This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
Instead of finding one consistent tone and sticking to it, Serge Bozon allows the wildly hilarious and the grimly serious to uneasily coexist.
Ukraine Is Not a Brothel ultimately exists in a representational space similar to the rad-fem tactics of Daisies or, even, Spring Breakers.
True/False Film Fest 2014: The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, Manakamana, & Concerning Violence
To call Jessica Oreck’s The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga “hypnotic” would be too easy.
Rich Hill is poverty porn, and this isn’t simply because the film examines poverty.
The Notorious Mr. Bout romanticizes rather than humanizes its rather thorny subject matter.
The drama remains appealingly off-kilter for the most part, but Me and You is not without familiar histrionics.
Intruders remains a consistently entertaining and surprising sophomore effort.
Flesh of My Flesh exposes the perilously thin line between the mysteriously elliptical and the merely undercooked.
Jeon Kyu-hwan’s The Weight often suggests a very sick joke that somehow concludes with a shaggy-dog variation of “and you think you got problems?”
Professional uncertainty sparks the lithe narrative of Hong’s latest wry relationship comedy.
Lars von Trier’s pretenses of self-interrogation and cross-examination avail themselves as especially useful when considering his work.
Not since Robert Altman’s Nashville has an American film felt as real as life itself.
It’s not just the prosaic approach the mythically outsized hallmarks of Americana that makes A.J. Edwards’s first directorial effort feel like a Malick movie.
This paean to cinema, and to the kindness of strangers, curdles into miserablism.
The best credit for a film playing at the Berlinale so far goes to The Midnight After’s “Based on the novel by PIZZA.”
Gondry’s squiggling animations—loaded with puns and cutesy-poo jokes—don’t really square with the subject.
A film about history that avoids it entirely. Not out of cowardice or lack of nerve, but because the head-on acknowledgement of Europe’s long 20th century is quite simply too painful.
We Are Mari Pepa captures the energy of aimless adolescence with a loose and ambling story structure.
In Bloom is constructed in part from writer-director Nana Ekvtimishvili’s memories of childhood life in 1990s post-Soviet Georgia.
As a kind of “festival of festivals,” the Viennale is one of the most esteemed fixtures in the world-cinema circuit.