See it

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2008)

The Lives of Others is a powerful and remarkable work for a first-time director. Having been to the reunified Berlin, I can confirm that his recreation of the late, unlamented East Germany is amazing, with its gray dreariness and never-fully-rebuilt postwar look. The moral universe recreated is even more remarkable. It gives viewers a taste of the strange reality of a communist utopia turned into a giant collectivity of mutually informing, pervasively listened-upon proles. The movie's subtlety makes it all the more powerful an anti-collectivist statement to be set alongside 1984, Brave New World, We, and other classics of the last century.