Berlinale 2023 Review: El Castillo (2023) (The Castle)
★★★☆☆
Berlinale presents San Sebastián award winner El Castillo (The Castle) a strangely moving mixture of documentary and fiction by Martin Benchimol.
Berlinale
Peter von Kant (2022)
★★★☆☆
Peter von Kant is a gender-flipped re-imagining by François Ozon of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 classic power play of sexual obsession The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Berlinale Winners 2022
★★★★☆
Berlinale Winners 2022
Memory Box (2021)
★★★★☆
A Memory Box triggers delayed reconciliation between past and present in Joana Hadjithomas’s deeply personal, emotional intergenerational drama.
A Cop Movie (2021) (Una Película de Policías)
★★★★☆
Award-winning Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacio with A Cop Movie has made a brilliant, intriguing and innovative – and startlingly genre-unclassifiable – film, starring Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones.
BFI LFF 2021: ROUNDUP
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2021: Roundup
BFI LFF 2021: Azor (2021)
★★★★☆
Azor, Andra Fontana’s subtle, sophisticated feature debut, unsettles with an increasing sense of dread as a Swiss banker is enveloped in the Argentinian junta’s heart of darkness.
BFI LFF 2021: Memory Box
★★★★☆
A Memory Box triggers delayed reconciliation between past and present in Joana Hadjithomas’s deeply personal, emotional intergenerational drama.
BFI LFF 2020: Eyimofe (This is My Desire) (2020)
★★★★☆
Eyimofe is the moving, contemporary, Lagos-set debut feature by twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri.
Berlinale 2020: The Winners
★★★★☆
The Berlin Film Festival awards presented on 1 March 2020…
So Long, My Son (2019)
★★★★☆
So Long, My Son (Di jiu tian chang) by Wang Xiaoshuai is a deeply moving, generations-spanning drama exploring the long-term effect of China’s one-child policy on a small circle of friends.
Monos (2019)
★★★★★
Monos by Alejandro Landes, set among volatile, trainee teenage guerillas in Latin America, is quite simply of this year’s best and most disturbing films.
By the Grace of God (2019)
★★★★☆
Based on recent real-life events, in By the Grace of God François Ozon empathetically opens up a French scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church going back over 20 years.
BFI LFF 2019: 8-13 October
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2019: 8-13 October. The Whistlers, Deerskin, Algo-Rhythm and So Long, My Son.