This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
Kirsten Sheridan’s Dollhouse feels unstable but also achingly real.
There’s a thudding pulse that seems to reverberate out of the city itself.
Zobel aims to implicate us all in what he forces us to confront.
The core framework of The Do-Deca-Pentathlon feels a bit too basic and familiar for Mark and Jay Duplass.
Keyhole never quite indulges in full-on abstraction.
The Comedy is continuously in danger of feeling either too cute or too abrasive.
Tchoupitoulas could also be described as a work of nonjudgmental portraiture, but that wouldn’t come close to encapsulating its beauties.
Less angry and strident than recent issues documentaries like Food Inc., Eating Alabama operates on a personal ground level.
The Cabin in the Woods ultimately does exactly what it condemns, prizing schematic formula and ingenuity over real terror.
Sleepwalk is a story of inter-textual synchronicity, of ideas and gestures bleeding from one medium to another.
Atlan’s black-and-white Mortem has been billed as a “metaphysical thriller” inspired by David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman.
Transfer satisfies, at a minimum, with a surfeit of intriguing ideas and delirious plot complications.
Even at its messiest and most meandering, the film exudes a refreshing warmth toward its characters.
After a few initial disappointments in Berlinale’s main competition, things gradually began to pick up.
While his work with children remains impeccable, Kore-eda Hirokazu proves considerably less successful in dealing with the adult characters in his latest film.
Michael Glawogger’s Whores’ Glory offers a revealing, troubling look into a trio of environments of prostitution.
Berlinale, the most smoothly run of all major festivals, is a pleasure for the Anglophone.
The 40-odd festival titles I caught at Rotterdam this year offered consistent amazement.
Hell on Earth? Not quite.
Walter Hugo Khouri is an undervalued master.