Faraway, So Close!

Wings of Desire, Wenders’s classic fable about the hunger of a wistful angel for mortal life, was also a city symphony dedicated to Berlin as it stood two years before the fall of the wall. The Berlin of that film’s sequel, made six years later, is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans. The underrated Faraway, So Close! is no less thoughtful or generous than its predecessor, and Kinski’s turn as a sympathetic, trench coat–clad angel now stands as one of her best mid-career performances. She joined one of the most gloriously eccentric casts in movie history, including Peter Falk, Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed, and, in his first film role, Mikhail Gorbachev.