Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 34 critics' reviews are positive The website's consensus reads: "Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mammoth-length passion project demands a lot of patience, but viewers willing to take the plunge into this dense character study will emerge feeling like they've truly walked in the shoes of another person." The film tied at #202 on the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics Poll.
Film critic Vincent Canby wrote "Fassbinder has created a huge, magnificent melodrama that has the effective shape of a film of conventional length." Critic Richard Corliss said "as it cranes down Berlin boulevards or creeps toward two people in bed, Fassbinder's camera is a most fastidious voyeur, observing every ruction of sexual violence with a clinical sympathy."
Andrew Pulver of The Guardian stated "it isn't especially stylish to look at: much of it is rudimentary, even stagey; but it's the murderous intensity with which Fassbinder bears down on Biberkopf's experience that makes it so compelling." Critic Geoffrey O'Brien commented the series "turned out to be a belated Expressionist masterpiece, harsh and unforgiving in its delineation of Franz's inevitable undoing, implacable in its air of nocturnal gloom."
Slant Magazine opined "the film's two-hour epilogue is ingenious, a descent into absolute hysteria and madness wherein Biberkopf wanders through a politically and spiritually charged psychosexual dreamscape, complete with anachronistic musical cues from the likes of Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, and Kraftwerk." Critic Steve Weintraub opined that "the sad irony of this titanic undertaking is that it would do quite nicely as a two or three hour feature."
