The best Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movies

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

31/05/1945- 10/06/1982
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
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The Marriage of Maria Braun

The Marriage of Maria Braun
7.7/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 23/03/1979
  • Character: Peddler (as Fassbinder)
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
8/10
Emmi Kurowski, a cleaning lady, is lonely in her old age. Her husband died years ago, and her grown children offer little companionship. One night she goes to a bar frequented by Arab immigrants and strikes up a friendship with middle-aged mechanic Ali. Their relationship soon develops into something more, and Emmi's family and neighbors criticize their spontaneous marriage. Soon Emmi and Ali are forced to confront their own insecurities about their future.

Veronika Voss

Veronika Voss
7.6/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 13/05/1982
  • Character: Kinobesucher (uncredited)
In Munich 1955, German film star Veronika Voss becomes a drug addict at the mercy of corrupt Dr. Marianne Katz, who keeps her supplied with morphine. After meeting sports writer Robert Krohn, Veronika begins to dream of a return to stardom. As the couple's relationship escalates in intensity, Veronika begins seriously planning her return to the screen -- only to realize how debilitated she has become through her drug habit.

Room 666

Room 666
6.6/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 01/06/1982
  • Character: Self
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"

Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends
7.6/10
  • Genre: DramaRomance
  • Release: 06/06/1975
  • Character: Franz "Fox" Bieberkopf
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to climb up the social ladder, it isn't without turmoil, and being torn between his old working class roots, and the shiny new facade of middle class consciousness.

Whity

Whity
6.4/10
"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank, and the retarded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.

The City Tramp

The City Tramp
6.1/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 01/01/1966
  • Character: Man #1 on Toilet
A tramp finds a gun lying in the street.

Katzelmacher

Katzelmacher
6.8/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 07/10/1969
  • Character: Jorgos
A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos, moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos.

Effi Briest

Effi Briest
6.9/10
  • Genre: DramaHistory
  • Release: 20/06/1974
  • Character: Narrator (uncredited)
A German-made film based on one of the most famous German novels by Theodor Fontane. Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) is a socially ambitious, 17-year-old German girl who accepts a proposal of marriage from Baron Geert Von Instetten, a much older diplomat. Unfortunately, neither the Baron's family nor anyone in the secluded town she now calls home accept Effi as an equal. Starved for companionship, Effi begins an innocent friendship with a well-known womanizer that may jeopardize her position as the Baron's wife.

Baal

Baal
6.4/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 07/01/1970
  • Character: Baal
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’

Kamikaze 1989

Kamikaze 1989
5.8/10
In a totalitarian society of the future, in which the government controls all facets of the media, a homicide detective investigates a string of bombings, and finds out more than he bargained for.

Beware of a Holy Whore

Beware of a Holy Whore
6.6/10
  • Genre: ComedyDrama
  • Release: 28/08/1971
  • Character: Sascha, Herstellungsleiter
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.

Bremen Freedom

Bremen Freedom
7/10
A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends. (synopsis written by Will Gilbert)

Tenderness of the Wolves

Tenderness of the Wolves
6.3/10
A German serial killer preys on boys and young men during the so-called years of crisis between the wars. Based on the true story of Fritz Haarmann, aka the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover.

Wim Wenders, Desperado

Wim Wenders, Desperado
7.2/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 16/07/2020
  • Character: Self (archive footage)
"Wings Of Desire" and "Buena Vista Social Club", "Paris, Texas" and "The State Of Things": Wim Wenders is considered one of the pioneers of New German Cinema and one of the most important and influential representatives of contemporary cinema. With never before shown archive material and extraordinary encounters with companions and contemporary witnesses such as Francis Ford Coppola, Willem Dafoe, Andie MacDowell, Hanns Zischler, Patti Smith and Werner Herzog, this documentary provides unique insights into the life and work of one of the most multifaceted artists of our times. Renowned documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler ("It Must Schwing. The Blue Note Story") and his co-director Andreas Frege were given the exclusive opportunity to portray Wenders for this film. From Dusseldorf to Paris, and all the way to the desert of Texas, the film traces iconic locations and decisive moments in Wenders' work as director, producer, photographer and author.

Love Is Colder Than Death

Love Is Colder Than Death
6.5/10
  • Genre: ComedyCrime
  • Release: 16/01/1970
  • Character: Franz
Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he's refused to join.

Fassbinder

Fassbinder
6.7/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 30/04/2015
  • Character: Himself
A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality.

Haytabo

Haytabo
5.3/10
A biochemistry professor finds an old manuscript with structure and formula of immortality drug.

The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp

The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp
5.8/10
  • Genre: DramaRomance
  • Release: 10/10/1968
  • Character: the pimp
Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "The film is a look entirely at Western decadence" - Jean-Marie Straub.

Gods of the Plague

Gods of the Plague
6.4/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 24/07/1970
  • Character: Pornokunde
A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.

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