
Berlin Film Festival 2014: Day 8
Masculinity takes charge in today’s Berlinale selection, starting with Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land – a Chinese Western of silent, bone-crunching machismo as a…
Read MoreMasculinity takes charge in today’s Berlinale selection, starting with Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land – a Chinese Western of silent, bone-crunching machismo as a…
Read MoreMaybe it’s me. Or maybe it’s the films. But today’s Competition selection makes for depressingly ambiguous viewing. First there’s Argentinian director Celina Murga’s La…
Read MoreAll’s fair in love and war. But in Feo Aladag’s war film Zwischen Welten, it seems like nothing’s really fair. Following an Afghani interpreter…
Read MorePerhaps one of the most enjoyable films so far is Hans Petter Molland’s scandi coproduction In Order Of Disappearance with actors and funding from…
Read MoreIf yesterday was love, then today it’s sin, walking the Via Dolorosa (literally) with Stations Of The Cross and Cavalry as well as mortifying…
Read MoreLove is strange. No, not the Fifties pop song by Mickey and Sylvia, but Ira Sachs’ latest film. Like his previous Keep The Lights…
Read MoreThrough Berlin, Paris, Belfast and New Mexico, today’s Berlinale selection leads us through war, homelessness, redemption and love. Perhaps the best is Yann Demange’s…
Read MoreThe 64th Berlin Film Festival opens with a giddy ride through Europe’s backwaters tonight with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s long anticipated The Grand…
Read More★★★☆☆
A sexy battle of the sexes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s debut feature Don Jon looks at the modern craving for perfection through the prism of pornography.
★★★★☆
Seeing a way to reassert control over her adult son’s life when he runs over and kills a child, an affluent Romanian woman sets out on a campaign of emotional and social manipulation to keep him out of prison, navigating the waters of power, corruption and influence.
★★★☆☆
In 18th century France, when a teenage girl is forced by her parents to become a nun, she rebels to try and regain her freedom.
After yesterday’s Don Jon, the sex continues. And most explicitly with Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is The Warmest Colour – the Palme d’Or winner at…
Read MoreFreedom, obsession and discrimination, it’s all here. And in Poland, Iran, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden and South Africa. First, there’s Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain, his fictional…
Read More★★★★☆
Love in a dark time, Malgorzata Szumowska’s In The Name Of evokes the desolation of a gay man in conflict with God with summertime brilliance.