Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ In competition at Berlin, Edward Berger’s Jack (2014) is a laconic adolescent drama that burns with all the dynamism and intensity of a hyperactive child, yet struggles to maintain its fierce momentum. Despite being only ten, the film’s titular […]
★★★☆☆ Beginning life as a Kickstarter project and now playing in the Forum section of the 64th Berlinale, actress and director Josephine Decker presents her sophomore feature, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2012), starring regular collaborator Joe Swanberg alongside Robert […]
★★★★☆ Wes Anderson ushers in the 64th Berlin Film Festival with his latest intricate offering The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Starring Ralph Fiennes in the lead as concierge extraordinaire M. Gustave, Anderson marries old world opulence with his signature stylistics […]
★★★☆☆ The debut narrative feature from actress and director Josephine Decker, Butter on the Latch (2012) has taken a leisurely journey to this year’s Berlinale, arriving at exactly the same time as her Kickstarter funded Thou Wast Mild and Lovely […]
The Berlin Film Festival has a reputation for exhibiting an eclectic mix of challenging and thought-provoking films that engage with sociopolitical ideas and promote independent cinema throughout the world. The highlights from this year’s programme are suitably varied. From the […]
The 63rd Berlin Film Festival drew to a close last night with its prestigious annual awards ceremony, rewarding the cream of this year’s crop with the International Jury’s highest accolades. Headed up by The Grandmaster director Wong Kar-wai, and featuring […]
★★★☆☆ From visionary director Reha Erdem (Times and Winds, Kosmos) comes Jîn (2013), an environmental parable that uses the bitter Turkish-Kurdish conflict as a universal metaphor for the destructive disposition of humanity upon a frail and delicate natural world. Narratively […]
★★☆☆☆ Sebastian Fritzsch’s End of Time (Endzeit, 2013) is a snapshot of a post-apocalyptic world, fashioned against the same deeply meditative backdrop of 1980s Soviet sci-fi. Yet, despite its melancholic methodology, this languid drama lacks the reflective, sociopolitical punch the […]
★★★★★ Despite the tumultuous Greek economy, the country’s cinema has been going through something of a renaissance of late, with directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari fashioning their own surrealist catacomb of absurdity. Elina Psikou’s The Eternal Return of […]
★★★☆☆ Founded in 2003 by “a couple of guys in a [internet] chatroom,” peer-to-peer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was responsible for co-ordinating half of the world’s bit-torrent traffic by 2009. With an estimated 22-25 million users downloading from the […]
★★☆☆☆ Polymath James Franco and director Travis Mathews take it upon themselves to re-imagine the lost 40-minutes of William Friedkin’s controversial drama Cruising (1980) in new film Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). The absent footage was reputedly cut due to its […]
★★★★☆ French-Canadian director François Delisle’s fourth film, The Meteor (Le météore, 2013), is an avant-garde exploration of isolation that quite rightly appears in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section. Eschewing conventional narrative techniques, the film includes not a single line […]