Latest in Berlin Film Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Indie stalwart Cassian Elwes is making a move into management via his Elevated banner, kicking off with signing Best Sellers director Lina Roessler, whose debut feature starring Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza screened in the Berlin Film Festival’s Special Gala section this week. It's the first time the film…

UPDATED WRITETHRU: The Berlin Film Festival revealed its 2021 awards in a virtual presentation this afternoon with Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn scooping the top prize Golden Bear. Also among winners are debut filmmaker Dénes Nagy who took the Silver Bear for Best Director with Natural Light. Maria…

The two most mature and emotionally insightful 8-year-old girls you've ever encountered in your life are the subjects of Petite Maman. Magnetically attentive to the serious "things of life," as the French put it, Céline Sciamma's 72-minute study of an intense brief friendship between two girls of extraordinary similar…

Lupin is "a great achievement, not only for us but for all producers around the world," said Gaumont Vice CEO Christophe Riandée, who is also a producer of the hit Netflix series, during a panel at the European Film Market today. The Omar Sy-starrer which has been a worldwide smash on streaming, is produced by Gaumont…

South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo has been a particular favorite at the Berlin Film Festival for quite some time — he won the Best Director prize there last year for The Woman Who Ran — and he's back again this year with another competition entry, Introduction. A study of indecision and uncertainty in the realms of…

Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin co-directed the sports documentary Undefeated in 2011, and their Berlin Film Festival Special Gala, Tina, could have shared the same title. While this is set in the world of music, its emphasis is on the resilience, survival and comeback of its subject, singer Tina Turner. Featuring a…

A teacher comes under fire for a sex tape in Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, the Berlin Film Festival competition entry from Romanian writer-director Radu Jude (Aferim!). We first meet Emi (Katia Pascariu) when she is engaged in graphic sex with her husband, who's filming an amateur video. She's wearing a feline eye…

Tides just aches to be a waterborne Blade Runner crossed with Mad Max, but instead emerges as even more waterlogged than Waterworld. A soupy, post-apocalyptic Europudding that needed more action, greater imagination and a star of some magnitude in the leading role, this tale of an investigation into the possibility of…

Two fine actors volley for advantage across 90 minutes in the tastily insidious little melodrama Next Door (Nebenan). Stepping behind the camera for the first time while also remaining in front of it, Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds, Rush, Captain America: Civil War) shows a sure grip on this mostly two-handed bar…

Director Tony Stone delves into the world of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski in Ted K, premiering in the Panorama strand of the Berlin Film Festival. More of a mood piece than a biopic, it stars an understated Sharlto Copley as the former math professor, who's living off grid in the Montana mountains, fostering a burgeoning…

The Pygmalion myth gets a gender flip in I'm Your Man, the Berlin Film Festival competition entry from Germany's Maria Schrader. Maren Eggert stars as Alma, a single anthropologist who agrees to live with a humanoid robot for three weeks as part of a trial testing period. Thomas (Dan Stevens) has been designed as…

Whether by accident or design, the ultra-low-budget Language Lessons feels like a definitive film for the Covid-19 era, as the two main actors never appear in the same shot together until the very end. Seemingly created on two computers, this exceedingly modest tale of a Spanish-language instructor and pupil who meet…