Berlin
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Berlin 2019: Earth review
★★★★☆ Highlighting the significant impact of mining and large-scale construction on the planet’s ecosystem, the latest film from documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter Earth is a powerful example of politically charged landscape filmmaking. A brief introduction underlines the extent to which mankind is now the most destructive force on the planet. Every year, 60 million tonnes of…
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Berlin 2019: Out Stealing Horses review
★★★☆☆ Hans Petter Moland is a peculiarity: a Norwegian born and based filmmaker of unmistakably American genre sensibilities. His 2014 film In Order of Disappearance was a darkly comic western revenge flick with more than a little of the Coen brothers about it – not least in the character played by Stellen Skarsgård, who roamed the…
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Berlin 2019: Öndög review
★★★★☆ A beguiling drama laced with dry humour and lashings of spiritualism, Wang Quan’an’s Competition entry Öndög possesses a mysterious grandeur that should ensure it doesn’t leave the Berlinale empty-handed. Concerned with the mysteries surrounding life and death, Öndög opens with the discovery of a dead body and ends in coitus, with what initially feels…
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Berlin 2019: Monsters review
★★★☆☆ Following in the footsteps of Adina Pintilie’s controversial Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not, Marius Olteanu’s Monsters is a tragic saga that explores the social taboos surrounding sexual identity and female emancipation in modern-day Romania. It’s been over a decade since Tudor Giurgiu released the lesbian romance Love Sick. Since then, Romanian directors have…
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Berlin 2019: Fourteen review
★★★★☆ Fourteen, the follow-up to former Los Angeles Reader film critic Dan Sallitt’s incest drama The Unspeakable Act, is a subdued drama about a friendship ageing over time. A nuanced portrait of female camaraderie presented in all its messy complexity. Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling) have been best friends since they were 14.…
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Berlin 2019: Our picks of the programme
The 69th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival kicks off this week (7-17 February) with Lone Scherfig’s The Kindness of Strangers, a “modern-day fairytale about hope, forgiveness and love” starring Andrea Riseborough, Bill Nighy, Caleb Landry Jones, Jay Baruchel, Tahar Rahim and Zoe Kazan. Given the announcement in late 2017 that this year’s edition…
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Berlin 2018: Yardie review
★★★☆☆ Hackney-born actor, DJ and now filmmaker Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with Yardie, a Caribbean twist on the well-worn conventions of the British gangster movie, based on the book by Victor Headley. The film follows a Jamaican drug courier called D (Aml Ameen) who leaves the gang violence of Kingston, Jamaica only to…
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Berlin 2018: What Comes Around review
★★★★☆ While Middle Eastern cinema seems to be having a fresh resurgence of late, films that shine a light on ordinary people in these countries remain few and far between. With an industry all but decimated by years of political and religious unrest in the area, many fans of Arab cinema have had to content…
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Berlin 2018: Victory Day review
★★★☆☆ Training his eye on the 2017 memorial service held at Berlin’s Treptower Park, a site of pilgrimage for the Soviet diaspora, Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day is an absorbing study of nationalism and the collective memory of traumatic experiences. After the Second World War ended, and Berlin was divided up into Soviet, American, British and French zones…
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Berlin 2018: Yours in Sisterhood review
★★★☆☆ A series of provocative and often heartbreaking conversations between the past and the present, Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood is a collective portrait of feminism, and a beautiful paean to the lost art of letter writing. Beginning as an insert in New York Magazine, before becoming the first ever mainstream feminist magazine in the US,…