I love this movie so much

Good movie but grossly overrated

Absolutely the worst movie.

Blistering performances.

Movie chronicles the rise and fall of Lulu (Louise Brooks) a naive but sexually uninhibited woman. She just oozes sexuality and drives men around her crazy. She uses them for sex and most of them come to a bad end. She's not doing it on purpose--it just happens. There's even a lesbian countess who falls for her!Mesmerizing movie. It runs a little over two hours but is never dull. Beautifully directed by G.W. Pabst but its Brooks film all the way. She's incredible in her role. She just radiates sexuality unlike any actress I've ever seen. However she also manages to show the innocence of the character. Actually all the acting is great. Also this is probably the first film to have a lesbian character. Alice Roberts plays her a little over the top but not too much. By all accounts she didn't want to do it but her boyfriend talked her into it. I love the film but the gambling sequences can get a little tiresome and I find the ending with Jack the Ripper a little OTT. Still this a truly great film.

"Die Büchse der Pandora" or "Pandora's Box" is a 1929 black-and-white silent movie, so this one is already over 85 years old. It stars Louise Brooks, a dark-haired actress, who is probably more known today than she was back then. Despite being American-born she starred several times in the films of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, one of Germany's top silent film directors. Unfortunately, I cannot appreciate this film here as much as most others do judging from the movie's IMDb rating. It has an interesting premise, especially taking into account when it was made, but that's also it pretty much. There are a couple fine scenes in here, but it's not even close to being enough for a film that runs considerable over 2 hours. I was pretty much bored by it I have to say and it also did not help that I found the main character very uninteresting despite how hard they tried to make her as interesting and controversial as possible. Then again, I am not the greatest silent film fan out there, so I may be a bit biased, but nonetheless there are a handful of films from the silent era that I managed to appreciate a lot more than this one. Then again, there's also some that I liked even less, such as the Mabuse film for example. As a whole, this may have been a much better watch at 80 minutes perhaps, but for this massive duration the material simply wasn't enough. An epitome of how quality does not match quantity. Not recommended.

Even in Louise Brooks own autobiography it is hard to tell where the character of Lulu ends and Miss Brooks begins. The picture of modern femininity in the late 1920s with her "flapper" pageboy haircut and sexuality. She stood against convention and paid the price for her modernity within the Hollywood structure. So, too, Lulu who makes her way through Pandora's Box as a modern woman who uses her sexuality to make a place for herself while ignoring the possible consequences of her actions. Does she care about these consequences--no--Lulu lives for the moment and even when it is time to pay the ripper at the end, she is unaware of the price she must pay. Certainly, as a film, it is the zenith of Pabst's work. Filmed during the end of the German Weimar era it begins to show the fraying of the moral liberality that would lead so many Germans to the acceptance of a Hitler Germany. Nevertheless, it a beautiful film where the image is the storyteller. The soft lighting on Lulu's face so captures the uniqueness of Louise Brooks beauty which is so unmarked by lines that it appears as a caricature rather that a living, breathing person. That is what Lulu is and that is perhaps why Miss Brooks was the perfect casting for this project and why she is so imagined as the character herself. For me, the final scene, as the Salvation Army marches off under the archway is the most spectacular. The lighting detail with rays of light extending from a window contrasted by the perfect amount of fog gives me goose flesh.

Louise Brooks is Lulu, a high-end prostitute in 1928 Berlin. She's always dancing around, gay, beautiful, careless -- like Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan except that instead of money she has sex. A couple of her clients are in love with her.The first thing you notice about "Pandora's Box", aside from Louise Brooks' haircut, is the absence of the usual German expressionism, except for the final scenes, in which the cockeyed quality of the staircase and shadows are appropriate. There's an art deco bas relief prominently displayed on the wall of her husband's apartment but that's generic to the times. The second thing is the lighting, which is exceptionally good. It must be, because I noticed it.Another thing you notice is that Berlin society in 1928 was pretty cosmopolitan and tolerant. Brooks is at least allowed some access to high society. There is a stage manager who is both identifiably Jewish and homosexual. Brooks' best friend, a Countess, is unquestionably a lesbian. Blacks appear both at a formal fête and in the jury box during Brooks' trial for manslaughter. (She accidentally shot her jealous husband during a struggle.) And I don't know what a menorah is doing on Brooks' mantelpiece but Jews were pretty well integrated into German society by that time and maybe ethnicity and religion didn't play the part it was to play ten years later.Anyway, Brooks shoots her new husband, is convicted of manslaughter, and she and her lover flee during a chaotic fire alarm. They meet some nasty people. The couple try to reach Paris by train but Brooks is identified by a passenger who tries to blackmail them. The reward is 5,000 marks. How much would that be in Germany in 1928, you ask? Enough to buy a Bratwurst on a roll. All sorts of disasters befall them. Most of their friends and well wishers either get in trouble themselves or turn out to be pretty rotten.In the end they wind up with their sole remaining companion, Carl Goetz, in a freezing garret. The windows are broken and a blizzard blows in. They're reduced to eating bread that is too stale to cut with a knife and must be broken by hand.The practical side of Brooks resurfaces and says, "To hell with this." She parts her hair in the old way, paints her lips, and in out on the street looking for clients -- despite a posted warning that Jack the Ripper is on the loose. (By 1928, he must have been 90 years old but no matter.) Guess the identity of the first man she meets and invites up for a tete-a-tete in the garret. But Pabst and his writers, who have done a good job of giving us multi-dimensional characters so far, do it again, even with Jack the Ripper. He's not the personification of evil. He's a frightened, moneyless guy who -- try as he may -- cannot overcome his compulsion.The movie is a downer. We all want Brooks and her lover, and their friend who manages to get Schnapps even in the most desperate of conditions, to live happy and comfortable lives. It's a downer, but a well-done downer.