Berlinale 2025: The Verdict
The Berlin International Film Festival’s 75th anniversary had a hard time overlooking the political turbulence in the world.
Berlin 2025
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Starring Rose Byrne on revelatory form, Mary Bronstein’s high-energy dark comedy ‘If I Had Legs I’d Lick You’ takes a deep dive into the nightmarish pressures and surreal horrors of motherhood.
The Settlement
Director Mohamed Rashad’s working-class drama ‘The Settlement’, a visually impressive folk tale portraying a young man’s desperate attempts at social integration, is a milestone for the Egyptian film industry at the Berlinale.
Kontinental ’25
Punky Romanian auteur Radu Jude softens his usual bitingly satirical approach with his latest Berlinale prize-winner ‘Kontinental ’25’, a serious-minded but minor-key social drama about gentrification and bourgeois liberal guilt.
Berlin 2025: The Awards
Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy closer ‘Dreams (Sex, Love)’ grabbed the Golden Bear for its portrait of a 15-year-old girl’s first crush and the intimacy of desire.
The Botanist
A Kazakh boy and a Chinese girl grow up together in China’s vast northeast, in Jing Yi’s dreamlike and meditative first film, ‘The Botanist’.
What Does That Nature Say to You
Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo returns to Berlin competition for the seventh time with ‘What Does That Nature Say to You’, an amusing boyfriend-meets-girlfriend’s-family tale illustrating the artist’s need to reject materialism.
Late Shift
You can’t look away from nurse Floria as she races around an understaffed hospital to check on 25 seriously ill patients in Petra Volpe’s breathless, high-stress salute to the nursing profession.
Dreams (Sex, Love)
Norway won the Golden Bear this year in Berlin with the endearingly awkward ‘Dreams’ (‘Drømmer’), the final installment in Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy about contemporary relationships.
All I Had Was Nothingness
Guillaume Ribot powerfully evokes the Holocaust in an astutely edited collection of outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s 9½ hour documentary ‘Shoah’ (1985), both playing in the Berlin Film Festival at a crucial point in history.
The Message
Ivan Fund’s small, quiet film featuring a young Argentine girl with a special gift is all about atmosphere and nuance.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
The worlds of James Bond and Italian comic books crash head-on in the drolly witty, madcap psychedelia of ‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ from experimental filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
What Marielle Knows
A telepathic schoolgirl unwittingly discovers some disturbing family secrets in German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s sharp-witted satirical comedy ‘What Marielle Knows’.
The Ice Tower
Marion Cotillard channels her inner Bette Davis to maximum effect in “The Ice Tower”, French auteur Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s relentlessly dark, glacially paced and emotionally forbidding adaptation of the Snow Queen fairytale.
The Blue Trail
Engrossing actors and an Amazon river setting lighten the heavy-handed social commentary about how the elderly are scandalously mistreated, in Gabriel Mascaro’s likable but narratively slight future dystopia, ‘The Blue Trail’.
No Beast. So Fierce.
Burhan Qurbani’s madly original revamping of ‘Richard III’ is a riotous sensory experience of uninterrupted energy that pushes Shakespearian evil to the limit, in the story of two Arab gangster families.
Living the Land
Set in 1991, Huo Meng’s sober and respectful ‘Living the Land’ is a bittersweet reflection on Chinese farmers, capturing the shared experiences of multiple generations who are threatened by mechanization and the urban siren song.