Six years ago Wim Wenders' overcoated angels circled a divided Berlin, hankering after a little of the Technicolor of which they were so starved, eavesdropping on the lives of the city's residents. Now the Wall is down, and Bruno Ganz's Damiel who fell in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and became a mortal man, is quite unreasonably happy with wife and daughter in a pizza parlour. His friend Cassiel (Otto Sander) still bears witness to the intimate thoughts of the newly reunited city, but to him also come notions of mortality. Not that this is a sequel to the original Wings of Desire. As Wenders tells it, he felt a need to return to Berlin, to the angels, but, he insists, not in a sequel. This is a road movie that never quite leaves the city.

Certainly for the first hour or so we are not best disposed to believing the director. Sander and his confidant Raphaela (Nastassja Kinski) cruise this monochrome metropolis, following, learning, comforting; Wenders' camera flying this way and that in those exhilarating swoops and dives we saw before. And yet suddenly Cassiel is mortal, a flesh and blood man, and he falls in with the enigmatic Becker, American gun-runner and porn merchant (all they want in the newly liberated East, he tells Sander). Thus is the ex-angel catapulted into a convoluted, comic thriller that flashes him briefly back to Germany's Nazi past and - given the look Wenders selects, and the presence of Ganz - tends also to recall the same director's 1977, The American Friend.

Faraway, So Close!, while not quite garnering the (unwarranted) critical brickbats slung at the earlier Until The End of the World, has still been roundly slammed from most quarters. Reportedly heavily recut since taking a Special Jury Prize at Cannes 1993, it is fair to say that here is a film still not without its share of problems: certainly over-long, and without doubt saddled with a confused, sentimentalised final half-hour, veering from Topkapi-like caper as a circus troupe raid Becker's underground store, to an attempt at an elegiac magic realist finale aboard a canal boat. Wenders seems uneasy where to cut, and the result is jaw-dropping, if not always for the right reasons.

There is however certainly an unequivocal genius to some of casting - Americans Horst Bucholz (The Magnificent Seven) as Becker, and Willem Dafoe as Emit Flesit (geddit?), a seemingly black deity who can drift between dimensions; and studied with cameos from the likes of Lou Reed, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Peter Falk - returning to again play himself as a fallen angel - and most curiously, Rudiger Vogler's private detective Philip Winter, in an intriguing (if chronologically challenged?) cross-pollination from Until The End of the World. As befits a Wenders film, a soundtrack featuring such luminaries as Nick Cave, U2, Johnny Cash and Reed himself lends suitable weight.

What is beyond question is that Wenders, whatever mistakes he might make along the way, has fashioned a bold and engaging epic, visually flawless (the opening shots spiralling about Sander atop Berlin's Victory Monument are worth the admission price alone), and spiritually provocative. As he adopts more and more Americanised ideas of plot - albeit wedded to his own very European intellectualism - Wenders seems to garner more and more criticism. (Some are even now using these films as stick enough to beat his entire back-catalogue; as though he were guilty of fooling us all along). For all its shortcomings, however, Faraway, So Close! is still a film very much to see.