the other pursuers, at which point they are all now friends. Cut off from the world and uncertain about its fate, they wrestle with fear at the remote lab/sanctuary, but remain bolstered by each other and the goal of showing Sam’s mother the world she’s missed out on, visually at least, for her entire life.

person lathering hands with soap and water

By Meghan Herbst

In the real world—aka, this timeline—no EMP has cut off electronics, but at this point anything, really, can happen. Just substitute a grid failure in the wake of personnel shortages or, say, a seemingly inevitable solar storm for a wayward nuclear satellite, and you’ll see what Until the End of the World is trying to warn everyone about. Right now, mere economic calamity looms, but what will that lead to? Social distancing and the inability of many people to do their jobs are cutting a similar arc to what those in the film endure. There’s only so much isolation people can take before they feel compelled to crawl back to normalcy, no matter the risks.

One of Until the End of the World ’s most poignant, and relevant, bits comes in its final act: Mad-scientist Henry reveals that the same device that records what the brain perceives can, with enough pushing of algorithms and massaging of data streams, also record dreams. When Claire and Sam submit themselves as guinea pigs in this experiment, the impact is profound. They become addicted to the scenes, which play out on small screens they clutch as they try to decipher the visions’ meanings. They retreat into their own minds, pretty much turning into zombies.

One more note about the groundbreaking presence of HD filmmaking here: The pixelated, digital videos created by the camera as it reproduces these vignettes are standout moments, and they remain just as impactful as they were 30 years ago. In fact, if Wenders were to again attempt to predict how computers would execute this sort of task, it’s doubtful he’d do anything differently. They depict AI algorithms bringing something into focus—in this case, literal videos from our most intimate private place. These scenes also happen to be a brilliant, if completely unsung, debut for what today is standard in cinema and all forms of media, as an incongruous bit of future digital technology dropped elegantly into an analog work of cinematic art. It also happens to presage, just with a bit more gravity, the appearance of the three-dimensional, digital world that Homer Simpson plopped into during the seventh-season Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode a few years later, in 1995.

It’s in this final descent that the movie does go ever so slightly off the rails, such as when Claire realizes the batteries on her device have died and she’s way out in the middle of the Outback. She lets out an overwrought primal scream. It’s a wonderfully meme-able moment, but it’s also a pretty spot-on parody of many home-bound quarantinees today. People have been addicted to their screens for years now, and who knows what fresh Hell would await them psychologically if they didn’t have these things to pass the time and stay connected to each other. Would they survive and thrive alone, in true isolation, or let out their own withering screams of despair? We’re guessing the former .

Claire and Sam do eventually make it back from the remote corners of their deep subconscious minds, and return to a world that is pretty close to what it once was. The first sign of this comes to them in an intercepted radio signal—a mundane traffic report from Los Angeles, with the DJ grousing about congestion. It’s an exhilarating sign of normalcy, the kind so many people currently long for. But when Sam and Claire emerge from their adventure, they’re also clearly different people—having made GIFs of their dreams and everything—and they need to figure out precisely what that means for them and the world they’re reentering. The film ends with Gene giving a soothing, optimistic narration of the characters’ lives in the future.

Watching it now, it’s hard not to wonder what Earth in 2020 will look like after a similar time-jump, or what a dream recorder would gather from the world’s collective sleeps. Wenders got a lot right in Until the End of the World , and if it’s any guide, there’s still hope—even if Earth’s devices do drop offline.

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Blu-ray Review: UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD Marks The End Of A Movie Decade

A 1991 film about 1999 feels exactly right in 2019, as we round out a decade in which film changed — and died — and will live — forever.

Everyone thinks they are staring down the barrel of the end of the world. Maybe right now, we have more reason to believe it than most: as the ice melts, the Orange Man tweets, and the Silicon Six reshape the meaning of truth. Closer to (our) home, the apocalypses of the 2010s have reached the shores of cinema, as the wild prophet Scorsese declaims against the coming of the Avengers and the subsequent end of the (film) world... which may have been wisdom, or may have been the all-time greatest promotional strategy for The Irishman , a film which exists in frigid negotiation between the way movies used to be (studios, directors, big stars), and the creative opportunities of at least one thing that is actively killing them: the rise of the streamers.

Speaking of The Irishman , whose ass-testing run time of three hours and thirty minutes both begged for sweet Netflix release (that pause button!), and argued at the same time for the rigours of classical moviegoing (honestly, if I hadn't seen it in a movie theatre, I doubt I would have made it all the way to the end... and if I hadn't, no element of the film would have worked, at all), mega-length cinema remains alive and well in the '10s. This is perhaps less in spite of -- and more due to -- the rise of the binge era. I've put both Miguel Gomes' thrilling Arabian Nights Trilogy and Mark Cousins' immense chronicle The Story of Film on my best-of-the-decade list , and if Mariano Llinas' La Flor didn't make that cut, well, it's not for lack of trying.

For all the arguments that attention has become more fleeting since the advent of Vine and Tiktok, I see the opposite evidence everywhere. Boyhood trained its lens on one child over twelve years; the Marvel Cinematic Universe rewarded a decade of sustained interest in the adventures of Norse gods and Russian super-spies. The Golden Age of Television might just be the Silver Age of Epic Filmmaking, repackaged (with dragons!). Deadwood: The Movie and El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie closed the loop on the investment we gave dozens of hours' of our time to on television in what might once have passed as the classic "movie" mode of approximately 2 hours, but which, in the last ten years, feels more like a graceful epilogue on a longer, deeper story.

Fittingly, the Criterion Collection closes its 2010s with a film that is nearly five hours long. It's a fascinating valedictory for the label's work this decade in preserving and uplifting film from around the world. That decade has seen Criterion move from DVD to blu-ray to streaming; it's seen the thousandth spine come and go. Until the End of the World is spine #1007, which feels like both a lunatic excess to me (there are how many of these things now??) and proof positive that, for all of the film community's angsty naysaying, cinema is unstoppably long-lasting.

The director's cut of Wim Wenders' 1991 "ultimate road movie," Until the End of the World on blu-ray is split across two platters and clocks in at a whopping 287 minutes. I truly wonder if it's better in this format (where, full disclosure, I not only took a two-day break between hours three and four, but took a couple of decent naps at various points, too) or, more generally, what would happen if an audience committed to sitting all the way through this like I did with The Irishman . (It doesn't even have an intermission, other than the natural one at the disc break.)

The story takes place in 1999, which was ten years away when production on the film began at the end of the '80s. An Indian nuclear satellite is threatening to fall out of the sky, and there is low-level concern around the world that this will eradicate life. Against this backdrop, a woman named Claire (Solveig Dommartin) gets into a truly spectacular car crash, which leads her to a bag of stolen money and, from there, to Sam, a man (William Hurt) fleeing across the world with a treasured secret.

The first half of the film follows Claire following Sam, who is using a fantastical device to record his own vision patterns so that he can pass them along to his blind mother. (It's not far from the SQUID devices in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days , another fin-de-siecle science fiction film from the '90s.) There's a private detective / bounty hunter; a bank robber who really, really prefers to play drums; and a milquetoast writer (Sam Neill), Claire's ex, who follows along and tries vainly to write a novel of all of this. It's all intensely, breezily watchable.

Like all good road movies and road trips, Until the End of the World has a mixtape -- its soundtrack setting the tone across continents and countries with a seamless blend of euro-flavoured pop and Americana. Famously, Wenders reached out to twenty of his favourite musical acts and asked them to write something that they might be playing in 1999, and to his astonishment (and chagrin), only two of them declined. U2's eponymous tune from Achtung Baby features no less than four times, and REM's "Fretless," Jane Siberry's "Calling All Angels" and Nick Cave's "I'll Love You Till The End of the World" all drive the narrative at various points. The music is a significant enough piece of the overall whole that one of the two in-jacket essays in the Criterion edition covers it; Wenders also discusses the soundtrack at length in the film's video introduction (recorded in 2019) and in a second featurette specifically about the music.

On the video side of the spectrum, a full hour on the disc is given to a Japanese television program from the 1990s about how Wenders worked with a Tokyo company to create the film's bleeding-edge HD graphics to visualize Sam's vision device. There are also deleted scenes -- in case 287 minutes isn't long enough -- and a 1993 interview with Wenders about his time in Australia.

In the film's second half, the whole entourage converges on an Aboriginal commune in the Australian Outback, Y2K arrives, and the Indian satellite does, indeed, fall out of the sky -- wiping our heroes from contact with the rest of civilization. The technology Sam is shepherding to his parents expands in scale to include the recording and transmission of dreams. From there, things get weird.

In a film that has already done a frighteningly good job predicting Google Maps and even offered up a decent draft of a working search engine, Claire and Sam's adventure eventually finds them staring into the faithless depths of palm-sized video screens, lost in the bottomless narcissism being reflected back at them. There's a technological boundary line in Until the End of the World that Wenders clearly did not trust us in crossing, even though he seemed pretty sure we were going to cross it anyway. (And he was right!)

It's a dispiriting note to confront at the end of this decade, a span which has seen the echo chamber of the internet expand to deafening levels. The way Wenders pulls his characters out of it -- an ouroboros of story, music, and video art -- seems like less and less of an option in a year when Martin Scorsese had to beg audiences not to watch his latest film on their phones, in spite of having handed them the technology to do exactly that.

But perhaps that's just my end-of-decade melancholia talking. Until the End of the World sees Wenders confront the end times and muse upon what might be transmitted beyond them, but the film seems also uniquely uncomfortable with giving us the power to do any such thing at all. Implicit in the end of the world is the promise, indeed, of an ending; a release from our self-absorptions. It's something the characters of Until the End of the World are forever stumbling after, never arriving. The road goes on.

Until the End of the World

Director(s).

Wim Wenders
Peter Carey (screenplay)
Wim Wenders (screenplay)
Wim Wenders (original idea by)
Solveig Dommartin (original idea by)
Michael Almereyda
Solveig Dommartin
Pietro Falcone
Enzo Turrin
Chick Ortega

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Matthias Reviews Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World

Whether from those who defended it upon a truncated 1991 release, the lucky few present for a rare screening of the mythologized directors cut, or even the frustrated auteur himself, Janus Films’ restoration of the five-hour version of Wim Wenders ’ Until The End of the World would seem to provide ample opportunity for an I Told You So emerging from the cinematic choir. An I Told You this needed 295 minutes to really work. I Told You contemporary geopolitical anxieties are directly tied to a culture of oversaturated images. I Told You we’d have GPS in our car and that U2 would still be making music at the turn of the century.

None of which says really anything about the film, of course. As with any other ‘lost’ film circulating in cinephilic chatter, Wenders’ masterpiece has spent the better part of the last two decades as more myth than movie, its narrative reduced to production woes not found on a single page of the script. Now that we finally “have” it ( despite being available on disc in Europe for about ten years ), American audiences familiar with the myth may find the completed project waning in what they had imagined as “the ultimate road movie” for its upcoming 25 th anniversary.

Such is the problem of cinematic mythologizing, which unfortunately here obfuscates just how ambitious Wenders’ film is. It is a behemoth picture with a severe identity crisis. It is a road movie with bank robbers, an impotent Philip Marlowe wannabe, and almost all the technology in your iPhone predicted within a noir-tinged espionage subplot. A post-apocalyptic dirge for the future of humanity, with Max Von Sydow conducting underground experiments on the visualization of dreams. And all the while, it’s narrated by Sam Neil, who as a novelist, may or may not be writing the whole thing down for his next great piece of literature. It is all those things and it is also none of them, because it isn’t really even a movie. That it got torn to pieces by Warner Brothers in 1991 makes total sense; that it is finally being understood for what it is in a post-HBO miniseries world does as well.

The film opens on the disguised face of Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin), departing a very 1980’s party in 1999 Venice under the dizzying drone of David Byrne and the Talking Heads (the soundtrack, featuring contemporary artists imagining what they may sound like ten years in the future, was the only critically or financially successful element of Wenders’ project upon its original release—ironic considering you can’t say the same for the accuracy of each’s predictions). After she finds herself stuck in a traffic jam filled with frantic drivers trying to escape a falling nuclear satellite (just run with it), she decides to turn off the side of the road to make her own way, chastised by the digital voice in her dashboard reminding her that the dead-end of concrete, tires, and anxiety is the only thing actually mapped within its computer database.

After running into two bank robbers who inexplicably have a gigantic pile of just about every currency on Earth, Claire takes up the road for Paris before running into a mysterious hitchhiker named Trevor (William Hurt), on the run from some sort of powerful global authority tracking him through facial-identification software, handheld GPS tracking, and a myriad of other technologies appearing jarringly dystopic in 1991, but which now might remind us of the ubiquitous technological commodities permeating a post-Snowden world.

The film is essentially broken into two distinct sections, the first following this noir-esque caravan from Venice to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, China (famously filmed with a handheld digital camera after Wenders failed to acquire permits from the government), Tokyo, and San Fransisco. This global jaunt becomes convenient for Trevor, who is in possession of a bizarre camera which records brain signals in an attempt to cure blindness through cognition—decoupling the act of seeing from its biological form into one of cultural critique, across borders, cultures, languages, and time itself. For here the camera itself is making its user start to go blind himself, and suddenly the act of seeing becomes the act of producing images —Wenders’ most prescient critique of cinema itself as images begin to move out from the cinema screen to cell phones, moving billboards, wearables, and watches.

By the time the film manages to drag its entire ensemble to the desert of Australia, serene in its iconography of both the end and beginning of time, Wenders shifts gears so abruptly that you can’t help partially understand why Warner Brothers freaked out upon receiving the original cut of the film back in 1991. What was once a road movie tinged with futuristic noir trappings becomes an austere chamber drama obsessed with the fate of the image, tied to memory, after the (possible) destruction of the contemporary geopolitical order.

An early scene from Claire and Trevor’s use of the camera gives us a meticulously staged rendition of a Vermeer—shot in painterly yellows, reds, and blues, echoing the dispersal of light the Dutch master was known for. But later, in the film’s confounding second half, we are given pixelated blurs, light warbling like bubbling liquid, unintelligibility.

Confusion reigns supreme both in the state of civilization and the efficacy of the camera—both Wenders’ and “Trevor’s”—to provide a holistic image which can responsibly and ethically relate to the world from which it was produced. If it isn’t Wenders’ way of questioning his own lens, then it is perhaps a question of all lenses, all cameras.

This clearly ran straight over the heads of studio executives, who then decided the best solution for the problem their trusted German auteur had given them was to chop it all up and sell it as some sci-fi adventure flick with accompanying music for sale at your neighborhood Sam Goody. You kind of have to wonder what they expected in the first place. But it is this question of the fate of the cinematic image itself that unites the two halves of Until the End of the World , as Claire’s travels are peppered with Parisan men wearing moving electronic billboards warning of the impending apocalypse, television screens on ubiquitous communication devices, and even a radically decentered, unstable identity for Claire herself to hold onto as she dons wigs and disguises on her journey from continent to continent, playing an actress with a camera herself, recording her travels as she tries to uncover more about the identity of “Trevor” and his device.

By the end of the film, Wenders’ interrogation of the fate of the cinematic image seems to exhaust itself, as a strange subplot of image addiction suddenly finds itself demanding attention as The Issue of the film. Here, “Trevor’s” camera device, which we come to find was designed by his obsessive scientist father (Max Von Sydow) is turned inward as the actual reproduction of the external world through brain signals gives way to an attempt to record dreams themselves. Losing its real world referent, the cinematic image here becomes not a representation of what is outside one’s self, but becomes, instead, a parasitic self-indulgent escape from reality, perhaps a way to cope with the impending crisis of contemporary society, post-or-pre-apocalyptic.

Wenders doesn’t seem to have an answer for this (beyond, uncomfortably, tossing Claire into what looks not unlike an internment camp while she screams for new batteries for her viewing device), and by the end, the film seems to be both yearning for a return to the natural order of things, away from mediated technology run amok, as well as back to the more responsible mode of seeing which served as a refuge from a society leaving its defenseless left behind.

And still, yet, there is something really remarkable going on here. Is it a good movie? I don’t know, but part of me wonders if you can even use the same framework to read this as we do Wings of Desire , or Paris, Texas , especially in a post- Game of Thrones media climate where the line between multi-hour televisual content and a 120-minute “film” continues to blur into oblivion. And yet amidst it all, somewhere, up above, stands a semi-transparent angel with towering wings, watching it all the same, the image mediated or unmediated, from the self or outside of it. I don’t know if he Told You So, but he is still stuck there all the same.

Matthias Ellis

Matthias is a PhD student in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, studying film, radio, and new media. In his spare time he writes about baseball at lookoutlanding.com and misses watching movies in the cinephile paradise that is Portland, Oregon.

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Until the End of the World (1991)

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Until The End Of The World Review

01 Jan 1991

158 minutes

Until The End Of The World

With the backstory of an out-of-control Indian nuclear satellite on the verge of plummeting to Earth, Wanders' self-described "ultimate road movie" is one part science fiction, one-part love story and, yes, one-part road movie covering 15 cities in seven countries all rolled into a schizoid package saturated with self-conscious hip, and complete with a pulsating soundtrack penned specifically for Wenders by some of rock's finest, among them U2, REM and Peter Gabriel.

Dom martin, Wenders' real-life girl-friend, is bored wanderlust hipster Claire who, while driving some stolen loot to Paris stumbles onto mysterious hitch-hiker-on-the-run Trevor McGhee (Hurt). McPhee, however, turns out instead to be Sam Farber, a man with a US government bounty on his head, and in possession of a nifty camera invented by his father (Max Von Sydow) which enables blind people to see.

Trekking around the globe capturing images for his blind-since-childhood mother (Moreau, in a too-brief appearance), Farber soon has the instantly obsessed Claire in hot pursuit, along with a vagrant crew of tag-alongs like ex-boyfriend Eugene (Neill in a throwaway role), before the whole troupe heads down Australia way to Sydow's Outback hideaway and some fairly overwrought neophyte sci-fi hokum.

Unfortunately, Dommartin, although gorgeously decked out in Yamimoto duds, is not what one would call a charis¬matic screen presence, while even Hurt falls below his usually dependable standards, leaving an ample void where we should have obsessional love story and investing the entire proceedings with a grating shallowness. And while Wenders, perhaps fashioning himself as a sort of cinematic beat poet for the 90s, has crafted a movie that is undeniably ambitious and visually stunning, particularly the high-definition video technology used in the dream sequences.

This all comes across as little more than soundbite philosophy wrapped up in stylistic flourishes and fab locations, neither energetic enough for a trendy MTV audience, nor penetrating enough for the more intellectual of his fans. Indeed, it remains resolutely unclear as to which of the two he is here setting out to reach in the first place

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Review by Christopher Tait

Until the end of the world 1991 ★★★★.

Watched Jan 29 , 2024

Christopher Tait’s review published on Letterboxd:

Another film with a five-hour run time that I split up over multiple nights, but unlike 1900, I didn't find anything repugnant in this. In fact, I found this quite fascinating, especially considering that this is a tale of two movies: one a road film and another a psychological drama with hints of sci-fi futurism thrown in. The road trip portion of the movie is interesting if a bit choppy, but the second half, focusing on Hurt's family hiding out in Australia as his father tries to create a machine to give vision to the blind, lays the groundwork for other movies like THE MATRIX or ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. The soundtrack was pretty solid as well. Any movie that uses U2's "Until the End of the World" as much as this one did, is a-okay in my book.

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Is This the Best Movie of 2024 So Far?

Radu Jude’s ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ won’t take the box office by storm, but it still stands out for its incisive dark comedy, subtle acting, and extraordinary choreography

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Driving endlessly through hazy, sun-deprived Bucharest to scout potential interview subjects for a corporate video , an overworked and underpaid production assistant named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) battles traffic, construction, and the weight of her own eyelids. The irony that she’s risking life and limb to help produce a PSA for job-site safety is not lost on our heroine, and neither is the fact that her overlords are only truly interested in exercising caution when it comes to covering their asses (they’re offering victims not-so-subtle hush money in exchange for participation in the videos). Angela’s white-hot loathing of her time-sucking, gas-guzzling gig is palpable, but it’s also sublimated beneath steady, pounding waves of boredom. Blond-tressed and statuesque in a sparkly, sequined T-shirt, she’s an unlikely and indelible embodiment of alienated labor.

To blow off steam (or maybe just to stay awake), Angela punctuates her errands by recording outrageously profane videos in character as “Bobita,” a racist, sexist, xenophobic alter ego addressing “a nation of sluts and pimps.” “You won’t catch me dead here,” crows Bobita, who’s been modeled, visually and rhetorically, after Andrew Tate, the notorious kickboxer turned social media star who was recently under house arrest in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape. Angela’s scenes are shot in black and white on grainy 16 mm celluloid, but when she transforms into Bobita, the format switches to cellphone video, with Tate’s visage digitally superimposed over her own. The result is a wonderfully layered sight gag that renders Bobita as a blurry, androgynous refugee from the uncanny valley, at once hyper-macho and strangely coquettish. Tate, who got rich off his grift as the king of toxic masculinity , would not be amused.

He might be the only one: Bobita is the comic creation of the year, a spleen-venting Greek chorus in a modern odyssey through a crumbling European metropolis. As its title suggests, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has distinctly apocalyptic vibes; where some movies evoke dystopia by way of special effects, writer-director Radu Jude simply keeps his lens trained on everyday life, refracted through multimedia prisms that distort it like a fun-house mirror. In this degraded present tense, everybody—even a posturing shock artist like Bobita—can be infamous for 15 seconds. To paraphrase the author of “The Hollow Men,” this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a TikTok.

When Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World premiered last fall at various international film festivals—including Locarno, Toronto, and New York—it made an explosive impact. Imagine a dirty bomb blowing a hole in all that surrounding art-house austerity. Such shrapnel-like sharpness is Jude’s stock-in-trade: In a pop-cultural moment that’s increasingly come to be defined by political provocation, the Bucharest-born director’s staunchly incorrect sensibility places him in the vanguard of contemporary edgelord auteurs. After cutting his teeth as an assistant director on his countryman Cristi Puiu’s harrowing, pitch-black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)—a film widely credited with kick-starting the influential movement known as the New Romanian Cinema —Jude made his feature-director debut with The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), a gentle but pointed comedy whose preteen protagonist is tapped to star in a car commercial, only to receive a harsh lesson in the realities of the hard sell. The theme of behind-the-scenes satire continued in 2018’s superb I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians , in which a young female theater director attempts to dramatize a dark chapter in Romanian history only to suffer threats of government censorship. Her struggles with the project—and the attendant questions about the ethical representation of violence and genocide—provide the spine for a movie that both celebrates and subverts the impulse to re-create the past.

In 2021, Jude scored international headlines—and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival—for his kamikaze comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn , a delirious, satirical tour de force in which a female history teacher becomes a local pariah after a homemade sex tape gets uploaded to an X-rated website. Carefully divided into three parts that increasingly veer away from straightforward narrative—including extended, stylized digressions into Godardian essay-film territory and documentary interludes depicting work and play in the shadow of a pandemic— Bad Luck is swift, confrontational, and self-consciously obnoxious; a shot of a priest wearing a face mask emblazoned with the words “I Can’t Breathe” dares to be deconstructed. Such semiotic high jinks are catnip to critics looking to anoint vanguard auteurs, but unlike, say, Yorgos Lanthimos—whose Poor Things ultimately flatters its audience under the guise of subversion —one gets the feeling Jude couldn’t care less about award races or even good reviews. In the film’s funniest sequence, Angela ends up crashing the set of a science-fiction thriller being directed by none other than Uwe Boll, who crows about literally getting into the ring with the critics who panned his movies and beating the shit out of them. “They came, and I smashed them,” says the bullet-headed director of Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne. “That’s the history of cinema,” Angela replies.

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Suffice it to say that Jude knows plenty about the history of cinema, and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has been carefully annotated for cinephiles via a series of thoughtful but scattershot homages ranging from art house to trash-humping. Jude’s style is to keep bouncing images, ideas, and epigrams off of each other until they either spark meaning or become redundant—a throw-everything-at-the-wall style that might be called shitpost modernism. The dialogue is peppered with allusions to current affairs, including the war in Ukraine, yet the script’s two biggest reference points bridge the gap between past and present, as well as between the Old and New Worlds. Firstly, Angela’s adventures behind the wheel directly invoke Romanian director Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Goes On , about a female taxi driver winding her way through Bucharest. The film, while by no means famous, is a key audiovisual artifact of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime, and, in an inspired act of solidarity, Jude edits footage from Bratu’s movie into his own, drawing pointed parallels between images of a country buckling beneath dictatorship and one supposedly liberated by democracy. Forty years ago, Bratu’s film flummoxed the country’s censors by embedding its critique into a deceptively banal slice-of-life style, with the titular cabbie as a passive tour guide puttering, quietly, through scenes of widespread poverty. On the other side of the millennium, Jude leans into the idea of Angela 2.0 as a rhetorical shit-stirrer, duly inventorying injustices at every intersection, as well as a directorial surrogate. “I satirize through caricature,” she announces at one point, effectively instructing the film’s audience on how to watch it.

Jude’s other guiding light is one that will be more familiar to Western viewers: the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan’s landmark video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” —in which he silently flips through a series of cue cards containing his cryptic, poetic lyrics—becomes an important motif in the film’s second half, including in an extraordinary, 30-minute, single-take sequence that is probably the best scene of the year so far. This extraordinarily choreographed and acted static shot not only serves as the climax to Angela’s labors, but also ropes in Bratu’s version of the character—now a senior citizen and played by the original actress, Dorina Lazar—for a kind of metatextual coup de grâce. After two hours of relentless digression and momentum, Jude’s camera comes to rest on the “winner” of Angela’s search—a wheelchair user recently out of a coma—and depicts, in excruciating detail, his participation in a spectacularly disingenuous PSA designed to absolve its producers of all responsibility for his condition. For what feels like a small eternity, the man’s testimony about the nature of his accident is cheerfully critiqued, revised, and eventually silenced altogether; under cover of corporate politeness, a broken man is reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy and then a literal placeholder—an absurdist doppelgänger for Dylan, except his cards are blank, waiting for somebody to fix them in post. “Don’t worry, we’ll write what we said we would,” says one of the filmmakers, lying through his teeth. Not that anybody on set believes him anyway. As the man himself said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; with fresh air in short supply, Jude’s brilliantly corrosive movie invites us to breathe in a toxic lungful.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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The Only Movie That Feels Like Contemporary Life

The black comedy do not expect too much from the end of the world captures the 2020s..

The movies might never have split in two if Antoine Lumière had been more interested in a quick buck. Among the audience at the sparsely attended 1895 demonstration of his sons Louis and Auguste’s new invention, the cinématographe, was the celebrated magician George Méliès, who, after years of using still projections in his stage act, immediately saw the potential in a device that could make those images move. Méliès offered Lumière a small fortune for one of the gadgets, which combined camera, developer, and projector in one 10-pound box. The cinématographe, he informed Méliès, was not for sale. And besides, he added, it had “no commercial future.”

Instead of giving up, Méliès devised his own version of the cinématographe, and his own means of using it. Where the camera was, for the Lumières, a scientific instrument that could capture reality, Méliès saw it as a means of surpassing it, generating fantastic visions that transported audiences to other worlds rather than merely reflecting the one they inhabited back at them. Who wants to watch workers leaving the factory when you could take a trip to the moon ?

Movies have never mended this primal rupture between realists and illusionists, nor was there any pressing need to. But nearly 130 years after that initial split, the balance between them has grown precariously out of whack. The tools developed to extend reality now often serve to replace it, to massage the color of an overcast sky so seamlessly that not even a trained eye can spot the seams. Even the most quotidian of tales has a trace of trickery, but when a movie like The Holdovers uses exclusive digital tools to emulate the look and even the imperfections of 1970s-era film stock, authenticity has been reduced to a vibe. Like those A.I.-generated shots of nonexistent people, it might look right, but it feels somehow, ineffably, wrong. It’s gotten to the point where, even in a movie as lousy as Madame Web , I’m grateful for the shots that take place on the real streets of New York and not some green-screened facsimile. (A viral tweet juxtaposes an elegantly lit, deep-focus shot of Madame Web ’s Dakota Johnson walking through Chinatown with a flat, obviously faked shot of a Queens street corner in Spider-Man: No Way Home .) Even a glimpse of the real world feels like an event.

There’s hardly a shot in in the two and a half hours of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World in which the real world does not intrude one way or another. The movie’s heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), is a perpetually hustling production assistant who’s always doing at least three jobs at once, speeding around Bucharest while juggling phone calls and blaring Romanian rap so she doesn’t fall asleep. She rises early, shoots a quick video for her socials, then sits in traffic until she reaches the house of a man she’s supposed to interview for a workplace safety video—only to find that he and his bandaged arm have gone fishing and she’s come all this way to connect with him over Zoom.

Angela spends a good chunk of the movie in her car, the way the protagonist of Jude’s previous movie, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn , endlessly wandered the streets of the city in the middle of the pandemic. Both movies use their characters as a pretext to wander through the world, which keeps intruding on attempts to place them at its center. That tendency is enhanced in Do Not Expect Too Much by intercutting Angela’s story with footage from the 1981 movie Angela Moves On , in what a handwritten title card near the beginning announces as “conversation” between the two films. The 1981 Angela, played by Dorina Lazar, also spends most of her time behind the wheel, working as a taxi driver, but the grind under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communism looks markedly different than the one in the EU era. Old Angela’s life is one of drudgery and repetition, which Jude sometimes emphasizes by slowing her excerpts down to a crawl. Present-day Angela never gets a moment to breathe. Even sex is just an item in the middle of her to-do list, a roadside tryst that nearly derails her afternoon when her lover stains her dress.

Jude shoots the present day in black and white, leached of the beckoning colors of capitalism—an ad reading “Come to the USA” renders the red, white, and blue in dull shades of gray—but it pops into color when Angela shoots a new video for her social channels. Online, thanks to a filter that gives her a bald head and massive, bristling eyebrows, she is Bobita, an alpha-male misogynist who claims to be best pals with red-pill influencer Andrew Tate. (The story is presumably set before Dec. 2022, when Romanian authorities arrested Tate for alleged rape and sex trafficking .) Bobita—Romanian for Bobby, as in Ewing, as in the old prime-time soap opera Dallas —has a mouth like the underside of an 18-wheeler, crudely bragging about the women he’s fucked and how he fucked them, while taking the occasional shot at the British monarchy. Angela’s bedside table holds a well-thumbed volume of Proust, and she pauses one drive to buy a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from a roving bookseller, but given the chance to put on another persona, she bursts forth in a torrent of X-rated liberation. Bobita even has a few choice words to say about Angela’s latest purchase—suffice it to say that when he’s done with Miss Jean, she’s no longer a maiden.

In Bad Luck Banging , a prestigious history teacher’s life is turned upside down when a sex tape she made with her husband surfaces on the internet, a humiliation that’s mixed with exasperation when her professional fate is subjected to the whims of an endless school board meeting. Although he’s obviously an intellectual— Do Not Expect Too Much credits citations from the works of Baudelaire, Žižek, DeLillo, and Errol Morris—Jude is intent on reminding us that even the noblest mind is housed in a decaying shell whose urges and impulses make a mockery of our aspirations. The pandemic made bodies seem not just fragile but embarrassing, an inconvenient reminder that we exist in the physical realm as well as the digital. The more technologies allow us to transcend space and time, the more of an affront it seems that we have to lug our carcasses from one access point to the next.

Modern life is a constant pas de deux between anxiety and boredom, the threat of economic annihilation and the drudgery necessary to stave it off. COVID lockdowns intensified both the anxiety and the boredom, and although the mortal panic has subsided for most, it’s not a lesson one can unlearn. Angela walks through a graveyard—the one where her grandmother was to be buried, until a real-estate developer claimed some of the burial plots encroached on their apartment complex—and the camera lingers on a tombstone that reads, “I was like you, you will be like me.”

The injured workers whose testimonies Angela collects implicitly accept that they’re just meat to be ground up in capitalism’s gears. No matter how grievous their wounds or how hazardous their workplace, they only blame themselves. They also understand that expressing enmity toward the company that’s paying Angela to scout prospects for their safety video might diminish their chances of getting cast in the final version—and thus of getting paid. The best they can do is squeeze out one final paycheck before getting tossed on the scrap heap.

After Angela has collected her testimonies, she heads to a production meeting with the company’s German executives. The newly hired director, who got his chance after the former one suddenly died, proudly lists his bona fides: hundreds of commercials for beer and oil companies and McDonald’s, plus one feature film, an adaptation of the celebrated Romanian novelist Mircea Eliade. He’s got grand ideas of filming the workers in a single, unbroken shot that highlights the truth of their experience, which makes it all the more painful when he abandons his ideals at the slightest prodding from the higher-ups. He wants the look of unvarnished reality but offers to add a filter to the lens to give his injured factory workers “a warm, golden glow.” The one-take approach is his preference, but he’s helpfully shooting in high resolution so the bosses can zoom in for a close-up any time they want.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World ’s last scene follows through where the commercial director falters, taking the form of a single, unmoving shot that lasts over half an hour. A worker paralyzed by a loose traffic barrier has been stationed outside the factory to give his account of the accident, climaxing with an admonition to always wear your safety helmet (the upshot being, of course, that the company can blame future accidents on workers failing to follow instructions). The worker, played by Ovidiu Pîrsan, tells his story over and over, adjusting it as voices behind the camera call out demands to leave out one part or stress another, an erosion of truth so gradual you could miss the point at which it’s gone for good. As the guilty barrier is moved out of shot—too rusted and unsightly—a slow rain starts and stops, evidence that not everything can be altered on orders from the head office. The shot’s style is Lumière but the content is Méliès, a fantasy, only this time without the hope of escape. These workers are never leaving the factory.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time—since Bad Luck Banging , in fact—that feels the way contemporary life feels, not just its superficial texture but its essence. It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.

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‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ Review: A Wild Romanian Trip

In Radu Jude’s shambling, acidly funny movie set in Bucharest, a foul-mouthed gofer named Angela tours the troubled heart and soul of her country.

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In a black-and-white film still, Ilinca Manolache, with blonde hair, sits in the driver’s seat with hands on the wheel.

By Manohla Dargis

Late in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” the movie shifts tones. Our heroine, a funny, foul-mouthed gofer who’s racking up miles driving in Bucharest, has just told her passenger about a road outside the city that has more memorials edging it than it has kilometers. The movie then cuts to one after another roadside memorial — some stone, others metal, some with photos, others with flowers — for an astonishing four silent minutes, and this near-unclassifiable, often comically ribald movie turns into a plaintive requiem.

The woman, Angela — the sneakily charismatic Ilinca Manolache — is a production assistant toiling for a foreign company that’s making a workplace safety video in Romania. Among her tasks is interviewing men and women who have been injured on the job, the idea being that one will make a camera-friendly cautionary tale for workers. As she changes gears, and the movie switches between black-and-white film and color video, Angela flips off other drivers, acidly critiques all that she encounters, creates TikTok videos and effectively maps the geopolitical landscape of contemporary Romania. At one point, she meets the German director Uwe Boll , who’s known to have trounced a few of his critics in boxing matches.

I don’t think that Jude wants to beat up critics (even if the interlude with Boll, who’s shooting a “bug-killer film,” is almost endearing); among other things, his movies tend to be well-received. Jude’s shaggy provocation “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” for instance, earned high praise as well as top honors at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. At the same time, there’s a pushy, borderline abrasive aspect to how Jude strings out Angela’s time behind the wheel in “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” forcing you to share in her tedium. The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.

It’s still dark when Angela stumbles out of bed one early morning, naked and cursing. (One of her favorite expletives is featured both in the first and final words in the movie, a fitting bookending blurt that seems like a cri de coeur and one of the movie’s more unambiguously authorial statements.) Before long, she’s dressed and out in the streets, making the first in a series of TikToks in which she takes on the guise of her bald social-media avatar, a bro named Bobita, an extravagantly offensive vulgarian who brags about hanging out with his pal Andrew Tate, the online influencer and self-anointed “king of toxic masculinity.”

Tate’s trajectory is lurid and gross, but the references to him are more symbolically than specifically germane to the movie. (Tate moved to Romania in 2017; he was arrested there in May 2023 on an assortment of charges, including human trafficking.) For Angela — for Jude — Tate basically functions as yet another emblem of Bobita’s grotesqueness and of a larger worldview, one that has reduced everything to its market value. Everything is part of his unending hustle, including the Maserati he brags about owning, the women he boasts about sexually conquering and, of course, himself. “Remember,” Bobita says, “like and share!” With her avatar, Angela entertains her audience with a very sharp sting.

The same can be said of “Do Not Expect Too Much,” which gradually gathers shape and force as Angela motors around Bucharest. As she does, Jude cuts between her and the title heroine of “ Angela Goes On ,” a 1981 Romanian film directed by Lucian Bratu about a taxi driver. Produced in the waning years of the Ceausescu dictatorship , the earlier film serves as a fascinating counterpoint to Jude’s movie visually and thematically. (The opening credits announce that this movie is a “conversation” with the 1981 film.) From one angle, not much has changed, but if the roads are still jammed and people hungry, it’s now capitalism rather than communism that keeps this world busily spinning.

At one point, as her endless work drags on, Angela drives to the airport to pick up an executive from the company producing the safety video. The executive, Doris, towers above Angela, and in a perfect bit of casting is played by the great German actress Nina Hoss. Casually if chicly dressed, Doris has come to Bucharest in advance of the video shoot, the team now having found a palatable star (its “raw material”). It’s a charge that she handles with impeccable manners and the kind of nonchalant, world-dominating hauteur that I imagine old-regime royals expressed with a lazy wave of the hand as they ordered someone to death.

Doris only makes chitchat with Angela, although in a killer touch — and in another of Jude’s sly comments about high and low culture, East Europe and West — the executive turns out to be related to Goethe. Eventually, Angela ends up in an alley, where many of the story’s pieces converge, including its wounded worker, the star of the Ceausescu-era film and, of course, Bobita. By that point, Jude has taken you all over, bridged the past with the present and shown the country’s many double faces, comic and tragic. He’s also come close to exhausting you with his movie, which is as relentless, pessimistic, heartbreaking and enlivening as the amazing Angela, who — like Jude, I suspect — keeps going because she must.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World Not rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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Movies | review: ‘do not expect too much from the end of the world’ — but do expect one of 2024’s best movies.

A harried Bucharest production assistant (Ilinca Manolache) guides the satire "Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World." (MUBI)

I don’t know he did it, exactly, but filmmaker Radu Jude has conjured a rarity: an angry, clear-eyed satiric flaying of modern capitalism and humankind’s infinite capacity to disappoint that doesn’t settle for a tone of “well, that’s the way things are, might as well give up.”

Direct from Bucharest, with tough love, the film carries the title “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” opening this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It is a bracing and chaotic and memorable experience. Writer-director Jude’s previous feature was, too: “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” about a Bucharest high school teacher whose sex tape leads to a series of bureaucratic, hypocritical and institutional nightmares. Jude hasn’t toned down much with “End of the World” but the result feels more purposeful, its scope wider, its empathy more fully invested in its hardy female protagonist and the workday she’s up against.

Her name is Angela, played by the extraordinary screen presence Ilinca Manolache. Her story amounts to a workplace serio-comedy on wheels. Working long hours as a production assistant at a film production company, Angela’s job requires her to bomb around Bucharest, with her aggressive and uneven driving skills, interviewing seriously injured factory employees for possible inclusion in a heavily lawyered workplace safety video.

Along the way, Angela fights back her fatigue and her creeping sense of something very wrong with the ethical core of the video in progress by turning herself into another person entirely. Using a gender-swapping filter, she’s Bobita, a swarthy uni-browed reactionary blowhard and misogynist and fan of Vladimir Putin. She’s making fun of all the real-life Bobitas she’s known, probably, but she knows how TikTok draws all kinds, half of them happy to miss the joke.

Is Jude’s film kidding, or serious? The answer’s yes. It’s kidding and it’s serious, and the mundane particulars of Angela’s interview sessions with the safety video “contestants,” or the painfully relatable pre-meeting banter of a Zoom session with management, keeps all 10 toes of “End of the World” in the world as we know it, right now. And, in fact, briefly, right here in Chicago: Nina Hoss of “Tár” enters the narrative on Zoom camera with the Chicago River and Trump International Hotel and Tower behind her, reminding us all that we’re still paying for the allure of “Wall Street’s” greed-is-good mantra.

Jude bounces Angela’s travails against scenes from an earlier Romanian film, the 1981 Ceaușescu-era “Angela Moves On.” The taxi driver of that story mirrors, to some degree, the Angela of Jude’s story. But times have changed; the insistent, placating sweetness of the older film becomes the uncomprehending parent of the one we’re watching. “End of the World” culminates in revealing stasis: a long, long fixed shot of the maimed factory worker chosen for the video, on camera with his family. How the true account of his injuries gets massaged, gradually, insidiously, into an entirely different story gives Jude’s film its true nerve, and teeth, without polemics.

It works, I think, because we taste ashes in the mouth. But because Angela never leaves the film for long, we know — we hope — she is a voice of dissent, finding her way to action. Trained in the Romanian theater, Manolache has fantastically dry comic timing. As Angela, her every move, every pop of bubble gum, every trash-talk insult to someone she’s just cut off on the road, every under-compensated indignity of the character’s workday adds up, detail by detail. Most anti-capitalist screeds are just that: screeds, nothing more. This one’s more essay than screed, full of discursions, but it’s unpredictable, vital and a lifeline for adventurous Chicago filmgoers.

“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (language, some nudity)

Running time: 2:43 (in Romanian and English with English subtitles)

How to watch: Opens March 29 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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Until the End of the World
‎Until the End of the World (1991) directed by Wim Wenders • Reviews
Until the End of the World (1991)
Until the End of the World (1991)
Until the End of the World (1991)
Dave's Movie Site: Classic Movie Review: Until the End of the World (1991)

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COMMENTS

Until the End of the World movie review (1992)
Wim Wenders filmed "Until the End of the World" in five months in 15 cities in eight countries on four continents, following two lovers played by actors who were reportedly not on speaking terms with one another. I'd love to see the behind-the scenes documentary. The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making. The story takes place in 1999 ...
Until the End of the World review
Until the End of the World takes place in late 1999, with most of the globe in a panic about an out-of-control nuclear satellite. But our protagonist Claire (Solveig Dommartin, who co-authored the ...
Until the End of the World (1991)
Until the End of the World: Directed by Wim Wenders. With Solveig Dommartin, Pietro Falcone, Enzo Turrin, Chick Ortega. In 1999, Claire Tourneur's life is forever changed after she survives a car crash. She rescues Sam and travels the world with him. Writer Eugene Fitzpatrick follows and writes their story as a method of recording dreams is being developed.
Movie Review: 'Until the End of the World'
Movie Review: 'Until the End of the World' By Lawrence O'Toole. Published on August 7, 1992. Sure to become a cult video favorite, this visionary, intense, and complex epic from Wim Wenders ...
Until the End of the World
Audience Reviews for Until the End of the World. Dec 09, 2009. German film director Wim Wenders was always a heavy-duty rock n' roll fan and saw to it that his films included music that reflected ...
Until the End of the World (1991)
The Song, a 1991 short film by Uli M Schueppel detailing the recording of " (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Deleted scenes. Trailer. PLUS: Essays by critics Bilge Ebiri and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on the film and its soundtrack. New cover by Michael Boland.
Until the End of the World
A dream project about allowing other people to see one's dreams, Until the End of the World is a dream partly realized and partly still in the head of the director. Described by director Wim ...
Until the End of the World
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2003. Ken Hanke Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC) A bit lumpy (with so much left on the cutting room floor, that was probably inescapable), but it's the ...
Until the End of the World
To watch the 158-minute 1991 theatrical cut of Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders's globetrotting, apocalyptic, pop-rock-saturated sci-fi odyssey, is to zone in and out of a meandering, wistful dream. ... Find a list of new movie and TV releases on DVD and Blu-ray (updated weekly) as well as a calendar of upcoming releases on home video ...
Until the End of the World (1991)
Wenders weaves all his thematic and narrative threads together into a coherent, philosophical whole. Even with the apocalypse, though, his view isn't despairing. A new direction, a new beginning emerges out of the ashes of the old, image-overloaded world, and with it, a sort of muted optimism. 83.
Until the End of the World
Until the End of the World (German: Bis ans Ende der Welt; French: Jusqu'au bout du monde) is a 1991 epic science fiction adventure drama film directed by Wim Wenders.Set at the turn of the millennium in the shadow of a world-changing catastrophe, the film follows a man and woman, played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, as they are pursued across the globe, in a plot involving a device ...
Until the End of the World Review :: Criterion Forum
The Criterion Collection presents Wim Wender's full 287-minute cut of his "ultimate road movie," Until the End of the World, on Blu-ray in a director approved 2-disc set. The film is presented over the two dual-layer discs in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The 1080p/24hz high-definition encode is sourced from a 4K restoration of the ...
This 30-Year-Old Sci-Fi Epic Is a Saga for Our Times
In 1992, German filmmaker Wim Wenders released an epic, globetrotting cinematic adventure called Until the End of the World. Set in the "near future" of 1999, the film follows the path of a ...
Blu-ray Review: UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD Marks The End Of A Movie Decade
The director's cut of Wim Wenders' 1991 "ultimate road movie," Until the End of the World on blu-ray is split across two platters and clocks in at a whopping 287 minutes.
Matthias Reviews Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World
Matthias Reviews Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World. Matthias Ellis. September 7, 2015. Whether from those who defended it upon a truncated 1991 release, the lucky few present for a rare screening of the mythologized directors cut, or even the frustrated auteur himself, Janus Films' restoration of the five-hour version of Wim Wenders ...
Until the End of the World (1991)
grantss 24 May 2020. Set in the near future a nuclear-powered satellite looks set to crash into the Earth, causing mass destruction. Meanwhile in France a woman accidentally becomes an accessory to a bank robbery, leaving her on the run. She meets a man who is also on the run, this time from the CIA.
Until The End Of The World Review
Reviews Until The End Of The World Review Set in 1999, a woman (Dommartin) has a car accident with some bank robbers, who befriend and enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris.
Until the End of the World
A preeminent figure in the New German Cinema period, director Wim Wenders first attracted international notice for his Road Movie Trilogy during the 1970's; his stature rose even higher during the 80's with Paris, Texas (1984) and the immortal Wings of Desire (1987). Following those successes, he made Until the End of the World, a road movie that melds science fiction and cutting-edge ...
Until the End of the World
In 1999, a woman's life is forever changed after she survives a car crash with two bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris. On the way, she runs into another fugitive from the law — an American doctor on the run from the CIA. They want to confiscate his father's invention - a device which allows anyone to record their dreams and visions.
Wenders Retrospective: Until the End of the World
Pray for the Wounded Planet: Wenders' Belabored Road Trip to the Apocalypse. The troubled production and following critical ambivalence towards Wim Wenders' 1991 film Until the End of the World launched it into a sort of oblivion. Nearly twenty five years after its ill-fated reception, initially released as a three hour film which the director bitterly deigned the Reader's Digest version ...
Until the End of the World
Directed by Wim Wenders • 1991 • Germany, France, Australia. Starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill. Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger (William Hurt ...
Until the End of the World' review by Christopher Tait
The road trip portion of the movie is interesting if a bit choppy, but the second half, focusing on Hurt's family hiding out in Australia as his father tries to create a machine to give vision to the blind, lays the groundwork for ... Any movie that uses U2's "Until the End of the World" as much as this one did, is a-okay in my book. Block or ...
Until the End of the World Movie Review
Until the End of the World (1991) Wim Wenders Movie ReviewUntil the End of the World (1991) is directed by Wim Wenders and stars William Hurt, Solveig Dommar...
Is This the Best Movie of 2024 So Far?
As its title suggests, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has distinctly apocalyptic vibes; where some movies evoke dystopia by way of special effects, writer-director Radu Jude ...
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World: The movie that
The movies might never have split in two if Antoine Lumière had been more interested in a quick buck. Among the audience at the sparsely attended 1895 demonstration of his sons Louis and Auguste ...
'Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World' Review: A Wild
In Radu Jude's shambling, acidly funny movie set in Bucharest, a foul-mouthed gofer named Angela tours the troubled heart and soul of her country. By Manohla Dargis When you purchase a ticket ...
Review: In "End of the World," expect one of 2024's best movies
"Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World" — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (language, some nudity) Running time: 2:43 (in Romanian and English with English subtitles)
'To the Ends of the Earth' Review: Sailing Through Antiquity
Like the first man to eat an oyster, the explorers of the ancient Mediterranean world chose not to be bound by what they knew. This was as it should be, for, in the beginning, they knew relatively ...
Watch When You Finish Saving the World
The top 0.01% of students control law and order at Jooshin High School, but a secretive transfer student chips a crack in their indomitable world. The 8 Show Eight individuals trapped in a mysterious 8-story building participate in a tempting but dangerous game show where they earn money as time passes.

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Until the End of the World Reviews

Until the End of the World

Picture 8/10

Extras 8/10

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