Told in flashback, the film recounts the events leading up to the killing of good-for-nothing Curt Jurgens. Warned by her friends and relatives that Jurgens is a bad job, impulsive Ina Kahr marries him anyway. His ceaseless philandering and abuse wears away at Ina to the point that she contemplates poisoning her husband...

A 1920s circus performer uses every means at his disposal to achieve fame and fortune at the expense of others.

Somewhat reminiscent of 'Mädchen in Uniform' (1931), the story is set in a private girl's school, populated almost exclusively by children from broken homes. Among the few students who can claim family stability is Micheline Presle, but even her happiness is threatened when her lawyer father Andre Luguet inaugurates an affair with stage actress Jacqueline Debulac. With the help of Debulac's daughter Louisa Carletti, Presle is able to break up her father's romance and deliver him into the open arms of her mother Marcelle Chantal.

Dr. Wittich is a passionate speleologist who spends more time on his research than on his fiancée Cornelia. As a result, she turns to the rich industrialist Roy, whom she eventually marries. But her heart actually belongs to the explorer and so she is drawn back to him.

Although she is known as a patron of the arts, a graceful duchess nevertheless refuses her nephew to marry an enterprising actress in this German melodrama starring Kathe Dorsch and silent screen legend Henny Porten. When Philine (Hilde Krahl), the troupe's ingénue, is rejected as proper marital material by the Duchess of Weissenfels (Porten), Karoline Neuber (Dorsch) creates such a furor that she is banished from the country. A performance at the court at St. Petersburg also ends in disaster for the unhappy actress and abandoned by all, Karoline dies a suicide.

A slippery femme fatale, a spy for Germany during the Great War, is sent to Thessaloniki in Greece and becomes involved with a man on the other side, a French military officer.

Antinea, the Queen of Atlantis, rules her secret kingdom hidden beneath the Sahara Desert. One day two lost explorers stumble into her kingdom, and soon realize that they haven't really been saved-- Antinea has a habit of taking men as lovers, then when she's done with them, she kills them and keeps them mummified.

Two young officers, Saint-Avit and Morhange, get lost in the desert and find themselves prisoners of the beautiful Antinéa, queen of the city of Atlantis. Saint-Avit, blinded by his love for her, obeys her when she orders him to kill his comrade... With L’Atlantide, Pabst offers a psychoanalytic reading of Benoit’s novel, with a dominant female figure who enslaves her lovers before destroying them. The film’s fantasy dimension is disturbing, L’Atlantide bathes in a humid nightmare atmosphere, between the desperate search for a missing friend and the apparitions of an underworld lost in the desert. A long, discursive flashback suggests the Parisian origins of Antinéa, born from the marriage between Clémentine, a pretty, light-thighed French Cancan dancer, and an Arab prince seduced during a theatrical performance. But again, it's impossible to know whether these are the ramblings of an old alcoholic or the strange truth.

Inflamed by his readings of chivalric novels, Don Quixote, a knight with a sad face, accompanied by Sancho Panza, a peasant steeped in common sense, decides to set off across the world in search of improbable adventures.

A Russian emigrant sings in a Shanghai nightclub under the assumed name of Kay Murphy. All she dreams of is a peaceful life with her daughter Vera. But this is only a pipe dream as she has been forced by her former lover Ivan to work for a secret criminal organization, "The Black Dragon". Vera, who studies in a Hong Kong boarding-school, knows nothing about her mother's past. When Ivan, who is also Vera's father, resurfaces and blackmails Kay, the young woman is determined to fight back...

Irene Beck, die attraktive Frau eines gut situierten Rechtsanwalts, ist unglücklich; sie leidet unter der Indifferenz ihres Mannes und versucht, ihrer Existenz zu entkommen. Den Fluchtversuch mit einem ihrer Verehrer, einem Kunstmaler, weiß der Ehemann zu vereiteln. Daraufhin stürzt sie sich ins Nachtleben, in den Drogenrausch und in einen weiteren Flirt mit einem Boxer. Sie provoziert die Scheidung, als sie für ihren Mann die in flagranti erwischte Ehebrecherin spielt. Dem Gerichtstermin folgt die Versöhnung, der Entschluß, wieder zu heiraten, und alles kann noch einmal von vorne beginnen. In “Abwege” gibt sich Regisseur Georg Wilhelm Pabst von seiner kühlsten Seite: Die Kamera registriert lediglich, was übrig bleibt, wenn man den Figuren psychologische Motivation und Zielrichtung nimmt. Die Personen des Films posieren voreinander und vor der Kamera, und immer wieder werden die Gesten und Allüren als Teil eines erotisch aufgeladenen Rollenspiels entlarvt. Pabst zeigt teilnahmslos eine Gesellschaft des Scheins, in der die fetischisierten Objekte des Blicks zu barer Münze gemacht werden. Man tauscht und man täuscht. Es ist das Bild einer Gesellschaft, die die Gesetze des Marktes verinnerlicht hat, welches “Abwege” so frappierend modern erscheinen lässt.

German language version of Don Quixote by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, shot simultaneusly with the English and French versions and, like those, starring Feodor Chaliapin Sr., but with a different supporting cast.

I saw this obscure German film in Toronto in 1956, my first exposure to Oskar Werner. A "sleeper" of a movie for me, but so long ago and it seems never to be seen again. The topic has been treated many times but never, I think, to such effect. The last days in the bunker are entirely through the wondering subjective eyes of Werner, as Captain Wuest, a rather unimportant guardsman. Hitler and his henchmen are always kept at a distance, the way Wuest views them from his station, and what stands out in my memory is the finale of a drunken champagne party as though in celebration of something, but in reality as their means to forget the impending doom looming ahead as the Russians can be heard closing in. The problem with films portraying famous or infamous people is that they are almost always unbelievable because we are unwilling to suspend our disbelief, aware that they are actors up there trying to imitate the unknowable. Here, at least for the English speaking audience, the problem does not arise, we understand only through subtitles, and we hear the characters speaking in their own language. And, thank God, it is in black and white. The impact of the film stays with me still, and of course, Werner was a major revelation.

The French-language version of the The Threepenny Opera with a different cast from the German version.

In 1882 a country girl disappears from a small Hungarian village. The inhabitants suggest that she was murdered by the Jews. Everything is done to accuse them before the trial. A study in stubbornness, racism and intolerance and how to fight against it.

At a mine on the shared edge of France and Germany, an underground explosion leads to the entrapment of a group of French miners. In an effort to save the trapped Frenchmen, German miners Wittkopp and Kasper take it upon themselves to traverse a crumbling war tunnel leading down into the mines. Yet, though the workers harbor no political biases against one another, their callous, less tolerant bosses hope to halt this cross-cultural rescue mission.

In the Crimea, the Reds and the Whites aren't done fighting, and Jeanne discovers that the man she loves is a Bolshevik (when he kills her father). Penniless, she returns to Paris where she works for her uncle. Soon after, her lover Andreas is in France to organize the sailors in Toulon. So also is a thief, traitor, and libertine, Khalibiev, who wants to seduce Jeanne. His schemes, Jeanne and Andreas's naivete, and a lost diamond bring the lovers to the brink of tragedy.

A 1943 German drama film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst based on the life of Philippus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus). The film is one of several big nazi era productions with main characters regarded as propaganda-parables to Adolf Hitler (see also Ohm Krüger and Der grosse König).

According to Sadoul in his "Dictionary Of Films": "The life and death of four average soldiers attached to the same company on the French front during the last months of World War I. Karl (Diessl), from Berlin, goes home on leave and finds his wife (Hoessrich) in bed with another man. A Bavarian (Kampers) takes life as it comes, while the lieutenant (Clausen) sticks to his duty. Anex-student (Moebis) falls in love with a French girl (Monnier) but loses her when the company moves on. All of them, sooner or later, meet a terrible end. Best sequences: the men buried alive during a bombardment; the first romantic meeting between the young student and Yvette; Berlin in the midst of food rationing with queues at all the shops; the death of the student at the hands of a wounded soldier in no-man's-land; the tank attack; the lieutenant going mad; the wounded and the dying in the ruined church converted into a field hospital. "Far better than the contemporary All Quiet On The Western Front, Westfront 1918 has little dialogue but gives tremendous dramatic force to natural sounds (Pabst refused to use music). As John C. Moore describes the final sequences: 'Pabst makes one last desperate effort to convey to us not only the horror of war but its futility and its gross stupidity as well.' Released to tremendous international acclaim, it still must be included among the finest war films ever made."