1987
If, in 1987, you had never been to Berlin, Wim Wenders’ melancholy romance Wings of Desire was enough to make you fall in love with it, in all its tattered, muted-silver splendor. Berlin was, at the time, a city still divided by a wall, and there were ragged, muddy fields where, years later, modern office buildings and shopping plazas would spring up. But it was also, in Wenders’ vision, a place where angels roamed. Bruno Ganz, with his great, bruised-boxer face, plays Damiel, an angel who watches people from various perches high above the city, including the golden-tipped Victory Column and the broken-but-mended Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. As an angel, he can hear the thoughts of the humans below, a cacophony of often-half-formed musings that constitute a kind…
