The Essentials: The 10 Best Wim Wenders Films

Wim Wenders started out as a painter, and one could argue that helps to explain a long-held fascination with landscapes that’s run through his career (and perhaps best exemplified in the recent “The Salt Of The Earth”). But the director, born in 1945, a key figure in New German Cinema and the holder of three Academy Award nominations (plus a Golden Lion, a Palme d’Or and an honorary Golden Bear from Venice, Cannes and Berlin respectively), has from day one been as interested in the people that fill these landscapes, and in the ways that they move.

Wenders first came to the United States in 1972 with his second feature, the New Directors/New Films premiere of “The Goalkeeper's Fear Of The Penalty” and he never quite looked back. The journey seemed to trigger the restless wanderer in him and the painter-turned-filmmaker soon began a soulful and inquisitive examination of landscapes from America and beyond. This curiosity and peripatetic quest for answers about how human beings...