“A young journalist collecting ‘impressions' of America for an article cruises around taking Polaroids, kicks in a motel-room tv set when John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln is interrupted by advertisements, misses his deadline, sleeps with a woman he meets at Kennedy Airport, and ends up back in Europe with her eight-year-old daughter searching cities on the Rhine for her grandmother's house with the aid of a snapshot and her memory of it ‘with a dark hall and trees in front.' When the police finally take her away, she hands him a hundred-dollar bill, he reads John Ford's obituary on a train along the Rhine, and finally starts writing again. End of movie.
“‘No modern director makes brighter comic capital of the deadening paraphernalia of twentieth-century living.... The film is crammed with typical Wenders touches--fade-outs between inconclusive scenes, cinematic in-jokes, interiors crammed with such mechanized twentieth-century soporifics as juke-boxes and tvs, and its success is in turning a potentially “cute” whimsical little tale into an absorbing, complexly funny parable of the problems of communication' (Nigel Andrews, Financial Times).” --Richard Kwietniowski