Absolutely brilliant

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This movie is a fantastic drama about a woman life, her fight to choose her fate in a world dominated by men who are dominated by their hormones. So when i hear today actresses whining about feminist movies, i rather laugh because they just show their big ignorance about film history: this one is nearly 90th years old, it's black and white, mute with captions and it tells everything they want! so this topic has existed since cinema is alive and awareness is not their gift because old generations was already on the move: Maybe those feminists should evaluate who are they finally? Here the young women works as a prostitute in a bordel run by a Madam and it seems that everyone was happy. But when they are in streets, under the command of a male pimp, it's bad? One scene happens in the beach: men and women have decent swimsuits and once again, every one has fun. So why the need to go there being nude, or topless, or just with a string or everything else? Decency, good taste are as essential as social code as their arguments! It's about getting a good education and this movie offers a scary reality: Church schools forget their own value of love and compassion and rather embrace a strict discipline that recalls the future Nazi camps! So this movie is just terribly actual, it's really inhabited by a deep and acute humanist feeling and the story is beautifully constructed and chiseled to build bridges between moments, a writing talent that today movies have totally lost! And for sure, Louise Brooks is an exceptional actress: her look is so much iconic and without her voice, she achieves to leave a eternal memory!

"Tagebuch einer Verlorenen" or "Diary of a Lost Girl" is a German movie from 1929 and this is still a time when silent black-and-white films like this one dominated the industry, even if it was not a long way to go anymore until the sound era thrived. The director here is Georg Wilhelm Pabst, one of the most respected movie makers from that era and the title character is played by his muse, lead actress Louise Brooks, once again. The writer is Rudolf Leonhardt and it is probably his most known work. Here he adapted a novel by writer Margarethe Böhme for the big screen, even if it was not the first time this novel was adapted. The version from 10 years earlier, however, is entirely forgotten today compared to Pabst's more recent work from four years before Nazis came into power. My opinion here is that the film stands and falls with how much you can identify and care for the main character. And sadly I must say that I almost did not care for her at all, during the entire film. I am not sure if the reason is the script or Brooks' performance, maybe a mix of both. She is a prime example of an actress who was a huge star during the silent era, but did not manage the transition into sound films. Then again, looking at how I perceived her here, I cannot say this is much of a loss, at least for me. Finally, a word about the film poster: I guess this must have been almost scandalous back then, a naked (implied!) woman inside a book. I doubt this could have been made 10 years later. But it did not have to. I do not recommend the watch.It dragged a lot for me and I do not recommend the watch.

'Diary of a Lost Girl' is a classy silent feature which centres on Thymian (Louise Brooks, fresh from 'Pandora's Box'), first seen as sweet and innocent young thing who takes the wrong turning after becoming pregnant by her father's pharmacy assistant (the repellent Fritz Rasp).Sent to a reformatory for fallen young ladies which is run by a shaven headed thug and a butch matron, she meets Erika (Edith Meinhard), a sometime prostitute, and eventually escapes with her to join a brothel, fall in with a rich count, and find her fortune.Directed with panache by Pabst, this film still has a fresh feel and some beautiful close-up photography of Brooks in particular. The tale of Thymian's ups and downs keeps you interested right to the final few sequences. Wonderfully atmospheric and well acted, this film is a good example of a late silent.

I stumbled on this flick on a late-night Canadian French channel, and became quite enamoured with it - partly due to the story, the way it unfolded, but more so with Louise Brooks. She looks fantastic, her smile (when it actually appears in this somewhat melodramatic film) so captivating. But even the characters around her were fascinating too, and the way they were filmed.It seems to me that with current technology, we can watch a silent movie like this now adjusted to what we understand to be a movement of characters to a pace more like our own, not the slightly quickened pace that we're used to seeing in silent films. I haven't seen the film in its original form, so I can't make an accurate assessment as to whether it unspools a bit more quickly simply due to projectors of the era, or the way it was filmed - the point is this: watching a movie such as this Pabst classic now adjusted to a more realistic pace does seem to make one appreciate them more in a strangely contemporary context. Though we still note the differences in clothing and appearance of the people, they all seem more identifiable somehow. But I swear, I spent a few minutes wondering if I had stumbled onto a contemporary silent-film imitation of some type! Oops! I experienced something similar recently when watching a screening of Murnau's "Sunrise" - the film and its characters somehow transcended their era. Though part of me wonders if that film also had its pacing adjusted technologically, there was a human dimension to it that made me push aside any preconceived notions of silent cinema and just enjoyed it as a tale well told, beautifully filmed, and amazingly acted. This film has the same effect - though I think it was actually I who transcended my era by experiencing it.