"Lola suggested a mellowing in Fassbinder even as he continued to survey the whorish corruption of Germany in the 1950s. It was the midway film between The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss in a trilogy on the Republic's economic miracle....The bulky, muscular Mario Adorf, projecting the massive power of money in the New Germany, dominates many of the early scenes, particularly one set in a men's room where the political text and sexological subtext of the film jockey for position around the urinals. Barbara Sukowa's cabaret entertainer (is) a kind of cerebral, contained half-a-Dietrich Lola Lola, but in a nightclub that makes Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel look like a monastery. Armin Mueller-Stahl plays a middle-aged idealist; in a great performance, his incredibly blue eyes suggest oceans of moral remembrance and regret. Fassbinder must have drawn on some reserve of mystical nostalgia to create in this cuckolded figure a haunting ghost of a lost grace, a lost honor, a lost faith."-Andrew Sarris, Tom Allen, Village Voice Repeated Friday, August 29.