Berlin 2013: Our Top 10 Programme Picks
This week sees the curtain rise on the 63rd incarnation of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival (7-17th February). The festival opens in spectacular...
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
★★★★★ Childhood friends Na-Young (Greta Lee) and Hae-Sung’s (Yoo Teo) young lives are irrevocably changed when Na-Young’s family emigrate from South Korea to Canada, until the pair reconnect twelve years later. Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song.
★★★★☆ American indie director Ira Sachs returns to UK screens with his comic romantic drama Passages, a pointed, revealing study of selfishness and an all-too familiar portrait of emotional indulgence, bolstered by three excellent lead performances.
This week sees the curtain rise on the 63rd incarnation of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival (7-17th February). The festival opens in spectacular...
★★★★☆ Jonathan Levine, writer-director of 50/50 (2011) and The Wackness (2008), turns the zombie movie sub-genre on its head to successful, heartwarming and humorous results...
★★☆☆☆ “You are bad guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy!” That’s Zangief, of Street Fighter fame, counselling Wreck-It Ralph (John...
★★☆☆☆ With Alfred Hitchcock arguably the toast of 2012, celebrated with a year-long season at the BFI and his classic 1958 film Vertigo topping...
★★★★☆ Completing Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s eclectic trilogy in style comes No (2012), a sophisticated, surprisingly humorous exploration of the opposition media campaign that...