“The Marriage of Maria Braun is the most spectacular product of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career to date, and probably of the entire New German Cinema as well. Mixing soap opera, sexual politics, offbeat comedy, epic romance, current history, social satire, and period piece into an amazingly coherent whole, Fassbinder uses the story of his prodigious heroine, who mobilizes herself upward while waiting for her long-lost soldier husband, as a metaphor for the defeat, rise, growing pains, and ultimate fate of postwar Germany, from the fall of Hitler through the ‘economic miracle' and beyond, to a destiny that combines apocalypse, irony, and farce. Maria Braun herself is one of the richest, most protean, and most fabulous female roles of recent film history, and Hanna Schygulla, rising to the occasion with a remarkably complex performance, has established herself as the most exciting new German star since Marlene Dietrich.” --New Yorker Films