Latest in Reviews

Perhaps it makes sense that Alex Parkinson's feature debut would simply be a flip of the dimensions of his usual fare. The documentarian has long made a career out of the kind of nature documentary that is more about the people said nature affects than the nature itself. As in his 2024 Living With Leo…

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 75th anniversary edition February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged film that takes stock of German society in the first quarter of the 21st century. It starts 11 days of debuts including for…

Refreshingly unexpected, Dag Johan Haugerud's Dreams (Sex Love) — the first Norwegian film to win the Berlinale’s Golden Bear — breathes new life into the often oversimplified genre of sexual awakening that seems to draw on his twinned career in both cinema and books. This headlong, hyper-nuanced…

Memories can't be cancelled. The Boltanski family never celebrates significant dates, even their own birthdays; according to the narrator who leads us into this whimsical fantasy of post-war Jewish life, they live only for the present moment. In May 1968, the present moment consists of riots in the…

There are shades of Peter Bogdanovich's 1973 Depression-set comedy Paper Moon in Argentinian director Iván Fund's melancholy road movie The Message. Aside from crisp black-and-white cinematography and a backdrop of financial crisis, this is a film about a family of grifters profiteering from the sale…

The Hong Sangsoo universe has always orbited artists of one stripe or another — wandering filmmakers, poets, and other writers, some more erratic than others. A recurring theme is the serenity and emotional salve that art can provide, along with an alternative to more ordinary, well-traveled roads…

There can't possibly be a more timely film in the Berlin Film Festival lineup this year than Kateryna Gornostai's Timestamp, an extraordinary deep-cover documentary about the effects of war in everyday Ukraine that, despite the harsh front-page…

"When is the last time the country was able to solve any of its problems?" ambitious congresswoman Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplan) screams at her father and former POTUS George Mullen (Robert De Niro) in Netflix's just-launched Zero Day. It is a fair question for the six-episode political…

Romanian hell-raiser Radu Jude won the 2021 Golden Bear in Berlin with the anarchic Covid-era call to arms Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, in which a teacher is persecuted by her school's community when a sex video her husband made somehow leaks on the internet. Now, after his even more explosive Do N…

Opening a film with a line of poetry is always a problematic way to start: the words are quickly forgotten once the visuals begin, making the verses far more meaningful were they before the final credits. In the case of Yunan, the words come from the Abbasid poet Al-Mutanabbi and they speak of…

If there is a cinematic equivalent of the theatre of cruelty, it must be the reigning spirit of Austrian cinema. Films by Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz and Jessica Hausner may be very different from each other, but are similarly unflinching as they roam threatening spaces, find the…

Lives are literally on the line in Vivian Qu's genre hybrid Girls on Wire, a surprisingly gritty study of people left behind or living in the margins that fuses gangster realism with social drama and leavens both with a dash of unexpected humor. A key…