Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

I wasn't expecting much of this film, even knowing what's it about. I was surprised how cleverly it was made. The main themes of this film are sex and love. Though there was a lot of profanity, everything fit perfectly. It's not one of those films where is a lot of unnecessary profanity just to shock audience. Another good thing about this film is, that it's characters always talk openly with each other, so you get to know them in a very short time and even start to like them. Actually this is a sad story, but I found this movie being optimistic sometimes. It's well filmed and there are many good German actors in this film. There were many unexpected twist, even the ending was not like I expected. It's interesting, funny, shocking and really worth your time.

Other reviews suggested this film was based on a French novel. If so, I have not read it and have no intention to. I watched this film strictly as a stand-alone entity, not knowing much about its background and its director, Oskar Roehler. I watched it out of a liking for international cinema, hoping I would land a good one. And I did.One can argue this is a serious film, on a popular subject: love and its impact on life. Apart from some minor 'imperfections', e.g. the physical resemblance of the brothers played by different actors portraying them in youth and adulthood, with one done right and the other out of whack, I find the film was very well done and it commanded my attention throughout all its 112 minutes.Perhaps it strikes a chord with intellectuals - one brother is a renowned physicist and the other an academic. It is a film that engages you and makes you think and try to get inside the minds of the protagonists, played as two half-brothers with entirely opposite life styles. One more likable than the other.I enjoyed this film greatly, and regarded it one of the few, memorable German films I have seen in recent years.

This is a plodding, clueless adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's novel of the same name. It manages to include many of the book's dialogs verbatim, while completely missing its point. The main evidence is the outrageous change of the conclusion - the director just mined the novel for catchy phrases and totally refused to tackle its challenging ideas. Or rather he was not able to notice them. Even apart from that, the adaptation is dumb. One example: when Bruno describes to the psychiatrist the biological details of the decomposition of a human corpse, he uses lines that are there in the book, down to the moths with "the names of Italian starlets" - but they belong to the narrator, not to Bruno! Such knowledge is completely inappropriate for his character.I don't mind the downplaying of the sex scenes - watch some porn if you have never seen it. The causality of the philosophy and culture of the times and the parents' lives on the lives of the main protagonists, the whole point of Michael's enigmatic life, the desperation of the obsession with sex and narcissism of the body, the sheer horror and cruelty of Bruno's existence, all this is downplayed to the point of absence. Houellebecq created a gripping world in his novel that you cannot shake off even if you think you know that he isn't right. The director produced a made-for-TV movie.

Bernd Eichinger and Oskar Roehler messed it up. Completely. How that was even possible considering Houellebecqs brilliant novel is unbelievable. They just made completely shallow, awful melodramatic crap out of what can be considered probably the single most important and greatest novel that world literature has seen at the turn from the 20th to the 21st century. This film is unbearable for all who have read and understood the book that undoubtedly is as deeply philosophical as it is scandalous, provoking and moralizing.Eichinger and Roehler stated at the 2006 Berlinale, where the movie premiered: "YOU CANNOT FILM SOCIAL CRITICISM, YOU CAN ONLY FILM MELODRAMS." (Eichinger) "THE UTTERLY FATALISTIC RESUMEE OF THE BOOK COULD NOT BE USED. WE DID NOT WANT TO ADOPT HOELLEBECQ'S MORALE." (Roehler) Besides that, they claimed the novel to be too pornographic to be filmed without major changes. They also frankly admitted not to have had any contact with Houellebecq.These statements and the attitude behind them are shocking, disgusting and can only serve as a negative example for all film-makers. They can only be adequately qualified with the facit: FILMING A NOVEL - HOW YOU MUST NOT DO IT.Luckily, there are some brilliant films, which prove all the points claimed by Eichinger and Roehler completely wrong: You can film social criticism and not produce shallow melodramas, as proved for example by Harron's wonderful "American Psycho" (from the Bret Easton Ellis Novel). You can translate the pornographic of a novel into a film without censoring it as proves Despentes' magnificent "Baise-moi!" (from Despentes' identically titled novel). You can adopt a completely fatalistic resumee of a novel in a film as proved by Radford's adorable "1984" (from the famous George Orwell Novel).It is exactly when this happens, that excellent novels are translated into excellent films. Eichinger and Roehler never had the intention to do so, nor would their abilities have been sufficient to do so, even if they had wanted. So, they had to produce this catastrophe now unjustifiedly bearing the name "Elementarteilchen". They failed as drastically as it is possible.