THE END OF VIOLENCE, the latest film by internationally renowned director Wim Wenders, is a haunting meditation about the causes and effects and the uses and abuses of violence in life and art. Returning to America, the same landscape he covered so effectively in his Palme d'Or-winning Paris, Texas, Wenders now focuses on Los Angeles, where he once again creates a moody, visually arresting drama built around seemingly unrelated characters whom he gradually links in mysterious and surprising ways. As their separate stories converge and collide, the filmmaker crafts a distinctive and disturbing vision of a world in moral crisis.

The plot device in which an image accidentally caught on camera is gradually manipulated until it reveals a sinister plot is strongly reminiscent of the central premise of Michelangelo Antonioni's ground-breaking classic Blow-Up. Considering that Wenders recently collaborated with the legendary Italian director on the omnibus film Beyond the Clouds, this connection is not surprising and, as in Blow-Up, the characters in THE END OF VIOLENCE realize that they are so pre-occupied with recording or interpreting reality, they have lost the ability to participate in it. Like Antonioni before him, Wenders uses this premise as a potent metaphor for the role of the artist in contemporary society and creates a disturbing and highly pertinent inquiry into whether the artist merely reflects or whether he actually affects the world in which he lives.