Run Lola Run

Lola has just twenty minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks or her boyfriend’s failure to pay off his underworld boss will turn very violent. But all is not lost. Lola (Franke Potente) is not only resourceful. She’s also very, very fast… And her daddy’s a bank manager. But can she convince him in time?

Writer-director Tom Tykwer plays out not one but three possible scenarios in this breathless thriller — imagine Speed crossed with Sliding Doors (or Blind Chance, if you prefer Kieslowski). We can’t help thinking Buster Keaton would have loved this movie, it’s relentlessly inventive, kinetic, and always a step ahead of you.

What a difference a quarter of a century makes! The days of our lives now run on digital kinetic energy. Our stories live in multiverses. Our imaginations hum and click to the mutating magic of technological possibility. When we don’t like reality, we reset it. Run Lola Run foresaw all that, incarnating it in a cinematic fable of destiny that felt like a three-part video game that was playing you. [Tykwer] treats filmmaking like drugs: as a mood enhancer to snort right into your mind’s eye. Run Lola Run was the ultimate feature-length music video to get high on, and maybe it still is.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety (2024)

It’s a furiously kinetic display of pyrotechnics from the director Tom Tykwer, who fuses lightning-fast visual tricks, tirelessly shifting styles and the arbitrary possibilities of interactive storytelling…

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Media Partner