The Light
German writer-director Tom Tykwer returns to the big screen with ‘The Light’, a stylish and ambitious but ultimately shallow family psychodrama set in contemporary Berlin.
Berlin
Berlin 2023: The Verdict
Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
73rd Berlinale Awards
Kristen Stewart’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the French documentary ‘On the Adamant’, about a floating psychiatric hospital on the Seine.
On the Adamant
French documentarian Nicolas Philibert’s latest feature, competing in Berlin, gives voice to the patients in a psychiatric day care centre floating on the Seine.
The Walls of Bergamo
An outstanding, deeply moving documentary that finally addresses the pandemic not simply as a record of a tragedy but a collective trauma needing to be processed as a community.
Love to Love You, Donna Summer
From early days in Boston to the height of her stardom and sudden crash, this affectionate documentary made with major family involvement doesn’t probe deep enough or contextualize her career, but it reminds us that Donna Summer was a terrific performer whose talents were minimized by the moniker “Queen of Disco.”
The Fundraiser
Todd Field’s Tár supplement provides compelling extra notes to his masterfully composed film.
Art College 1994
Painter-filmmaker Liu Jian’s third animated feature (his second in Berlin competition) lacks the bite to capture the painful realities faced by Chinese art school students as their country opened up to the West and capitalist ideals.
And, Towards Happy Alleys
Indian director Sreemoyee Singh’s moving documentary And, Towards Happy Alleys transcends its overly relaxed editing and sometimes dispersive focus.
Living Bad
This companion to Bad Living is a repetitive exploration of deceitful mothers and toxic families that offers no new insights.
ALLENSWORTH
James Benning’s latest, bowing in the Berlin Forum, offers a powerful comment on racial politics in the U.S. in a static-shot portrait of the first settlement to be founded and governed by African-Americans.
Bad Living
The feel bad movie of Berlinale is a bleak and punishing look at familial decay that’s both manipulative and dishonest.
CineVerdict: 20.000 especies de abejas
La historia de sobre un niño de 8 años que siente una creciente desesperación de ser percibido como masculino es extraordinaria por su sensibilidad y percepción. Será un parámetro en la discusión fílmica sobre género, sexualidad e identidad.
20,000 Species of Bees
Extraordinary for its sensitivity and perception, Estibollz Urresolo Sologuren’s story of an 8-year-old girl’s growing discomfort with being perceived as a boy is a landmark in the filmic discussion of gender, sexuality and identity.
The Plough
French director Philippe Garrel in The Plough is faithful to his intimist style, working with his three children in a classic tale.
Remembering Every Night
Japanese director Yui Kiyohara’s second feature combines delicate human drama, mesmerising imagery and a reflection on personal and social history.
In the Blind Spot
A bold and chilling political thriller of shifting perspectives in which the weight of state-sanctioned terror begins to crush a security agent in eastern Turkey, where trauma and paranoia rip apart the social fabric.
The Shadowless Tower
Zhang Lu’s ‘The Shadowless Tower’ is gentle, impressionistic story set in historic old Beijing is a rambling account of complicated family ties and individual loneliness.
CineVerdict: Tótem
Tòtem, la segunda pelìcula de la mexicana Lila Avilés se estrena en competencia en el Festival de Berlín.
The Burdened
A hard-pressed couple in Yemen’s port city of Aden search for a doctor to perform an abortion in Amr Gamal’s excellent, understated yet hard-hitting portrait of a family and their city in desperation.
Orlando: My Political Biography
In Orlando, My Political Biography director and LGTB+ activist Paul B. Preciado extravagant manifesto pushes the boundaries of feminine-masculine genres as well as cinematographic ones.
Between Revolutions
Vlad Petri’s visually captivating yet structurally slippery found-footage film reflects on the suppression faced by young, idealistic Romanian and Iranian women under self-avowed “revolutionary” regimes.
Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert
Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply perceptive study of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, played by a dazzling Vicky Krieps, portrays the great writer’s struggle to combine freedom and commitment.
Past Lives
A remarkably delicate, moving romance destined to be a major indie hit, boasting superb dialogue, terrific performances and an insightful understanding of how the what-ifs of life so often dangle around the perimeters of our lives.
Kill Boksoon
A slick but hollow Netflix actioner about an aging professional assassin balancing work and motherhood, inspired in parts by “Killing Eve” but without the bite.
All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White
Babatunde Apalowo’s masterful international debut examines a real Nigerian life engaged in a denial of love and its pleasures.
The Cemetery of Cinema
‘The Cemetery of Cinema’ conveys an important point about Guinea’s deplorable relationship with film archives, despite its director’s theatricality.
Superpower
Actor and activist Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman codirect a diary-like travelogue through war-torn Ukraine, highlighted by three brief interviews with Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky.
BlackBerry
The backstory to the creation of the world’s once-most-popular smartphone is much wackier than can be imagined, as evidenced in Matt Johnson’s good-humored rise-and-fall business chronicle.
CINE VERDICT El Eco
La directora Tatiana Huezo regresa a su primer amor cinematográfico con El Eco documental conmovedor y bellamente fotografiado participante en la sección Encuentros en el Festival de Berlín.
The Beast in the Jungle
Had Henry James been alive and well in the 1980s, it’s unlikely you would have ever seen him getting busy on the dance floor. He probably wouldn’t have even set foot in a nightclub. And yet director Patric Chiha has had the rather novel idea to take one of the writer’s classic stories and transpose...
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The Survival of Kindness
Rolf de Heer’s stripped-down story of a black woman who escapes from a cage and walks through a landscape heavy with racism and pandemic fear aligns with much of his intensely humane films, yet it feels weighed down by the uncertainty of its ultimate message.
Iron Butterflies
The downing of Malaysian Airlines’ passenger flight MH17 in 2014 over Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine becomes a prophetic and highly symbolic event portending the current war and its methods in Roman Liubyi’s doc, whose poetry can seem forced but is still capable of shocking.
A Piece of Sky
A beautifully shot, rigidly ice-cold story of love, disease and crushed dreams that will play best with festival crowds and highly selective art houses.
The Quiet Girl
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
Una Femmina – The Code of Silence
A young woman learns her family is linked to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate and other horrors in an authentically harrowing drama shot in Calabria.
Millie Lies Low
Millie foolishly lies low but the film should stand tall given how well it captures the excruciatingly relatable tribulations of a young New Zealand woman who digs herself into a very deep hole while attempting to preserve other peoples’ expectations.
No Simple Way Home
Akuol de Mabior’s first feature-length documentary isn’t quite cohesive, but it offers a partial portrait of a troubled country and one of its female leaders.
Working Class Heroes
The band of rowdy construction workers at the heart of Serbian director Milos Pusic’s dark new dramedy are not your typical Working Class Heroes, and the film’s title is meant to be taken somewhat ironically, or at least with a sizeable grain of salt. They are, however, the victims of a corrupt system that starts...
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Until Tomorrow
The rapidly changing social mores in Iran are highlighted in the dilemma of a single mother and her baby, directed by Ali Asgari with thriller-like tension.
Happer’s Comet
Taylor Taormina’s experimental second feature captivates without telling a traditional story — or any story at all.
The Novelist’s Film
Hong Sang-soo’s 27th feature, and his third in competition in Berlin in as many years, offers his trademark acerbic humor, anchored by veteran Korean actress Lee Hye-young’s caustic turn as an embittered writer.
Leonora Addio
On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily’s great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.
Father’s Day
Through a triptych of stories, Kivu Ruhorahoza offers a critique of masculinity and patriarchy in his most accessible film to date.
The Forger
Maggie Peren’s evocation of young, reckless Jewish forger Cioma Schönhaus during the dark days of Hitler’s Berlin is strong on physical atmosphere but can’t balance his devil-may-care spunk with a sense of what awaits should he be caught
One Year, One Night
Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta’s powerful eyewitness drama ‘One Year, One Night’ chronicles the shattering aftershocks of the 2015 Bataclan theatre attack on one young Parisian couple.
A Little Love Package
An experimental, hybrid film that in its disjointed way expresses nostalgia for nicotine, Kaffeehaus culture and family bonds, set in present-day Vienna.
Dry Ground Burning
A gang of tough queer women controls an illicit oil refinery in this grim neorealist documentary drama, set in Brazil’s largest shanty town.
1341 Frames of Love and War
Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am’s life and work is powerfully, sometimes painfully recounted through still images and offscreen voiceover in Ran Tal’s multilayered documentary that questions the psychological effects of shooting atrocities.
Return to Dust
Li Ruijun’s deeply felt portrait of mature love between two socially unvalued Chinese peasants is beautiful to look at, but labors to catch the emotional wave it promises.
The Passengers of the Night
French director Mikhaël Hers falls short of his Rohmer-esque ambitions in ‘Passengers of the Night’, a sprawling family drama set in 1980s Paris.
My Small Land
Japanese filmmaker Emma Kawawada takes the humanist cue from her mentor, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and adapt it to her warm and engaging directorial debut, in which a Kurdish-born Japanese teenager struggles to keep her life and dreams afloat when the authorities threaten to deport her family from the country.
A E I O U — A Quick Alphabet of Love
A joyful, transgressively liberating ode to cinema and the way an unexpected passion can make societal barriers disappear, Nicolette Krebitz’s intelligently written and expertly crafted love story about an older woman and a much younger man is a delight.
KUDOS TO: MOHAMED HEFZY
When it was announced that Egyptian producer and screenwriter Mohamed Hefzy would be on the World Cinema Dramatic Competition jury at Sundance this year, following his recent jury stints at Venice and BFI London, we saw it as not just a recognition for the producer, but as a sign that the importance of Arab cinema...
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Myanmar Diaries
An anonymous collective of Burmese filmmakers delivers a powerful statement of defiance against the murderous military dictatorship that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.
Dreaming Walls
There’s not much new in this lovingly made impressionistic documentary about New York’s very well-chronicled Chelsea Hotel, but the place and its tenacious residents still have a pull.
Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush
An indomitable Turkish woman living in Germany battles to free her son from imprisonment in Guantanamo in Andreas Dresen’s no-surprise recreation of a true story.
Both Sides of the Blade
French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in ‘Both Sides of the Blade’, a conventional but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack form a winning pair of performers in Sophie Hyde’s watchable story of sex positivity across age categories.
Nana: Before, Now & Then
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
Coma
French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s work has often toed the line between narrative and the avant-garde, with plots that are chopped and screwed into a melee of images, sounds and music — the latter often beautifully composed by Bonello himself. His movies are less about stories than they are fleeting aesthetic experiences: what most of us...
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Convenience Store
A punishing film of unrelenting cruelty which seeks to draw attention to the plight of enslaved Central Asian workers in Russia, but its overstuffed plot and taunting hopelessness is more alienating than galvanizing.
This Much I Know To Be True
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
Into My Name
Elliot Page’s attachment as executive producer will spur interest, but “Into My Name” stands on its own as a sensitive, humanist portrait of four young F to M trans Italians coming into their own.
Flux Gourmet
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
Dark Glasses
Less gore and more psychology should broaden the audience for Dario Argento’s kinky but strangely staid horror film about a slasher out to kill a blind prostitute.
Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?
Egyptian queer experimental cinema comes into its own with this playful, visually inventive sex-positive short feature that repurposes “One Thousand and One Nights” using gay Arab cultural signifiers.
Incredible but True
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
We, Students!
Rafiki Fariala’s history-making film shifts to a more intimate story towards its end, which one wishes he had pursued from the start.
Peter Von Kant
French director François Ozon pays artfully twisted homage to Fassbinder’s torrid queer classic ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant’ in this stylish glam-rock remake.
Kudos to Ulrich and Erika Gregor
The 72-year history of the Berlin Film Festival has been shaped by many people, but arguably none have left a greater mark than Erika and Ulrich Gregor, the founders of the Arsenal Cinema and creators the festival’s influential Forum section. And it’s not just a matter of the sheer amount of time the couple was...
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The Dream and the Radio
Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk pay tribute to Stan Brakhage, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa in an intriguing experimental exercise looking at the history of cinema and old-school political activism.
