Metacritic reviews

Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.

The events onscreen are semi-autobiographical for Sama and thus a document of the turmoil those his age at the time faced when external expectations and internal hopes clashed. At its center: love. The power it has to bring us together opposite its potential to tear us apart.

Smart, good-looking and buzzing with edginess, Sama's fourth feature has been made with a love and care that's palpable in every frame, allowing us to forgive its occasional, inevitable brushes with cliche.

What’s lovely about the best scenes in This Is Not Berlin is the sense Sama captures of all the possibilities opening up for Carlos.

Sama owes much of the authenticity and visual panache of This Is Not Berlin to his cinematographer Alfredo Altamirano. The DP’s nervy, panoramic compositions heighten the precise production design of various multimedia art pieces and an assortment of impeccably choreographed street protests.

Sama’s film captures the quicksilver sparks of an artistic moment – the point at which a loose bohemian community collectively finds its voice and forces the mainstream to take notice.

The film has style in spades; it would have substance, too, if only it knew when to quit.

Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.

This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.

Similar to the cringeworthy performance art that wraps itself around the core of the film, This Is Not Berlin is emotionally hollow, more than a bit confused, and regrettably forgettable.