Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire

Drama • PG-13 • 1987 • 2 hr 8 min

7.7

7.9

Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.

Starring

Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois, Peter Falk

Directed By

Written By

Peter Handke, Richard Reitinger, Wim Wenders, Bernard Eisenschitz

Attributes

Complex Slow Watch By Myself

Genre

Drama Fantasy Romance Foreign

Release Date

April 29, 1988

User Reviews

Explores the profound feeling of being alive and the gifts and curses that it brings.

Great context and material, beautiful cinematography and Mise-en-scène.

Jonathan Maurice

Silk beauty envelops as warm hands around a shiver. Stoking that private candle behind our eyes.

Flimmervielfalt

One of the most poetic German films, as well as one of Wim Wenders' best. This film is pure magic!

Profound and deeply touching, a film that explores what it means to be human and the beauty of life.

A gorgeous film, especially for the fact that it's not sanitized. The world is dirty and sad and all the more beautiful for that realism.

One of the most beautiful movies I have seen. Those philosophical phrases, made me more reflected about life, death and love.

One of my fav movies of all time. French cinema with it's elegance and simplicity blowing my mind. Concept of angels and death is marvelous.

The European slice of life mixed with the contemplative philosophy about humanity makes for a very comfortable film.

Heavy going and enigmatic but also mesmerising.

Stats

Ratings

7.7 – Based on 2.7k ratings

Attributes

Watch With

Wings of Desire

Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.

Faraway, So Close!

Faraway, So Close!

A group of angels look longingly upon the life of humans. Berlin now is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans.

Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.

The Seventh Seal

When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.

In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime, only to learn he has died. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Major Calloway, and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.