Berlin 2023 Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

The 2024 Berlinale kicks off next month on February 15 with “Small Things Like These,” starring Cillian Murphy. But right before then, a winner from last year’s festival hits theaters in NYC.

Since his breakout performance in “1917,” George Mackay has surprised audiences with several challenging roles. Sure, he did “Munich – The Edge Of War,” another historical drama, two years later.

Stateside cinephiles know György Fehér for his collaborations with fellow Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr on his masterpieces “Sátántangó” and “Werckmeister Harmonies.” But the late Fehér was a filmmaker of his own right, although his films prove challenging to see outside his native country. READ MORE: American audiences get a chance to see one of Fehér’s two feature films next month in NYC, when Film Society At Lincoln Center screens a 4k restoration of “Twilight,” Fehér’s 1990 serial killer drama.

In “Kill Boksoon,” a female hitman finds out that killing is simpler than raising a kid. Fresh off its world premieres at the Berlinale last month, South Korean director Byun Sung-hyun‘s new film stars “Secret Sunshine” actress Jeon Do-yeon as an assassin that sees her family and professional lives collide to antic results.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

The films of Jennifer Reeder have an unmistakable vibe. Her acclaimed short films, including “All Small Bodies” and “Crystal Lake,” have been shown on The Criterion Channel, and her feature film “Knives and Skin” has been shown at Berlin and Tribeca.  READ MORE: ‘Inside’ Review: Vasilis Katsoupis’ Heist Thriller With Willem Dafoe Is Formulaic Yet Never Dull [Berlin] Reeder’s films, which have been described as the meeting point between David Lynch and John Hughes, share little in terms of plot, but all bear an unmistakable eeriness, an otherworldliness that could only be Reeder.

In 1991, “Street Fighter” made history by introducing the world’s first playable female character in a fighting game, Chun Li. An expert martial artist and Interpol officer, Chun Li has a notorious sense of justice, with much of her arc dedicated to a tireless search for revenge for the wrongful killing of her father.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

There’s a pretty traditional formula that most music documentaries follow. They’ll often center around a standard birth to mainstream success overview, populated with talking heads and contemporaries to contextualize the music, politics, and social scenes.

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.

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.

Young Belarusian Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is impatient for a better life in Europe. Coming from a country under dictatorship and with very strong Russian ties, the political isolation of which has made it suffocating for the younger generations, he is seduced by the idea of a borderless, communal whole where everybody counts for something.

With an admirable cohesiveness, Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo (“Prayers for the Stolen”) has curated a body of work that often returns to familiar questions, subjects, and even precise images of evolving girlhood and untarnished nature. The filmmaker’s most fixed preoccupation is the spaces women carve for themselves and each other in communities where their safety, needs, and aspirations often suffer the tacitly violent tactics of patriarchal social norms.  Back to her documentary roots, Huezo follows her acclaimed fiction debut, “Prayers for the Stolen” (“Noche de Fuego”), with another multigenerational saga of mothers and daughters in a remote locale.

Michael Cera is at the Berlin International Film Festival for the world premiere this weekend of Dustin Guy Defa‘s “The Adults.” In the film, Cera stars as a man who returns to his hometown as he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters (Hannah Gross and Sophie Lillis) and bridge the gap between his childhood and adult life.

Miss Whit Stillman and his charming, highly literate cinema? Well, not to worry: the filmmaker has his first project since 2016’s “Love & Friendship” lined up. And it’s Stillman’s first foray into TV, too.

Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, with “Seberg” in 2019 and “Spencer” in 2021. Now she has another to add to her upcoming projects, but this one has a meta twist.

American audiences know Korean actress Jeon Do-yeon best for her role in Lee Chang-dong‘s 2007 film “Secret Sunshine.” Now it’s time to catch her Jeon in more bloody and offbeat fare, as she stars in “Kill Boksoon,” an assassin flick set for a world premiere at Berlinale 2023 before it hits Netflix in March. READ MORE: Berlin 2023: New Films From Sean Penn, Jesse Eisenberg & More Announced In the film, Jeon stars as Gil, a single mom who must juggle the demanding career as a professional killer with her role as a mother to a teenage girl.