It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.
11.02.2020 - 18:31 / hollywoodreporter.com
A driftily disjointed evocation of urban ennui, Zheng Lu Xinyuan's feature debutThe Cloud in Her Room(Ta fang jian li de yun) combines narrative and experimental techniques to conjure the inner life of its 22-year-old protagonist Muzi (Jin Jing).
It was a surprise winner of the top prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam — the Tiger Award, worth €40,000 ($43,785) — with its triumph seen as an "upset" not least because this was the third year in a row that the event's jury opted for a
.It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.
In the moody French policier Night Shift (Police), three officers are tasked with escorting an illegal immigrant to Charles de Gaulle airport, where he will be forced onto a plane and sent back to his homeland. According to statistics, this is something that happens all too frequently in France, where nearly 24,000 people were deported last year alone.
Banned from filmmaking in Iran but still active, screenwriter and director Mohammad Rasoulof returns to the great moral themes that underlie all his work in There Is No Evil(Sheytan vojud nadarad), a German/Czech/Iranian co-prod competing at the Berlin Film Festival.
Award-winning filmmaker and video artist Tsai Ming-liang continues to move toward cinema that looks more and more like a video installation inDays (Rizi), which recounts the everyday lives of a middle-class man and a poor boy who gives body massages. Their relatively innocent professional encounter in a hotel room stirs unforeseen emotions, which will probably lead nowhere.
Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s numerous documentaries, and handful of fiction features, have often been built around the depiction of his native Cambodia under the deadly reign of the Khmer Rouge, during which the director lost his parents and several other members of his family.
Who today has heard of Jan Mikolasek (1887-1973), once revered as a celebrated faith healer who is said to have helped millions (including the Communist president of Czechoslovakia and Nazi bigwig Martin Bormann) with his herbal remedies? A figure of blinding light and darkest shadow, he springs ambiguously to life in director Agnieszka Holland’s fascinating period drama Charlatan, in a dazzling perf by top Czech actor Ivan Trojan.
Probably the most unusual entry in this year's Berlinale competition, and certainly one of the most hotly anticipated, DAU. Natasha is the first theatrical feature to emerge from Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky's wildly ambitious, mildly notorious multimedia project DAU.
The fertile fantasy of writer-director-composer Sally Potter, memorably on display in her adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s multi-lives tale Orlando,comes disappointingly close to straight family drama in The Roads Not Taken, in which a working daughter spends a difficult day caring for her senile father.
Twin siblings from a German theatrical family get more than their fair share of drama at home in the Berlin competition entryMy Little Sister (Schwesterlein) from Swiss directorial duo Stephanie Chuat and Veronique Reymond. As in their feature debut, the Michel Bouquet-starring French-language dramaMy Little Room—they seem to have a thing for little things —a sterling cast makes up for screenplay weaknesses.
Running a concise 70 minutes,Last and First Men remains the only feature-length film directed by Johann Johannsson (1969-2018), the Icelandic composer who received Academy Award nominations for The Theory of Everything and Sicario. It was first presented at the Manchester International Festival as a symphonic performance with a live BBC orchestra, and made its official film bow as a Berlinale Special.
“If he only repeats himself, how can he be sincere?” wonders a woman about her famous novelist husband whose TV appearances are all starting to sound alike. For anyone familiar with the work of Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo, there’s a fascinating tongue-in-cheek quality to this remark, uttered in his latest work, the Berlin competition titleThe Woman Who Ran (Domangchin yeoja); repetitions with infinitesimal variations are basically Hong’s entire modus operandi.
The dehumanization of life under Communism reaches into the most intimate spheres of the relationship between husband and wife and parents and child in Polish animator Mariusz Wilczynski’s terrifying first animated feature, Kill It and Leave This Town(Zabij to i wyjedz z tego miasta).
Willem Dafoe’s character Clint is not going to be the only one struggling to find meaning in Siberia, the latest rumination on life from agent provocateur Abel Ferrara. Not only does the screenplay, which Ferrara wrote with Christ Zois, seem like a highly personal exploration of the director’s own psyche, but it is peppered with dreamlike/drug-like encounters with pregnant women, naked dwarves, shamans and magicians who pop out of nowhere, are questioned and disappear a few minutes later.
The latest work from scrappy French iconoclasts Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern (I Feel Good,Near Death Experience) is at once a dramedy that dips into yellow-vest sentiment in suburban France; a farce about the digital world that surrounds us and seems to command us more than actually help us; and an all-round, utterly depressing movie about the world we live in today.
The hallowed feminist message that women’s bodies belong to them is exotically dramatized in the German-Mongolian coprodBlack Milk (Schwarze Milch). Set among nomads living on the Mongolian plains, but seen through the eyes of a Westernized local woman, the story of two sisters plays with cultural expectations in a tale of sexuality and the limits of female empowerment when it jostles tradition.
Sometimes, as a critic, you really love the film that the filmmakers were trying to make —even though they failed, perhaps even spectacularly, to actually make it. Brazilian Berlinale competition titleAll the Dead Ones (Todos os mortos)is one such film.
A revisionist Outback Western set in early 20th century Australia, High Ground draws on genre conventions but also transcends them with some unusually thoughtful elements, notably its meticulous and respectful depiction of Aboriginal culture. The result is a gripping, visually spectacular revenge thriller that makes superb use of stunning landscapes while also addressing the lingering scars of colonial-era racism.
A true story with Kafkaesque overtones, Romanian director Radu Jude's latest Berlin world premiere dramatizes a real-life case that took place almost 40 years ago under the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.
A 200-minute conversation, set indoors, conducted mostly in stilted French and concerning late-19th-century views of religion, war and good vs. evil doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for a surefire hit, even in the arthouse arena.
When disconsolate lovers light up a post-coital cigarette amid tousled bedclothes in a French New Wave film, the source of their angsty ennui is often, in some way or other, l’amour.