All Quiet on the Western Front

Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) opened on Netflix in October 2022 and won four Academy Awards in 2023 including Best International Feature Film, Best Cinematography (James Friend), Best Production Design and Best Original Score. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 anti-war novel, the film was the first German-language adaptation of the source material in nearly a century, Lewis Milestone's 1930 Hollywood version had been the canonical screen rendering, with English-speaking actors playing the German soldiers.

1917, the late Western Front. Felix Kammerer (in his first feature role, after a Vienna theatre career) plays Paul Bäumer, a seventeen-year-old who enlists with three classmates after a school assembly speech that frames combat as the highest form of patriotism. The film follows him through the trenches as friends and squad-mates die in succession, the mud-and-rat-infested daily horror normalises, and the war approaches the November 1918 armistice. Daniel Brühl plays the German negotiator Matthias Erzberger in a parallel diplomatic-track plotline that the film weaves into Bäumer's combat experience.

Berger's adaptation made the controversial structural choice to add the Erzberger negotiations and a particular bleak final-day military operation that does not appear in the novel. The decision was widely debated (Remarque purists objected) but produced one of the most emotionally exact closing sequences of any recent war film. James Friend's photography earned its Oscar through a sustained register of mud, fog and frozen distance.