GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Jackson Booth-Millard From director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, I assumed this was a German war film about the sister or another female relative of Eva Braun, and even though it wasn't I watched with interest. Basically, set in Germany, 1943, and during a bombing raid by Allied forces, Maria (Hanna Schygulla) is married to soldier Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), but after only a short time together he returns to the front, and she is later told he has been killed. She starts work in a bar, often visited by Americans, as a hostess, and after a relationship with African-American soldier Bill (George Byrd) she becomes pregnant with his baby, but she is shocked to be caught with him by Hermann who is in fact alive. In the fight between the two men, Maria unintentionally kills Bill hitting him over the head with a full bottle, but when she expresses love for her husband he takes the blame for the crime and is put in prison. After aborting her pregnancy she heads home on a train and gets the attention of Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny) the old wealthy industrialist, and he offers her a new job as his assistant, and of course she soon becomes his mistress. Maria tells Hermann in prison about the latest events, promising their life will get going again after he is released, and she earns loads of money to buy a new house, Oswald even visits her husband to offer him and his wife his wealth if he leaves his wife after he is released. This offer is kept a secret, but when Hermann is let out he heads for Canada, only sending his wife a gift every month so she knows he still loves, and when he finds out that that Oswald has died he returns to Germany. In Oswald's will that executor Senkenberg (Hark Bohm) reads out, the secret agreement between him and Hermann is revealed, and in distress she ends her life by lighting her cigarette and creating a gas explosion. Also starring Gisela Uhlen as Mother, GoldenEye's Gottfried John as Willi Klenze and Elisabeth Trissenaar as Betti Klenze. In the leading role Schygulla gives a good emotionally up and down performance, the story set in the war is admittedly a little confusing for me at times, but it had some good melodramatic moments, full of the sort of things you get in those kinds of genre films, so it is certainly a worthwhile romantic drama. It was nominated the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Good!

rory-campbell Maria Braun is an extraordinary woman presented fully and very credibly, despite being so obtuse as to border on implausibility. She will do everything to make her marriage work, including shameless opportunism and sexual manipulation. And thus beneath the vicey exterior, she reveals a rather sweet value system. The film suffers from an abrupt and unexpected ending which afterwards feels wholly inadequate, with the convenience familiar from ending your school creative writing exercise with 'and then I woke up'. It is also book-ended at the other end with the most eccentric title sequence I've ever seen, but don't let any of that put you off.

Bob Taylor This first part of the BRD Trilogy has more passion and plot density than Lola, but less of the magic of Veronica Voss. The political musings have point to them: we see the shortages after the war, how the blackmarketers were able to control so much of the day-to-day life (delicious moment when Fassbinder, playing a grifter, tries to sell a complete set of Kleist to Schygulla, who remarks that burning books don't provide much warmth: she really wants firewood).There's some clumsiness in the first hour. The scene in Maria's room with the black soldier, interrupted by Hermann's appearance should go quicker. The train scene when Maria meets Karl Oswald falls flat when she insults the GI--I cringed, it was so bad. But as the story develops and the years go by, I was drawn more and more into this glossy, cold world.

Galina Sensual and tough Maria Braun. (Hanna Schygula) marries a soldier in the middle of World War II and spends a half of day and the whole night with him. That's how long her marriage lasts before she loses him to the war and then to prison. She carries on with her life, becomes a successful businesswoman being not only sensual but intelligent, ambitious, and willing to use sex whenever or wherever necessary: "I don't know a thing about business, but I do know what German women want. You might even say I'm an expert on it". While climbing up to the success she always remembers her husband, Hermann (her man) and convinces herself that whatever she does – is for him, for their future happy life together. "Maria Braun"'s style reminds much of melodramas by Fassbinder's favorite Hollywood director, Douglas Sirk and offers a glimpse of the loss and survival in postwar Germany. Hanna Schygula literally shines in every scene of the movie and she is fantastic.8.5/10