Popular reviews

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 33

  Less than a century after Italian unification, national democracy had already begun to rot. 

  Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” depicts the sagging structure of a society with an extravagant facade, built around a frame than could never sustain its weight of its own decadence. 

  “The Damned” is a thinly veiled allegory about a true life German industrial family that supplied the Nazis with steel in order to retain and grow their social standing. Which - was never questionable at the outset. These were never back room dealings to parlay mediocrity into affluence, but parlour exchanges where power begat more power. 

  “Damned” is a dramatic departure in style by Visconti. The soapy camp and glamor from “Sandra” and “The Leopard” re-emerge. But…

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  Review by nick ★★★★

  The Damned is crazy, disturbing and heart-wrenching. As a grim insight into the 1930s Germany where nazis had just took over power, Luchino Visconti opted for a microscopic approach, reflecting the madness of the German society as a whole, through the entry point of a high class German family, where family members are vying for power and control even at the cost of each other's life, and the end result is one of the most devastating and memorable accounts of nazism you would ever see.

  What sets The Damned apart is its abundant elements of sexual perversions, exclusively from the character of Martin, played by a dangerously magnificent Helmut Berger, whose ocean-blue eyes and deceivingly boyish frailty Visconti never skipped…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★★ 24

  This is just Succession (2018) Nazi Edition, and Helmut Berger’s character is definitely Roman.

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  Review by Sean Baker 7

  Saw that this is happening -- www.filmlinc.org/daily/visconti-retrospective-announced/ -- A Visconti retrospective at Lincoln Center. I won't be in NYC so decided to finally settle and watch this on DVD.

  Didn't have nearly the effect that Rocco and His Brothers or The Leopard had on me but it's still Visconti and still a must-watch. Visconti's over stylization is nice to look at but never allowed me to fully enter the world.

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★½ 10

  "Today in Germany anything can happen."

  I must confess to feeling slightly underwhelmed by Luchino Visconti's The Damned (known as Götterdämmerung throughout Europe), though the film definitely has much to recommend it. Two obvious factors stand out when trying to pinpoint the nature of my relative disappointment: 1) my preexistent relationship with Visconti (having seen Rocco and His Brothers, Le Notti Bianche, The Leopard and Death in Venice) has been a thoroughly positive one and 2) Rainer Werner Fassbinder cited The Damned as his favorite film ever made. As such I think I entered the film with unrealizable expectations.

  Co-written by Visconti with Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli, the sprawling narrative tracks the demise of German aristocracy and the consolidation of…

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★★ 1

  Luchino Visconti's subversive film The Damned depicts National Socialism in a microcosm; here in the form of the wealthy von Essenbeck family during the rise of the Nazi's in 1930's Germany. The family at the centre is used as a mirror to a nation in moral decline; a time where morality plays second fiddle to political power. A situation where decadance, perversion and depravity can flourish under a feeble excuse for a political ideology which favours the so-called elite echelons of society. Visconti beautifully juxtaposes the melodrama between various family members and their maneuvering for power against historical events such as Nazi book burning and The Reichstag fire. The film makes its points quietly but with a real cutting edge.…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★½ 12

  “Don’t have any illusions; this war has just begun!”

  A subversive juxtaposition of decadence and hedonistic amoralism, The Damned is a study of corruption—moral, ideological, political, sexual, familial and industrial corruption set amidst the rise of the nazi party in Germany in the 1930s. Visconti exposes the greed and corruption of an opportunistic ruling class family in a time of political upheval and budding fascism, and he does this primarily through the character of Martin (Helmut Berger). It’s no coincidence that Berger was a muse for Visconti in the back nine of his career, and his admiration of Berger’s beauty and outward innocence is eschewed here. Just as Visconti shows the underlying evil of the decorative decor and pristine outward presentation…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★

  An absolutely filthy perversion of Visconti's usual deliberately hollow opulence, here stressing that the Nazis' buzzkill puritanism only applied to the masses while the rich and party elite were left to keep pursuing the absolute depths of depravity. Of course, the escalating mania of both the country at large and the unchecked id of these aristocrats means that eventually they turn on each other, playing the kind of palace intrigue games of ruthless social climbing that filled time at court in the imperial era. Visconti's lavish sets and pulsing color makes the demented family dynamics of incest and betrayal that much more perverse, making a microcosm of Nazi insanity that inevitably encroaches upon the Essenbecks' bubble when their own connected…

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  Review by Criterion 1

  The most savagely subversive film by the iconoclastic auteur Luchino Visconti employs the mechanics of deliriously stylized melodrama to portray Nazism’s total corruption of the soul. In the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power, the wealthy industrialist von Essenbeck family and their associates—including the scheming social climber Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the incestuous matriarch Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the perversely cruel heir Martin (Helmut Berger, memorably donning Dietrich-like drag in his breakthrough role)—descend into a self-destructive spiral of decadence, greed, perversion, and all-consuming hatred as they vie for power, over the family business and over one another.

  Our edition of THE DAMNED is coming September 28, 2021. Visit Criterion.com to learn more and pre-order.

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★★ 15

  Nazploitation meets artistic resplendence in this tale of familial treachery and unbridled sadism—where the tainted ethos of the state becomes that of the individual. Visconti’s examination of the industrialist family power structure circa 1930s pre-WWII Germany is a tragic masterpiece for the ages, and what makes it so goddamn great is how poorly we regard our monstrous protagonists, yet we can’t help but be totally invested in each slight and double-cross that takes place throughout the story. Drama that is equally as compelling as our loathing for these odious characters.

  Ahh, I still can’t believe I didn’t like this the first time around… oh, how the tables have turned. After three viewings now, I can safely say that this film has become a new personal favorite. The Damned is a sick and twisted masterpiece that seems to get better each time I watch it.

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★ 4

  Sorry, I know many consider this a great film by but I found it to be a provocative mess. Yes, there's some excellent camerawork, a star-studded international cast and a compelling score by Maurice Jarre. Also, a sumptous production with perfect 1930s period sets, costumes and details. But the characters were all so depraved and/or evil from the outset and the story so melodramatic and over-the-top that I couldn't really feel engaged in the plot except to see what outrageous development and double-cross Visconti would reveal next.

  We follow the Von Essenbecks, a wealthy and very screwed-up German family that made its fortune by manufacturing munitions and weapons of war, as they make an unholy alliance with the ascendant National…

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  Review by Brian 🦇 ★★★★★ 2

  That unique breed of brilliant, transfixing disaster that can only come about when an aristocratic, semi-repressed gay Communist madly in love with his protégé gets to make a movie about Nazism just at the beginning of a watershed moment in onscreen sexual permissiveness. Wants to be about so many things—the Faustian bargain of capitalist industrialism with fascism, the formation of sexual identity in the 1930s, the transhistorical violence of heteronormativity, Nazism’s vulgarization of the German Romantic aesthetic tradition, Helmut Berger’s thighs and shoulderblades—that it winds up completely collapsing in on itself like an overripe and particularly noxious fruit; but that advanced state of decay—aesthetic, narrative, and thematic—is mesmerizing to witness, as Visconti, a decadent at heart, well understood. Awful and…