Run_Lola_Run

"Take a deep breath and hold it for 81 minutes. You are about to be dazzled by Tom Tykwer's inventive, exhilarating and pulsating Run Lola Run, an original work that is as fresh as diving into a tropical waterfall with enough energy to make glass shatter. It's as vibrant, unexpected and as unpredictable as life itself: a rollercoaster on a time fuse that combines imaginative cinematic techniques with playful creativity. It's a cartoon-style tale that explores chance, coincidence and circumstance at a frenetic pace that's way over the speed limit, leaving you reeling with delight. Twyker's concept, brilliant execution and thrilling soundtrack is surely one of the most electrifying movie experiences of the year.” -Louise Keller "Wow. How often does a feeling of exhilaration grab you in the first minute of a film and stay with you until the last' That's the effect of this stunner by director Tom Tykwer who gives new meaning to the term kinetic cinema. That he does it by playing out the possibilities of a twenty minute scenario three times is even more impressive because he's taken the traditional device of compressing days, weeks and even years into 90 minutes and turned it on its head. It's an almost interactive experience as we're invited to study the minute details of Lola's sprint to Manni's phone box and predict what might happen with the slightest differences in timing next time around and there's much more to be intrigued by than simply whether or not she'll make the rendezvous. Lola's life and the destinies of everyone she encounters can be dramatically affected by the smallest margins. Some of the many sideline pleasures in this mad dash, are rapid-fire snapshots of what becomes of the bit players Lola passes on the way. An enormous amount of information is crammed into 81 pulse-pounding minutes, all of it driven along by a thumping electronic soundtrack (Tykwer was one of the composers and Potente supplies vocals on several tracks), made even more dazzling by the insertion of animation, black and white sequences and footage shot on video. In lesser hands this might have been just an extended rock clip but Tykwer's meticulous planning pays off brilliantly, leaving us with plenty to think about after the chase is over." -Richard Kuipers "The perfect modern throwaway movie. The characters are like instant pulped versions of several decades of poses and quotes: the cute lowlife chick with punk red hair could have come out of an early Luc Besson film (e.g. Subway). The hyped-up style is closer to British cinema post–Trainspotting: all fast action, kooky angles and throbbing beats, wrapped up in a playfully fractured narrative. Clearly there’s a common source of inspiration in TV commercials, with their shorthand use of predigested, immediately legible images. More figuratively, the film resembles a computer game, locked into a matrix of possible options within a limited chunk of space and time (an approach shared by recent formal spectaculars as diverse as Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon and Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes). Director Tom Tykwer gets points for sustaining the energy level almost throughout, tossing in everything from animation to shot-on-video psychodrama. But if the film is more than a slick stunt it’s less via the shreds of ‘realism’ in the mix than the way the whole thing suggests itself as a romantic metaphor for modern life – contingent, superficial yet weighty, based in the banal everyday while driven by kinetic pop emotion. Many films have done great things with similar themes, which is perhaps why this one doesn’t finally have a lot of resonance: storyboarded and streamlined to the ultimate degree, it flashes past you in a moment and disappears without a trace. Even so, it’s