A bullet grazes the shin of matriarch Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed) at her beloved son’s wedding. It was a celebratory bullet; shooting guns into the air replaces fireworks in this part of provincial Pakistan. Even though Sohni Ammi just needed stitches, the groom’s family blamed the freak mishap on the ongoing curse of Zeba, the bride (Mamya Shajaffar), whose previous two marriages never…
Before the Berlinale announced its official selection, it presented a remarkable retrospective entitled Lost in the 90s. Spanning wide geographies, with particular emphasis on narratives surrounding the Soviet collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it brought together an eclectic cohort of documentaries and fiction—from Farocki and Godard to an underscreened Belarusian doc Orange Vests and the…
No one moves abroad in Ted Fendt’s Foreign Travel; people walk plenty—mostly around Kreuzberg, Berlin—but the kind of wandering this erudite film is concerned with is chiefly of the mental variety. It is triggered by books, those of Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese, who rose to fame after her death but is yet to find […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Foreign Travel_ is a Rousing Ode to the…
Shortly before the 2025 edition of the Berlinale, incoming festival head Tricia Tuttle was outspoken about filmmakers shunning the event over fears they would be censored out of political pressures. The 2024 edition ended with German politicians outright condemning the team behind the prize-winning No Other Land for “antisemitism”––culminating in a scene straight out of […]
The post Berlinale…
Deep into the second week of another tumultuous (and freezing cold) year at the Berlin Film Festival, Angela Schanelec arrives with a welcome reminder of what summertime in the city feels like: a place where young people meet and chat and go for bike rides; a place where the uniform black and greys of winter […]
The post Berlinale Review: _My Wife Cries_ Is Another Poetic Tapestry From Angela…
In Home Stories, a young woman from the town of Griez in East Germany is selected to compete on a TV talent show—an opportunity that will require her family to do a rare bit of self-reflection. The writer of this conceptually rich idea is Eva Trobish, among the lesser-known directors to emerge from the Berlin […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Home Stories_ Tells an Ambitious If Uneven…
From Biblical tales of the prodigal son to Zach Braff’s Garden State, stories of returning home after an extended absence are ripe territory to explore reconciliation and changed identity. With his rigorous debut feature Trial of Hein, Kai Stänicke distills these ideas to their core essence, creating dramatically rich territory for his ensemble that also […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Trial of…
The ever-increasing accessibility of filmmaking means that anyone with basic technology can shoot and edit a film. However, only those with a story worth telling can hope to reach an audience and build a sustainable career. Before they were even teenagers, a group of boys in northern Nigeria started making their own movies. Thirteen years […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Crocodile_ is a Choppy…
Sooner or later, conversations around the ever-growing oeuvre of Hong Sangsoo all land on the same word: repetition. That’s kind of inevitable: few could ever dream of putting out new stuff at the Korean’s pace, his filmography—now spanning 34 features—expanding at the same speed with which his characters down their soju. Hence the almost forensic […]
The post Berlinale Review: _The Day She…
Drumroll: Amy Adams stares at you. It’s intense—not haunting, but certainly not inviting. The camera pulls away, and it’s her character Laura who’s playing the drums. It’s daytime, there’s unremarkable company around. Music, no dance. Soon, she will leave the facility. Soon, she will return to her Cape Cod home, to her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), to her barely…
Lady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu’s neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver’s gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She’s not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of…
Eleven years ago, Tom Courtenay arrived at the Berlinale with Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, an exquisitely observed study of emotional dilemma in which the British actor played a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened to get the better of him. He returns to the German festival with a performance of similar weight and resonance in […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Queen at Sea_ Sets Tom…
Last week, the jury president of the Berlin Film Festival claimed that this year’s edition would provide an “opposite” to politics. If such a thing exists, it certainly doesn’t look anything like Faraz Shariat’s sophomore feature Prosecution—a narratively propulsive yet finely detailed procedural (all props to screenwriter Claudia Schaefer) that overflows with political statements, ideas,…
Saturday night in Berlin often means standing in a freezing queue, but Armani Beauty had a far warmer plan at the Kino International. To celebrate the 76th Berlinale Film Festival, this 1960s landmark on Karl-Marx-Allee felt properly alive, filled with golden light and a hundred guests for a Valentine’s dinner. The building is famous for its massive glass facade and a hand-painted film poster…
When I think about a quintessential Isabelle Huppert film, I like to defer to a largely forgotten feature that will soon turn ten: Serge Bozon’s 2017 Mrs. Hyde. I say “quintessential” because Huppert has long excelled at playing beleaguered women who wake up to their more devilish personas, and that reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s […]
The post Berlinale Review: An Extraordinary Isabelle…
There’s a melancholy to Tobias Nölle and Loran Bonnardot’s Tristan Forever that is comforting. A lingering, existential question hangs over everything: where does one belong? In the film, a Parisian doctor (Bonnardot himself) decides to permanently move to the South Atlantic Ocean island Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote places in the world. […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Tristan…
For years, the relationship between Hollywood actors and politics has been treated by the entertainment media as a foregone conclusion. Red carpets weren’t just for movie promotion — they were ideological activist battlegrounds. Junkets doubled as policy forums. Award shows became sermon platforms. But something is shifting. And judging by the reaction out of the […]
The post Media Frustration…
It’s the last day of junior high for Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman); the veil of adulthood has never felt as thin as it does on that late-June morning in the car, blasting Michelle Branch’s 2002 pop hit “All You Wanted.” Branch belts “If you want to, I can […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Mouse_ Offers a Tender Companion After Loss first appeared on…
The new film from Anthony Chen takes a minute to find its rhythm. For the first hour or so of its admittedly substantial runtime, I couldn’t help but wonder if an LLM, prompted to make the most normcore script imaginable, would be able to conjure a story of such modest simplicity. Stick with it a […]
The post Berlinale Review: _We Are All Strangers_ Channels Edward Yang to Kitschy But Compelling…
To belong to the diaspora is to inhabit a paradox: a state of in-betweenness, neither fully inside or outside one’s home and adoptive countries. Films trying to map that condition also tend to feel somewhat “suspended,” populated as they are by characters grappling with a double consciousness—“either I’m nobody,” Derek Walcott captured that limbo in […]
The post Berlinale Review: Alain Gomis’…
Moulding cruel or nihilistic characters into darkly attractive protagonists requires a deceptively delicate touch. We’ve grown so used to seeing it done effortlessly that a movie like Rosebush Pruning can perhaps be some useful reminder of how difficult it is to pull off. The latest from Brazilian sensualist Karim Aïnouz (of Futuro Beach and The Invisible […]
The post Berlinale Review: _Rosebush…
Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, a guiding figure in the L.A. Rebellion movement with such films as Bush Mama and Ashes and Embers, is returning with his first work in nearly two decades, one that was three decades in the making. Black Lions – Roman Wolves, spanning around nine hours, is described as a treatise on […]
The post Legendary Director Haile Gerima Returns in Exclusive Trailer for…
Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an ode to a past New York City and the films set there. John Turturro plays Harry, an old-school pickpocket who’s become out of step with the modern world around him. As a fourth-generation New Yorker, Segan’s roots in the city run deep, though we’ll […]
The post “I Don’t Want to Lose the City We Have”: Noah Segan on _The Only Living…
A pair of legends are uniting for a Berlinale 2026 premiere. Isabelle Huppert stars in the first narrative feature in quite some time from German director Ulrike Ottinger (Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando). The Blood Countess, co-written by Ottinger and The Piano Teacher author Elfriede Jelinek, is inspired by the 16th-century Hungarian serial killer […]
The post Isabelle Huppert is _The Blood…