Berlin Review ‘Inside’: Willem Dafoe Delivers Tour De Force Performance In An Art Film All About Art – And Survival

Few actors are as committed as Willem Dafoe.

Willem Dafoe is keeping it real in his acting. So real, that when a scene required a slap from costar Emma Stone, he had her practice on him 20 times. More amazing, the slap is off-camera in the film.

Emma Stone is speaking out about her experience working with her co-star Willem Dafoe in their upcoming movie, "And." The two have also previously appeared in "Poor Things."  "There’s this instinct to perform that many actors have — the ‘Look at me, look at me!’ kind of performer," Stone told the New York Times. "He’s the opposite of that.

Willem Dafoe went above and beyond for his upcoming movie, AND, with Emma Stone.

And, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). In a profile interview with Dafoe by The New York Times, it’s revealed that Dafoe asked to be slapped repeatedly for a scene where Stone slaps his character, despite him being off camera in the shot.In the interview, it’s described how Dafoe “insisted that the move would look more genuine if he were actually being slapped”, and that he took the staged hit 20 times.“That’s what you want from actors,” Lanthimos said about Dafoe being on set even when he’s not required to be.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Emma Stone hasn’t acted in a film since 2021’s “Cruella,” but that will soon change thanks to two new collaborations with her “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos. The first is “Poor Things,” a Frankenstein-inspired story in which Stone plays a woman whose brain gets replaced by that of her unborn child, and the second is “And,” plot details for which remain under wraps. In both films, Stone stars opposite Willem Dafoe. But it was only “And” that required Stone to slap Dafoe across the face 20 times. In a new Dafoe profile published by The New York Times, it’s revealed that Dafoe asked to be slapped repeatedly for a scene in which he does not even appear on camera. Stone slaps Dafoe’s character, who is off camera in the shot. But that didn’t stop Dafoe from wanting to be present on set even though he wasn’t required to be there.

Batman fans have clamored for a while now that Willem Dafoe would be a great fit to play The Joker in a movie at some point. And Dafoe has acknowledged that interest, like in his monologue when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” last year.

With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy called Aitor, is feeling his way toward a new identity as a girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.  

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

EXCLUSIVE: Greenwich Entertainment has acquired North American rights to Jennifer Peedom’s visually stunning documentary River, “a profound cinematic and musical reflection on how rivers have shaped both the planet’s elaborate landscapes and all human existence.”

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

Director Vasilis Katsoupis tells the audience exactly what “Inside” is about to do from its very first scene. The disembodied voice of Willem Dafoe narrates a childhood fable fished from the depths of memory.

You didn’t think Willem Dafoe would star in a conventional escape room thriller, did you? Then again, “Inside” is barely an escape room thriller despite it being about an art thief trapped in the location of his latest heist. Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis’s elegant provocation may be closer to the kind of existential mood pieces that generations ago defined so much of European cinema, but it’s been given a modern gloss of design, tension, and star power more in keeping with the gripping tales of solitude that have found a mainstream audience (“Cast Away,” “Life of Pi,” “All Is Lost”).Inevitably, because of its challenging nature, “Inside” and its methodical excavation of one man’s survival instincts in a place not assumed to require endurance –- a luxury penthouse in Manhattan — will likely only appeal to the arthouse crowd.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

From “Rosa Luxemburg” in 1986 to 2012’s “Hannah Arendt,” the films of Margarethe Von Trotta, an icon of the New German cinema, have put strong female protagonists center-stage in renditions of German history. For her latest, Von Trotta paints a portrait of German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, author of essays, radio dramas, and opera libretti.

Christopher Vourlias To set a 100-minute drama entirely inside the confines of a single apartment — and to have just a solitary character performing for the camera — might not seem like the most obvious template for an edge-of-your-seat thriller. But when that character is played by a versatile actor with the range of multi-Oscar-nominated Willem Dafoe, there’s no telling what will emerge. That’s the case with “Inside,” which premieres Feb. 20 in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. Focus Features is releasing the film theatrically in the U.S. on March 17. Dafoe stars as an art thief who enters a collector’s high-tech penthouse hunting for valuable works of art, only to be trapped inside when the security system locks the apartment down. When help fails to arrive, the thief — surrounded by so many of the art works he covets and admires — must use all of his cunning and invention to survive, even as supplies dwindle and his body is pushed toward ever-more-demanding extremes.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.