Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
Kristen Stewart’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the French documentary ‘On the Adamant’, about a floating psychiatric hospital on the Seine.
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.
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.
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.”
Todd Field’s Tár supplement provides compelling extra notes to his masterfully composed film.
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.
Indian director Sreemoyee Singh’s moving documentary transcends its overly relaxed editing and sometimes dispersive focus.
The latest YA fantasy adventure from Japanese anime master Makoto Shinkai is a beautifully written and animated work of the imagination that incorporates elements of ‘Your Name’ and ‘Weathering with You’ and often sails beyond them.
Passages is a steamy, sensitive, and surprisingly funny look at the complications of modern love.
This companion to Bad Living is a repetitive exploration of deceitful mothers and toxic families that offers no new insights.
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.
The feel bad movie of Berlinale is a bleak and punishing look at familial decay that’s both manipulative and dishonest.
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.
Christian Petzold is in top form with this intimate summer drama that quietly builds to an unexpected, heart-wrenching finale.
South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo teases all the humour and melancholy out of his young cast in a comedy of awkward manners, bowing in the Berlin sidebar Encounters.
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.
Payman Maadi gives another outstanding performance in a deeply layered refugee drama that isn’t always the sum of its parts.
Angela Schanelec returns to Berlin with another weird, challenging film destined to thrive only in ultra-art houses and academic spaces based on its austere approach to narrative enjoyment.
French director Philippe Garrel is faithful to his intimist style, working with his three children in a classic tale.
Japanese director Yui Kiyohara’s second feature combines delicate human drama, mesmerising imagery and a reflection on personal and social history.
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.
Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s silly single location thriller is too straight-faced to be any fun.
Lois Patiño’s latest contains a fascinating cinematic experience though the work as a whole will likely receive a more mixed reception.
Director Zhang Lu’s gentle, impressionistic story set in historic old Beijing is a rambling account of complicated family ties and individual loneliness.
La mexicana Lila Avilés dirige con sensibilidad y de forma impecable Tótem, su segunda película, en competencia en Berlín.
Mexican director Lila Avilés shows sensibility and a strong hand in ‘Totem’, her second feature.
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.
Frauke Finsterwalder delivers yet another take on the life of Empress Sisi, but can’t escape the long shadow of the much more spirited ‘Corsage’.
Debuting director Paul B. Preciado’s extravagant manifesto pushes the boundaries of feminine-masculine genres as well as cinematographic ones.
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.
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.
Sydney Sweeney shines in Tina Satter’s captivating, word-for-word account of Reality Winner’s FBI interrogation
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.
Dutch director Sacha Polak and British actress Vicky Knight reunite for an even looser-limbed slice-of-life story after their ‘Dirty God,’ which opened Rotterdam in 2019.
Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
Kristen Stewart’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the French documentary ‘On the Adamant’, about a floating psychiatric hospital on the Seine.
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.
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.
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.”
Todd Field’s Tár supplement provides compelling extra notes to his masterfully composed film.
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.
Indian director Sreemoyee Singh’s moving documentary transcends its overly relaxed editing and sometimes dispersive focus.
The latest YA fantasy adventure from Japanese anime master Makoto Shinkai is a beautifully written and animated work of the imagination that incorporates elements of ‘Your Name’ and ‘Weathering with You’ and often sails beyond them.
Passages is a steamy, sensitive, and surprisingly funny look at the complications of modern love.