Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A lyrical portrait of Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower.
Joris Ivens's Rain is a landmark of avant-garde cinema and the poetic documentary form. Its cinematography is genuinely extraordinary — the way Ivens captures the shifting textures of water on cobblestones, canals, and glass across Amsterdam is visually inventive and deeply beautiful, earning a well-above-average mark. Its novelty is equally exceptional: a purely lyrical, non-narrative city symphony that treats rainfall as its sole subject with an unmistakable singular voice, anticipating decades of experimental filmmaking. The ending gracefully completes the rain-cycle with quiet elegance. As a silent abstract documentary, conventional plot and acting are irrelevant categories — both score low not as failures but because they are structurally absent by design.