Wim Wenders's sentimental fantasy for eggheads, about an invisible angel patrolling the streets of Berlin, where he has evidently been on duty since the dawn of time, witnessing and remembering the deeds of humans, and providing fleeting and ineffectual comfort for them with the occasional arm around the shoulder. Despite all he has seen (and particularly because of a pretty blond trapezist he is seeing currently), he longs to become human, and then does so with very little fuss and bother. The function of our earthbound angels, while it conforms rather nicely with the onlooking egghead's feelings of Weltschmerz and powerlessness, hardly seems a full-time job, or anyway a full-length movie, and it makes the main angel's desire and decision to turn human -- i.e., to act out an escapist fantasy for the burnt-out heavy thinker in the audience -- all too easy. The aimlessness, even stagnancy, of these angels is of course perfectly consistent with the heroes of other films of this director. But the aimlessness of an itinerant movie-theater repairman (Kings of the Road) or of the members of a stalled film production on foreign location (The State of Things) is one sort of thing: it implies a vision of the world around us. Aimlessness among angels is another sort of thing: a vision of some other world. And to go to the trouble of inventing a supernatural species and then invest them with no more power or purpose than this -- a celestial Clark Kent without the underwear -- seems, to put it bluntly, nothing less than unimaginative. Wenders, to put it another way, just as bluntly, is not the ideal man to be cast in the role of fantasist. Shot in black-and-white (for the vision of angels) and color (for that of a human); with Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, Solveig Dommartin, and Peter Falk. 1987. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd