Tag: berlinfilmfestival
NOBODY'S HERO Review: Unexpectedly Topical French Farce
French director Alain Guiraudie's unpredictable comedy combines a bedroom farce with a terrorist attack.
Berlinale 2016 Review: WE ARE NEVER ALONE Delivers A Powerful, Harrowing And Way Too Vivid Parable
Petr Václav, the Czech filmmaker living and working in France, returns to the theme of racial discrimination already addressed in his feature debut Marian (1996). Prejudice based on race persists as a hot topic in the Czech Republic, attracting ever...
Berlinale 2016 Review: GENIUS Proves That Not All Talent Translates
Elvis Costello famously quipped, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", and while I hardly agree with the overall sentiment -- if I did, I wouldn't exactly be doing this -- his point is well taken. Success in...
Berlinale 2016 Review: First, SOY NERO Dazzles, Then It Disappoints
How important is a single shot? Not a sequence, nor an edit. Can a solitary, unbroken shot make or break a film? Can it upend one's total reception of a work? Because there is a shot at the very beginning...
Berlinale 2016 Review: BADEN BADEN, A Promising Yet Frustrating Debut
An amiably aimless jaunt set in the French city of Strasbourg (and not the German spa town of its title) Baden Baden has much in common with its main character, an amiably aimless misfit just coasting through life. Both main...
Berlinale 2016 Review: THINGS TO COME Artfully Tells A Tale As Old As Time
Everything new is old again (or is it the other way around?) in Mia Hansen-Love's elegant and understated take on the cycles of life, Things To Come. With an astute eye and a sensitive-if-hardly-mushy script, Hansen-Love lets us know...
Berlinale 2014 Review: HISTORY OF FEAR Is Brooding, Atmospheric, And Glacially Slow
History of Fear is set in an unnamed Argentine suburb, an idyllic community where rich families' vast estates are bordered on every side by barbwire fences and imposing gates. The presumed effect is to keep the people inside safe, but...
Berlinale 2014 Review: THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY Proves Middlebrow Is Timeless
They've been making movies like The Two Faces of January since before they made movies. A graying man, his blonde haired bride, and the younger cad who comes between them. Crime and chase amidst sun dappled vistas. Cops and con...
Berlinale 2014 Review: Grand and Hypnotic, A DREAM OF IRON Won't Soon Be Forgotten
Early on in A Dream of Iron, a new documentary premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival this year, director Kelvin Kyung Kun Park shows us images a whales moving through the vast blue expanse of the ocean - enormous...
Berlinale 2014 Review: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, An Ode To Joy
Regrettably, Beethoven got there first. In another world, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a celebration of wit and style and class, an example of a technical master working at the top of his craft, a work as warm and genuinely funny...
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Berlinale 2014 Review: Subdued Yet Powerful, NIGHT FLIGHT Soars
LeeSong Hee-il returns to Berlin a year after White Night (2012) with his fourth feature Night Flight. While his last film was a subdued but powerful work about lingering memories of homophobia in modern Seoul, his new film is his...
Berlinale 2013 Wrap-Up: Hits, Misses and In-Betweens
I think that it's time for the Berlin Film Festival to cut its festival program down. Not to say I didn't see some great films -- I did, including a few that would have remained off the radar otherwise --...
Berlinale 2013 Review: The Fascinating Mysteries Of I'M NOT DEAD
The opening credits to I'm Not Dead play over an intense string number that immediately calls to mind Hitchcock thrillers of yesteryear. While in many ways Mehdi Ben Attia's film is far more intimate and ambiguous (at least on the...
Wong Kar Wai's THE GRANDMASTER Is Coming To The U.S.A. and Canada
On the eve of its European premiere as the opening film of Berlinale, Wong Kar Wai's much-anticipated retelling of the Ip Man saga, The Grandmaster, has been picked up for distribution in the U.S. and English-Speaking Canada by The Weinstein...
Berlin Film Festival 2013: ScreenAnarchy Previews the Panorama And Forum Programs
If there was one thing that our Berlin Competition Preview lacked, it was smiles. I mean, just get a load of all the glum, tortured faces from stills! The only character who's not miserable is the girl in the Hong...
Berlin Film Festival 2013: ScreenAnarchy Previews the Competition
Moving right along from Sundance and Rotterdam, here comes Berlinale! Starting Thursday, we'll be bringing you updates from the festival, but before the cold-weather movie marathon begins, lets take a look at some films that stood out in the lineup....
Euro Beat: Berlinale Finally Finishes Unveiling Massive Lineup
Most festivals send out one or two line-up announcements at most -- but not Berlinale. Perhaps they are worried that their insanely huge lineup would be too overwhelming in one press release, or perhaps they just get very excited every...
Full Berlinale Panorama Fiction Program Includes Double the James Franco
The Berlin Film Festival has now announced its entire fiction slate for the always fascinating Panorama program. Yes, the first thing that sticks out is that James Franco has two films playing, including his riff on the cut footage from...
