Metacritic reviews

Wenders’ ideas, emotions--and his characters--eventually do converge in a stately manner, rewarding the patient with a stunning, enlarging vision of human experience, a melding of the material and spiritual worlds.

Like Mr. Wenders's previous film, last year's "Until the End of the World," this one begins as a swirl of dazzling ambition and at midpoint turns into a mess. Even so, and even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it is one of the more intriguing messes on screen.

Unlike its predecessor, this is not a light, mystical romance, but a somewhat muddled narrative that ends up resembling an offbeat action/adventure movie. It's still a film about issues -- humanity, the soul, time, and Nazism -- but it lacks many of the "art" aspect of Wings, relying more on straightforward storytelling.

Like the original, Wings 2 is endearing, even if it is a spiritual muddle.

To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]

The eccentric performances make this otherwise flawed film work.

It's a mess, but it's Wenders' mess, and that means that there are any number of salvageable parts to the whole.

Faraway...is vaguely deflating, a film that doesn't build to a powerful climax so much as gradually run out of air.

Overlong and ultra-slow, this meditation on the sad state of things will tax the patience of even dedicated Wenders fans.

The movie meanders for two and a half hours, has glaring continuity gaps, and repeatedly confuses self-consciousness with irony, sincerity with significance. There are grace notes here, but Wenders' ambitions seem far, far away.