Well, i've been so disillusioned with Wenders' work for well over a decade that i've not got round to the few latest ones under discussion. I hated End of Violence and Million Dollar Hotel, but the positive reaction of some French critics to Don't Come Knocking gives me some hope all's not lost forever. I loved (+ still love) some of his 70's and 80's films to the point that his inferior and yes self-important later stuff becomes almost too painful to contemplate. I was in a lovestruck goose-pimpled daze for weeks after seeing Alice in the Cities and Paris Texas.

I think Wings of Desire, and the largely deserved acclaim that received, was where it started to go wrong. His later attempts at philosophising are embarrassingly pretentious, and i think he's missed Robbie Muller. Still, Until the End of the World was not the absolute disaster many thought- David Thomson called it "as awful a film as a good director has made". The initial version i saw was confused, unbalanced, weighed down in the second half, and let down by its editing, but with enough strengths to promise something better that might have been; i'm sure the updated cut is likely to have been an improvement.