ENDED

“A TOUR-DE-FORCE OF CINEMATIC EROTICISM!
Capable of inspiring some critics to babbling gush —
and reducing others to awed silence...
Brooks’s performance as Lulu retains a vitality, a live physical
and affective presence, that has rarely, if ever, been matched on screen.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times. Click here to read entire review

“LET THERE BE LULU! Watch a legend being born…
Both visage and coiffure shimmer in Film Forum’s restored 35mm print,
but what glows incandescently is Brooks’s aura. DON’T MISS!”
– Time Out New York

“THERE WOULD NEVER BE ANOTHER LULU—NOR WILL THERE EVER BE…
Brooks needed only this movie to establish herself as an icon.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice. Click here to read entire review

“Bristles with the bobbed-hair naughtiness of Louise Brooks,
who shimmies and shivers as the very best bad girl in Weimar Berlin.”
– Logan Hill, New York magazine

“Showcases the apocalyptic charms of the
bewitchingly bobbed Louise Brooks… a bracingly free spirit -
a spinning swannecked beauty of both curves and angles,
like an Art Deco human, totemic and modern.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Sun

Sex in the City — Berlin, 1928: in the wake of Louise Brooks’s patent leather bobbed Lulu, men set up expensive love nests, get caught in embarrassing public situations, break prestigious engagements, demand and commit suicides, engineer escapes from the law, ruin themselves gambling, commit brutal murders and join the Salvation Army; as she moves from kept woman, headlining showgirl, lesbian’s love interest, widow in mourning, convicted criminal, fugitive from the law, possible sex slave to common streetwalker; amid a bustling backdrop of life in Weimar Germany including the sleekest of apartments, the most frantic backstages (“for sheer erotic dynamism, the backstage scenes have never been equaled” – Pauline Kael), the sleaziest bars and the most decrepit attic hovels.

But through it all she preserves a simple innocence, as a being devoted solely to pleasure without malice—the author of the original plays, Franz Wedekind, eyebrow-raiser of the Victorian 90s, called Lola “the personification of primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware.” (But then Brooks herself later noted that, as an ex-Ziegfeld girl, “It all seemed perfectly normal to me.”) G.W. Pabst’s adaptation combined his fluid, cut-on-movement editing style with the harsh contrasts, lurking shadows and staircases-to-nowhere of German expressionism, plucking Brooks from a waning career as Hollywood flapper to goddess of the European art film.

But not right away, as Pandora, a silent film released on the cusp of the talkie revolution, and one greeted by censorship and generally negative reviews, soon became a historical sidebar. Then, following Brooks’s rediscovery in the 50s as a bitingly intelligent, wickedly witty woman in real life, Pandora’s Box finally (and deservedly) entered the pantheon as one of the last masterpieces of the cinema’s most exciting era—with Brooks’s creation taking her place as one of the screen’s most enduring love goddesses.

A KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASE, IN ASSOCIATION WITH GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE