Just perfect...

Excellent but underrated film

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

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

I'm going to spare the summary and skip straight to the criticism. For starters I thought this movie could've played out the ex-Nazi perspective a lot better, and a lot more. I think when that's addressed with his old teacher and the construction worker was really the most interesting part of the film. The rest of the film really is just meh. (Minor spoilers) Edmund comes off like way too nice of a kid to be persuaded towards something so obviously wrong, just by a quick rant! I felt the motivations just weren't there throughout the film. The ending just felt way too forced for the sake of shock. The lead up to it could've had worse things happen than some kids not wanting to play with him and a Nazi slapping him! Overall I felt this film was more interesting being filmed so close to the real events. I'm glad it was made almost for historical reasons, and I'd say it's worth a watch if you're already interesting in this genre, or post war Germany.

Germany Year Zero is a great film, and it resembles the similarly themed great French film by Robert Bresson, Mouchette, made two decades later, in which a female child has to deal with the death of a parent, poverty, sexual indiscretions, and ends up dead. But this film is anything but dead; it is the embodiment of a cliché, though, in the best sense, for although clichés are often oversimplifications, they are also often based upon truths, and Germany Year Zero is an exemplar of the maxim that less is more. Yes, perhaps developing some of the other characters may have made the film more saleable to the public (it was a bomb upon its release), but its focus on the black and white mind of an impressionable and troubled child in extremis is a rarity, and makes the film not only a companion piece to Mouchette, but also to two other magnificent films that depict the lonely lives of children, Robert Wise's 1944 The Curse Of the Cat People and Inoshiro Honda's 1968 Godzilla's Revenge, which also features an industrial wasteland, criminals, and a possible pedophile. That's quite good company for this film to keep, as it bridges Neo-Realism with child-based psychodrama to produce one of the most unflinchingly brutal, yet tender, films in cinema history, as well as a rarity in film trilogies, a trilogy wherein each film is better than the preceding film. Bravo, Rossellini, bravo!

Saw this film unaware that it is part of a trilogy, let alone that it is the final effort of such trilogy. The story is set in Germany, in the difficult years after the war. The injuries of the war are well visible, with all those buildings in ruins and the general poverty. Other than a portrait of that very dark age, this film tells the story of German child Edmund Kohler and his life in family and not only. Edmund and his family are among the war's survivors.In many ways, this movie has little to distinguish it from other post-war movies and lacks an effective combination of plot and pacing strength. There are moments when that works, such as when Edmund wanders through the ruins of Berlin, including a church if I'm not mistaken. But otherwise it doesn't really work that well.The ending is the strongest and harshest part of the movie. It's memorable and well filmed, but so depressing. Edmund poisons his own father as a way to put an end to his suffering. Edmund feels horrible about what he did and can't take anymore, committing suicide by throwing himself from a building.The cast does what they should for their roles, but Edmund Moeschke is the best of the bunch thanks to his strong portrayal of Edmund Kohler.

This movie is one of the three Rossellini's neo-realist movies that make the trilogy of war of his direction. The other two are "Roma Città Aperta" and "Paisà". Despite having won the First Prize at the 1948 Locarno Festival it was a commercial half-failure. In 1947 in Berlin, Germany, a city destroyed by the war, full of ruins and rubbish everywhere, with people and families living in awful conditions of poverty and housing squalor, a 13 year old boy resorts to petty thefts and tricks to get money and food to help to support his family composed by him plus an old and ailing father, a sister who wins money at night by going to dance and drink in nightclubs with the allied men and a brother who lives half-hidden and unregistered for fear of being arrested and sent to a prisoners camp since he had fought there till the end of the war. The best of this movie is its documentary value since it shows in a very realistic way the images of a Berlin almost totally destroyed by the war and the life conditions of its population. The story is not bad itself but in the end it introduces an unnecessary too dramatic ending by the boy poisoning his father to death partly out of pity and to put an end to his suffering and partly to alleviate the family of the burden he represented. It's however one of the best movies of the Italian neo-realist school that flourished in the forties and fifties of last century.