Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

cettel Jan-Ole Gerster's "Oh, Boy," which is called in America, "A Coffee in Berlin," is one of the most gorgeously cinematographed or filmed movies of all time, the stills from which could be framed separately as photo-masterpieces, one after another -- in the hundreds if not thousands of them -- and then displayed in a museum, simply as a succession of photographic masterpieces; but this is instead a motion picture, in which, additionally, the script, acting, casting, musical score, and, of course (doesn't it naturally follow from all those) the direction, are literally breathtaking, and the total impression from that profusion of artistic brilliance left this viewer deeply moved. It's a film I shall want to see many times, because it's the type of film that I'll probably understand the more and experience the more deeply with each successive viewing of it, and there aren't many movies like that. If you want directorial comparisons, the movies of the great director Guy Madden, and the two great movies from David Lynch, can be compared with this one, for their haunting effects and deeply offbeat and surprising turns of script and for their images which (like this one's) burn themselves into one's consciousness at a deep enough level to become a permanent feature of a receptive viewer's being.

anarchistica Oh Boy is somewhat reminiscent of Prozac Nation. The protagonist is an unlikable, spoilt child, leeching off others while breezing through life. It is an anti-"Coming of Age" film, showing how people refuse to "grow up" - even supposed adults. Niko's father is childish, his friend an underachieving actor and the former classmate he runs into is in a way still the little girl with a crush on him. It doesn't end there, even Germany itself refuses to "grow up", clinging to its Nazi past and sticking to absurd bureaucracy.On top of having an amusing story, Oh Boy has lovely cinematography. Berlin looks great in black & white, and with the lazy jazzy soundtrack it sometimes seems like a 50s film. Quite a promising start from Gerster, who won just about every German film award around.

Thom-Peters "Oh Boy" features the same "plot" as countless art-house and student movies: A young man drifts through a big city, meets strange people, the end. There is probably a fancy name for this, but most people just call it pointless, boring, a waste of time. Regarding "Oh Boy" there is really no point in arguing with them.The "boy" (Tom Schilling) meets about 12 stale caricatures: a presumptuous bureaucrat, a snide coffee shop waitress, a wacky lonely neighbor, a fat girl who was bullied by him at school and is now thin and very blatantly mentally unstable, his rich & heartless daddy, stupid ticket inspectors ... These characters are neither funny nor interesting, they are just incredibly annoying versions of stereotypes recycled by a clueless author. He actually manages to dedicate two of the movie's scenes to the times of Hitler - in a movie about a young man's journey through the Berlin of today! That's world-class, in its own inane way. You are afraid to deal with current topics; you don't have a single original idea? Well, you can't go wrong with Hitler! He's still got a gigantic fan base that can't get enough of this guy."Oh Boy" is author/director Gerster's thesis project for a film academy. Therefore critics shouldn't be too harsh; they should concentrate on the promising aspects of this exercise. But there was a preposterous hype about this movie. It won the highest German movie award, the "German Film Award", for best feature film. This "best German movie of 2012" will be shown in art-house cinemas and Goethe Institutes around the globe. There is no reason to hold back punches anymore. Gerster's professors might be proud, but viewers expecting a good movie are bound to be seriously disappointed.While I'd give zero points for the author, the work of the cinematographer is quite good. "Oh Boy" is not only filmed in black-and-white, sometimes it really does look like an actual movie from the Fifties. And it has got an appropriate jazzy soundtrack to go with that. All in all there are several minutes of lovely Berlin photography. If B&W-movies do have a future, the name of the cameraman Philipp Kirsamer is definitely one to remember.In one of the two remarkably pointless Hitler scenes, the weather-worn old man Michael Gwisdek (born in 1942) gives a theatrical monologue about how he as a young boy witnessed the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, dreading that all the glass would hurt his bicycle tires the next day. This 5 minutes long, static monologue got him the "German Film Award" for best male actor in a supporting role. Awkward! Is the German cinema really that dead? ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 12)

Jochen Wilhelm As a German living abroad for the past 12 years, it's been a surprising pleasure to see, back in Berlin, this little jewel of a movie. Step by step the young guy's everyday-life situations pull you in, develop a light but melancholic atmosphere in which great acting, a pensive and funny script, music that reminds the best of Miles Davis and awesome black-and-white camera-work form a wonderful whole of a movie. If you see, towards the end, average shots of Berlin turned into looking poetic… you know the film has found its tone just on the right note.Beautiful - I hope this (first!) film didn't only accidentally turn out so well. You want to wish the director, all actors and his crew the very best !