Berlin
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Berlin 2018: An Elephant Sitting Still review
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent individualism. Under the perpetually grey sky of a run-down industrial town in northern China, Hu…
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Berlin 2018: L’Animale review
★★★★☆ It’s not difficult to guess which beast is being referred to in the title of Katharina Mückstein’s coming-of-age drama L’Animale. In rural Austria, Mati (Sophie Stockinger) is only a few weeks away from passing her final exams. But matters of the heart soon take precedence over a graduation diploma in this charming, precise lesson about…
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Berlin 2018: Lemonade review
★★★★☆ The theme of institutional corruption has become recognised as a mainstay of the Romanian New Wave, but Ioana Uricaru’s debut Lemonade, the story of a Romanian woman’s attempt to obtain a United States green card, suggests things aren’t much better in the ‘Land of the Free’. Arriving almost a decade after her contribution to…
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Berlin 2018: The Green Fog review
★★★★☆ A veritable treasure trove for cinephiliacs, The Green Fog sees Guy Maddin and his Forbidden Room team use footage repurposed from movies and television shows shot or set exclusively in San Francisco to create a cinematic echo of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo. Commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival, but born out of…
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Berlin 2018: Watch premiering titles online with Festival Scope
This year, for the very first time the Berlinale is offering a handpicked selection of films for special festival screenings online. This joint project with online digital platform Festival Scope is intended to reach Berlinale fans who are unable to attend the festival in person. The special festival programming offer serves to acknowledge the interest…
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Berlin 2018: Daughter of Mine review
★★★★☆ While it can be frustrating to see female characters defined by their reproductive capabilities and adherence to societal norms, some of cinema’s most complex and memorable women have been mothers. That’s certainly the case in Laura Bispuri’s Daughter of Mine, a deeply felt study of motherhood focused on a young Sardinian girl torn between the…
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Berlin 2018: The Prayer review
★★★☆☆ A film about faith in all its various forms, Cédric Kahn’s The Prayer is a sobering drama about the fragility of the human spirit, interwoven with a dollop of biblical abstinence. Thomas (Anthony Bajon) is a junkie. That’s about as much as we know about him when he arrives at a remote community in…
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Berlin 2018: Stateless review
★★★☆☆ “Only the sun can cross borders without soldiers firing at it.” This quote, from Hénia (El Ghalia Ben Zaouia), the protagonist of Narjiss Nejjar’s eminently political film Stateless, only really resonates after we learn that she is one of the 45,000 families – about 500,000 people – who were ruthlessly expelled in December 1975…
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Berlin 2018: Dovlatov review
★★★☆☆ If a novel is written but there’s no one there to read it does it even exist? What it means to exist in a world without creative freedom is central to Alexey German Jr’s Dovlatov, a film that circles around and threads through the life of Russian-Jewish writer Sergei Dovlatov. Dovlatov once said “There’s…
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Berlin 2018: Damsel review
★★☆☆☆ Following on from the critical admiration he received for his starring turn in The Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Robert Pattinson finds himself in front of another sibling duo’s camera in David and Nathan Zellner’s Damsel, an off-kilter western about misplaced love that whilst not without its pleasures, ultimately struggles to overcome its abundance of…