"No film could make for a better beginning to this anniversary Berlinale - and no other director. Wim Wenders, the Berliner with an address in Los Angeles, the German eternally wrestling with the American Dream (and its factory, Hollywood), the last remaining representative of the German 'Autorenfilm' in international cinema - who else could one have wished to open the festival? No one. What else could one have wished for? A film that works."

Merten Worthmann in "Die Zeit", February 3, 2000.

"That's what Wenders can show wonderfully: this shy choreography of love. It comes again and again in this film like a beautiful tremor and then disappears... One almost wants to protect this film against the growing realization that it also uses its power against itself and disappears. When one first begins to feel this most tender of loves at its heart, one doesn't want to see its great failure."

Jan Schulz-Ojala in "Der Tagesspiegel", February 9, 2000.

"It lasts two hours, offers a few elegant fades of the LA skyline, burning trash cans like in the Peter Stuyvesant commercial and truly great actors like Peter Stormare, Bud Cort and Amanda Plummer who have to fight their way uncomfortably between observation and movement through a blurry story."

Anke Westphal in the "Berliner Zeitung", February 9, 2000.