Berlin
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Berlin 2016: The Commune review
★★☆☆☆ The first person invited to live at the Copenhagen collective of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune is Ole (Lars Ranthe), a gregarious fortysomething with an unpredictable temper. He arrives carrying two plastic bags, one for his clothes, the other filled with leftist literature. A 1970s period drama grappling with the unsustainability of utopian living in…
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Berlin 2016: Maggie’s Plan review
★★☆☆☆ Rebecca Miller’s largely disposable Maggie’s Plan ensnares Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore in an unconventional love triangle. Gerwig plays the eponymous Maggie, a thirtysomething singleton working as a business developer for the arts and design world. Whilst speaking with her old friend Tony (Bill Hader), whilst walking his child, she complains about…
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Berlin 2016: Death in Sarajevo review
★★★★☆ The winner of two Silver Bears in 2013 for An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Bosnian director Danis Tanović returns to the Berlinale competition with his spirited new film Death in Sarajevo. Adapted from the 2014 play Hotel Europa by Bernard-Henri Levy, Tanović incorporates his source material’s monologue delivered by a…
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Berlin 2016: Crosscurrent review
★★★★☆ The Yangtze River has played an important part in Chinese history, bringing life, death and industrial growth to the country. Beijing Film Academy graduate Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent uses the river as its driving force, its current acting like the hands of a clock pushing time forward. Traversing China, from the riches of Shanghai’s financial…
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Berlin 2016: The End review
★★★☆☆ Guillaume Nicloux reunites with Gérard Depardieu – following last year’s Cannes title Valley of Love – for The End, a lean, spiritual voyage into the unknown. Opening with the sound of a dog barking and the ringing of an alarm clock, the first shot of Nicloux’s latest sees Depardieu strewn atop his bed in…
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Berlin 2016: Creepy review
★★★☆☆ Creepy (Kurîpî) marks Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s welcome return to genre filmmaking. Based on the novel by Japanese author Yutaka Maekawa, Kurosawa’s latest does more than enough to warrant its moniker even if it fails to live up to expectations. Distinguished detective and criminal psychologist Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is called in to interview a young…
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Berlin 2016: Being 17 review
★★★★☆ French director André Téchiné teams up with Céline Sciamma to write the screenplay for a tale of two young men struggling with their identities whilst living in the unforgiving landscape of rural France. Being 17, screening in competition in Berlin, introduces Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Tom (Corentin Fila) as being somewhat close to…
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Berlin 2016: Things to Come review
★★★★☆ “Only in movies do women over forty leave their husbands,” remarks Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) whilst discussing her impending divorce with a former student. She’s right in one sense: how often are the lives of women over forty represented in film? Things to Come, Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to last year’s EDM drama Eden, finds itself…
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Berlin 2016: Lily Lane review
★★☆☆☆ Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf, winner of the Silver Bear in 2012 for his bleak and brutally affecting thriller about the persecution faced by Hungary’s Romany community Just the Wind, returns to Berlin with his sixth feature, Lily Lane (Liliom Ösvény). A harrowing journey between two worlds, one haunted by past mistakes, another populated by…
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Berlin 2016: Coma review
★★★☆☆ “Every day is the same,” says one of the three women at the centre of Sara Fattahi’s Coma, an intimate and personal portrait of life in Syria at the beginning of the war. A grandmother, mother and daughter (Fattahi herself) live together in a middle class house in Damascus. Grandmother has retreated into an…