Popular reviews

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 2

  lang never faltered, never stopped being relentlessly contemporary. nuclear disaster, american-german finances after the war, the astrological mysticism behind business interests, the 24/7 surveillance state, assassination networks, and mabuse not as a man, nor even as a ghost, but as an archetype which is inherent in the cursed inception of western civilization, like how mass shooters inspire a dozen more copycats, a nihilistic virus. anyone with access to the levers and databanks can play god over others -- mabuse is a 'gambler' with men's fate because he wants to play the system out to its logical conclusion, he is 'rational' in the sense that he sees nukes being built, and wants them to be used for their intended purpose: the…

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  Review by Lexzilla ★★★½

  Delightfully and deliberately convoluted, Fritz Lang’s last ever film and his return to Mabuse after a few decades is a lot of pulpy fun. With all its gadgets, secret rooms, eavesdropping equipment, coded messages, assassins, car chases and shootouts, it’s a bit like he invented the campy spy film, even though this is still very much a densely plotted crime thriller.

  Probably not of interest to anyone but me, but the main female character goes through a suicide attempt, murder, kidnapping and surgery and her manicure still help up! I must find out what top coat was used.

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★½

  For his last film, Fritz Lang decided to return to his Dr Mabuse character that initially propelled him to success in Germany. The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse falls in with the Krimi films that were building in popularity at the time, and this one is plot heavy to say the least. The complex narrative begins with the murder of a reporter, with the action then switching to a hotel where a young lady is about to commit suicide. The titular character looms large over the proceedings without actually featuring. Similar to how in Testament the character existed more as an idea than a man. The spectre of Mabuse manifests literally here in the form of a hotel riddled with…

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½

  The testament of Fritz Lang. Practically a return to most of the thematic and formal schemes of his entire career, a take on surveillance and the longing effects of nazism and its scars, a hotel full of cameras, secrets and closed angles, a mise-en-scène so perfectly aligned with its dramaturgy and conceptual dimension, one aims to see it all but never manages to do so, cinema's own failed attempt at portraying perfectly what lies within society's structure, some kind of sociological deviation of Flusser's essays on the black box, only here the problem isn't of a technical matter, but of an existential one. A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of nazism, Germany burns with its history and there is no easy reconciliation in the horizon in Lang's claustrophobic house of mirrors and deceit, for ideas live longer than bodies.

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★½ 11

  If you speak to the old hardened criminals they all say the same thing, “Dr Mabuse isn’t dead, he can never die “

  27 years after 1933’s "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse", director Fritz Lang returns to the Dr. Mabuse character for his third in the series and his last film ever.

  I’ve seen several Lang movies, but this was my first experience with Dr Mabuse. If nothing else, it’s sparked my interest in the series and I’m planning on watching his first two movies as well as the many followups.

  As for this one, it’s a complex affair, with mysterious characters, sneaky surveillance, masterful disguises and enough gadgets to keep even the pickiest of Bond villains busy.

  Speaking of…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 7

  I keep thinking about the fact that the hero in Fritz Lang's The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse is an American, a clueless but good businessman whose faith and loyalty enable him to not only save (and get) the girl, but also fire the bullets that end the immediate threat to the good guys. The same is the case in the film's two official sequels, The Return of Dr. Mabuse and The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, in which it is FBI agents (both played by Lex Barker) who are able to solve the mystery and end the danger. In all three of these films, the figures who dream of world domination, whether they're Mabuse or simply Mabuse-inspired, are homegrown, as are…

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  Review by threepenny ★★★★★ 3

  The police are shrouded in smoke from their own cigarettes like a thick fog. The seer is a blind man in a room surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. Only the camera, the microphone, sees, tells stories, and everyone who knows of its gaze must carefully curate their every word and expression so that even this record doesn't contain the truth. The last movie that Fritz Lang made in his long career before being declared legally blind, features the return of his signature character, Dr. Mabuse, to a new, postwar age where everyone is compromised and no one is safe. Gert Fröbe centers the picture as a detective who is tired of seeing death and at his wits end…

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  Review by Taylor Leverage ★★★ 3

  Marge Simpson: "A thousand eyes, what could that mean?"
  Grampa Simpson: "I'm pretty sure a thousand ... is a number."

  Feels oddly reminiscent of a modern Christopher Nolan thriller with its many crossed wires, sometimes substituting complexity for a good story. Fritz Lang's final outing as a director brought him back to Germany and to the character that made him famous, the malevolent, mysterious Dr. Mabuse. Lang's earlier, more experimental Mabuse films (including the four-and-a-half-hour silent epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) were pioneering works that helped to establish some of the style that would evolve into the noir, using a central character that was uniquely chaotic and diabolical for the period, to the point where some later critics thought that…

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  Review by D Rock ★★★ 2

  An honorable but relatively unmemorable final chapter not only in Fritz Lang's Mabuse mystery/crime trilogy but in the German director's film-making career.

  The inventiveness and spark of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) are not extinguished here, but the burners have been turned down to simmer. Those movies were groundbreaking, but think of some of what was being done by others in 1960, and it's harder to give this Mabuse the same compliment.

  For one, there are long static chunks with little-to-no movement on the part of the characters or the camera. For another, there's far less use of shadow and dark/light interplay, which is to be expected given this was 1960 and not…

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  Review by Andy Fell ★★★ 3

  Ich mach mal kurzentschlossen eine Krimi-Woche 🕵️‍♂️ . Deutsche Krimis sollen es aber sein. Und Klassiker obendrein. Nein nicht Edgar Wallace. Aber so ähnlich. Die Dr. Mabuse-Reihe aus den 60ern habe ich mir vorgenommen 🧐.

  Beginnen möchte ich, um die chronologische Reihenfolge einzuhalten, mit Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse. 1960 inszenierte Fritz Lang diesen Schwarzweiß-Krimi, der an seine Mabuse-Filme aus den 30ern anknüpfen sollte.

  Ein Reporter 🗞 wird ermordet. Die Art und Weise der Tötung lässt die Polizei 👨‍✈️ um Kommissar Kras (Gert Fröbe) an Dr. Mabuse erinnern, der allerdings schon lange tot sein soll 🤔. Die Spur führt in ein Hotel 🏪 und dort passieren plötzlich seltsame Dinge.

  Ein typischer deutscher Krimi aus dieser Zeit. Das soll jetzt…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½ 1

  Weirdly engaging retro-futurist fantasy; I'm not sure why it intrigued me so deeply, but Lang's technical mastery at this point was so absolute that he no longer had to give a shit, and the incongruous convergence of technology-of-surveillance paranoia with parapsychology ///// oh, wait -- I know what it is! It's a mash-up of Alphaville and En La Palma De Tu Mano!

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  Review by João Bénard da Costa

  Após o êxito obtido na Alemanha pelos filmes do marajá de Eschnapur (Das Indische Grabmal) o produtor Brauner voltou a abordar Lang, convidando-o a filmar um remake de Die Nibelungen. Lang recusou imediatamente (a ideia pareceu-lhe despropositada) mas quando Brauner voltou à carga com a proposta de um remake de Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse pensou duas vezes. E contrapõe a Brauner, em vez de remake, uma nova variação sobre a figura de Mabuse que o tornara célebre em 1922 e lhe valera a proibição dos nazis em 1933. Assim nasceram “Os 1.000 olhos de Dr. Mabuse” numa tradução literal, que viria a ser o último filme realizado pelo autor de M.

  Lang recordou um dia que o subtítulo do…