Film Forum

TONI ERDMANN had audiences rolling in the aisles in Cannes. “This tender German comedy is a moving, often hilarious portrait of an unusual father-daughter relationship... Many of the concerns…are as old as the hills or deadly serious: the growing gulf between parents and their adult kids; the conflict between work and family; the alienating, dehumanizing nature of the modern workplace; the role of women in corporate culture… But the way in which Ade decides to tackle all these things is startlingly original, frequently hilarious and completely surprising at every turn. It’s a rare film that makes you think deeply about the world while also making you laugh hard at scenes of nudity or a grown man walking down the street in an oversized bear costume…  Just brilliant.” – Dave Calhoun, Time Out (London)

GERMANY • 2016 • 162 MINS. • IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

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Reviews

Academy Award® Nominee! 
Best Foreign Language Film

“Sensational…a work of great beauty, great feeling and great cinema…”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“If a single movie were enough to silence reports of the death of cinema, it would be this one…It’s something new under the sun, a thrilling and discomfiting document of the present moment and also, like every movie that matters, a bulletin from the future.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

– David Calhoun, Time Out

“Get ready to retract every cliche joke you’ve ever made about Germans and their sense of humor — TONI ERDMANN suggests that perhaps they’ve simply been operating on a higher level of joke all along. The film is ridiculously funny at times, but the funny comes from the same place as the sad —  these two wonderful characters, played faultlessly by Simonsichek and Hüller... We lack female directors of every stripe, but what we really lack are female visionaries. This film…is so singular, and so uniquely Ade’s that it heralds her confirmation as one such.  On top of everything else, TONI ERDMANN is wise: a summary lesson in acceptance of your family members”
– Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

“Hüller delivers a remarkably subtle performance as the introvert so committed to bottling up her feelings. Simonischek, an exuberant goofball who has no respect for boundaries but only good intentions, provides the ideal foil to the Hüller character’s repressive tendencies. Almost certainly the funniest nude scene of all time, it’s at once an inventive form of physical comedy and bizarrely touching.”
– Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“The world’s first, genuinely funny, 162-minute German comedy of embarrassment. A slow-burning thing of beauty, ultimately as moving as it is implausibly funny. (Ade’s) blend of subtle social observation, bawdiness and absurdity evokes an unfeasible cross between the comic sensibilities of novelist Jennifer Egan, Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl and actor-showrunner Lena Dunham.”
 – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter