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      This Year, the Berlin Film Festival Sparkles

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      After two years of pandemic disruptions, the festival returns in full, with Kristen Stewart as the jury president and gems like Celine Song’s “Past Lives.”In February, when the Berlin International Film Festival takes place, the German capital is reliably what meteorologists term “bloody cold.” The overriding fashion aesthetic is puffer jackets, the puffier the better, accessorized with a scarf and a scowl.That might be one reason that, contrary to other major European festivals in Venice or Cannes, the Berlinale, as it’s also known, has never acquired much of a reputation for glamour: One can’t expect too many stars to hazard shoulder-frostbite in red-carpet gowns, especially as Oscar night looms in a couple of weeks.But this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, feels a little different. Call it the trickle-down effect of appointing Kristen Stewart — whose effortless, dressed-down cool and sulky, up-all-night charisma make her very much the Berlin of American movie stars — as the jury president. Or perhaps it’s the result of Steven Spielberg being in town to receive an honorary lifetime achievement award presented by Bono, or the fashionably late arrival of Cate Blanchett, alongside her German co-star Nina Hoss and the director Todd Field, to toast the German premiere of “Tár.”Most probably it’s the rising tide of an unusually strong of lineup — which has scattered high-profile titles among debuts, documentaries and world-cinema darlings — that has lifted all ships. After an online festival in 2021, and a restricted, in-person 2022 edition, the Berlinale Bear has fully emerged from pandemic hibernation ‌‌this year, set to dazzle its attendees, however bulky their outerwear.Kristen Stewart, the jury president for the film festival, on the Berlinale red carpet.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s a tricky line to walk, including starrier U.S. titles without seeming to be pandering. But not even the snobbiest cinephile could grumble at the selection of the American director Tina Satter’s “Reality,” based on her Off Broadway play “Is This a Room?” and starring a de-glammed, deeply convincing Sydney Sweeney as the whistle-blower Reality Winner. Using dialogue exclusively taken from an F.B.I. transcript, it is a gripping look at the mechanisms of state power brought to bear on an individual; every sniff, every pause and every non sequitur, culled from the original ‌recording, somehow highlight just how unreal reality can be.‌In tension-building, closed-space prowess, that film is matched by Ilker Catak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge,” a thornily unsettling drama of clashing social and generational values set in a German school where a teacher (Leonie Benesch) copes with an outbreak of theft. Then there is Ira Sachs’s excellent, sexy and conflicted “Passages,” starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Such is the strength of the year’s selection that these two excellent films, along with “Reality,” played in the Panorama sidebar, when they could easily have slotted into the competitive sections.Not that the main competition lacks in luster. After premiering at the ‌Sundance ‌Film Festival last month, Celine Song’s shimmeringly soulful debut “Past Lives” provides Berlin with some radiance. Greta Lee plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright living in New York City, like Song herself, who reconnects with her Seoul-based childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) before meeting and marrying an American writer (John Magaro). It sounds like a standard love-triangle setup. In fact, it is anything but, unfurling into a gorgeous, glowing, aching thing that connects with viewers from every conceivable background, so universal are its highly specific observations on love and friendship.Naíma Sentíes in the feature “Tótem,” in which a family gathers to celebrate the birthday of a dying man.LimerenciaIf “Past Lives” doesn’t grab the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honor for a feature film, my pick would be “Tótem,” the second film from the Mexican director Lila Avilés (“The Chambermaid”), a vibrant child’s-eye portrait of an extended family gathering to celebrate the birthday of a dying man. Blithely ignoring the W.C. Fields adage about never working with children or animals, Avilés manages to corral both, often in the very same shot, delivering deceptively naturalistic performances that plunge us into a young girl’s first experience of the terrible and beautiful coexistence of life and death.The flagship German festival always debuts some outstanding homegrown work. “Afire,” from Christian Petzold, has many of the hallmarks of the celebrated director’s recent work: a woozy edge of ever-so-slight surreality; the transformative deployment of a music track, here “In My Mind” by Wallners, an Austrian band; the actress Paula Beer. But it’s also subtly different from Petzold’s recent titles “Undine” and “Transit,” unfolding largely in a chatty, Rohmerian register. Petzold’s films are many things, but rarely are they as funny as this discursive tale of an insecure writer struggling to finish his book — the press corps’ laughter felt ruefully self-directed — during a beachside getaway with a friend, while forest fires threaten nearby.At the opposite end of the accessibility spectrum, there’s the severe German formalist Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” a beautifully composed but extraordinarily opaque riff on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” It’s the definition of not for everybody, but if you’re the kind of masochist who enjoys the Sisyphean challenge of a movie that refuses to give up all its secrets, no matter how much you mentally wrestle with them, it might be for you.The contrast between those two titles highlights the exciting diversity of this year’s thoughtful curation. One can only applaud a competition selection that includes a fun, true-story, rise-and-fall comedy from Canada (Matt Johnson’s “Blackberry”); a stark, despairing Australian colonial-oppression allegory (Rolf de Heer’s inaptly titled “The Survival of Kindness”); and a Spanish trans-themed coming-of-ager (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees”).The competition also featured three pleasantly eccentric Asian titles: Zhang Lu’s “The Shadowless Tower,” a personal favorite; Makoto Shinkai’s wild-ride anime “Suzume”; and Liu Jian’s animated slacker memoir “Art College 1994.” Even the films that did not appeal to me — such as Philippe Garrel’s “The Plough” or Margarethe von Trotta’s “Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey into the Desert” — added something to the overall picture, both representing the old guard of European auteur cinema.Toward the end of a festival I always get a little sentimental — chalk it up to lack of sleep or a surfeit of stories vying for space in my addled brain. But this robust, often sparkling edition of my beloved Berlinale has earned certain indulgences. When I sit in the Berlinale Palast for the last time this weekend, the lovely starburst trailer — my favorite festival ident, a glittering rain of gold briefly coalescing into the outline of a bear — will feel starrier still. More

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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Isabelle Huppert Doesn’t Watch Her Past Films, but She Will Discuss Them

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      The Berlin International Film Festival is honoring the superstar of art house cinema with a lifetime achievement award. She took us through some career highlights.BERLIN — Isabelle Huppert isn’t fond of nostalgia. In her five-decade career, the 68-year-old French actress has appeared in over 120 films, including recurring collaborations with some of the most important filmmakers in postwar European cinema. Her ability to channel brittle vulnerability, intellectual forcefulness and icy hauteur (often simultaneously) in films like Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” have made her one of the few true superstars of international art house film.The Berlin International Film Festival will award her an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement on Tuesday, which Huppert will not accept in person after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to a news release from the festival.The festival will still celebrate her career by showing seven of her films, although Huppert said in a recent phone interview that she had little interest in looking back. She explained that the award was “as much about the present and the future than about the past.” She added that she rarely rewatched her old films: “I don’t have time to see new films. Why should I lose time watching my previous ones?”Huppert’s schedule is almost comically packed. She has one film (“Promises”) currently in French cinemas and three more set for release in the coming months. Another, “About Joan,” is screening at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. She is currently shooting “The Union Lady” with the French director Jean-Paul Salomé, and this year, Huppert is going on tour with two plays as well. She also revealed that she was slated to appear in the next film by François Ozon.Nevertheless, Huppert said she saw the Golden Bear “as a recognition for the directors I’ve worked with.” With that in mind, the actress shared insights about her experiences working on the films being screened at the Berlin retrospective. Here are edited extracts from that conversation.‘The Lacemaker’ (1977)In this slow-paced drama directed by Claude Goretta, Huppert plays Pomme, a shy salon employee who embarks on a romance with a university student.Huppert and Yves Beneyton in “The Lacemaker.”Jupiter FilmsI had done films before, but this was the film that defined me as a young actress, because it was so much about interiority. It was a great role as a career starter — one of these roles that imprints itself on you. She is a young lady who does not speak much, who has a relationship with this intellectual. It was very dramatic and emotional, but it didn’t play with the seduction and physicality that is usually connected to young people.I’ve never played soft characters. They were always very powerful, and very intense. They could be silent, but they were never soft. She expresses herself more with looks and with her eyes and her physical attitude than with words. Cinema is the perfect medium for revealing the unsaid, and “The Lacemaker” is really about this.‘Every Man For Himself’ (1980)In this French New Wave classic by Jean-Luc Godard, Huppert portrays a prostitute navigating her clients’ absurd fantasies.Huppert in “Every Man for Himself.”Saga ProductionsMy character was a very unusual way to show a prostitute: I didn’t really look like what you’d expect, and there was a poetry to it. The movie is about money and bodies, not really about prostitution, and there was very little sexuality shown in front of the camera.Godard has a special way of working: There was no script and there were very few people, sometimes just images or music. We went to a shopping mall and bought our costumes. It went against all principles of organization and preparation. I wasn’t intimidated by Godard. I was never intimidated by anyone, at least no directors. If you are intimidated, things become impossible. I was always confident.I like what Godard once said about me: “It’s visible when she is thinking.” That is probably one of the best compliments I’ve gotten in my life.‘La Cérémonie’ (1995)Huppert plays Jeanne, a postal worker in a small town with a grudge against a wealthy family, in this film by Claude Chabrol.Sandrine Bonnaire and Huppert in “La Cérémonie.”Jeremy NassifI’ve always worked with unsentimental directors who make no attempt to make people better than they are, and this was really Chabrol’s specialty. We were exactly in tune, like in music. He asked me which role I wanted and I said the post office girl. Compared to some of the previous characters I had played, she was very talkative. She kills with words and speaks and speaks and speaks.I don’t think much before I act. I just do it. It’s instinctive and very intuitive and certainly I don’t have thorough discussions with the director beforehand. The relationship between a director and an actress is so powerful and fascinating. Why does a director want to film you? Why is he interested in what you are, your face, your body, your way of moving or talking? It’s unconscious and conscious, it’s an invisible and mute language, but it is a language. It’s what I cherish and love most about cinema.‘The Piano Teacher’ (2001)Directed by Michael Haneke, Huppert plays a Viennese piano teacher who has a boundary-pushing sadomasochistic relationship with a student.Benoît Magimel and Huppert in “The Piano Teacher.”WEGA FilmAgainst all odds, Haneke is so easy to work with. He is very pragmatic and concrete. Even in the most daring scenes, the most incredible scenes, it’s about how to place the frame, it’s technical. Some scenes go quite far, but Haneke is a master of making the audience think they see things that he doesn’t show. His direction, his mise-en-scène is very protective for the actors. As an actress, I never felt exposed.I don’t think when you do a film you go, “Oh my God, I’m going to do a provocative film.” Of course, it’s also a game, to go as far as you want, to show things people have difficulty watching. At the end of the day, it’s a very strange love story, but it’s also an exploration of the mystery of love and of how this woman wants to impose her own view of love.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Hearing the City, Too, at an Outdoor Berlin Film Festival

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      The movie soundtracks are competing with distant techno beats and the subway’s rattle at a coronavirus-proof edition of the annual event.BERLIN — On Thursday night, the mood at the Hasenheide open-air movie theater was buoyant. An audience of about 200 people had assembled for a screening of “The Seed,” a German drama about a construction worker struggling to take care of his daughter in a rural part of the country. Despite the grim subject matter, audience members chatted and drank beer, and a faint smell of pot smoke drifted through the air. More

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      ‘There Is No Evil’ Review: Condemned, One Way or Another

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      “There Is No Evil,” which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival last year, is one of the most kinetic films ever made in secret.Because “There Is No Evil” has landed in international headlines — the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, made the movie covertly and without the approval of Iranian authorities, and a ban on his leaving the country prevented him from accepting the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in person last year — revealing what it’s about seems fair. But the film is constructed to surprise you.The first of four episodes follows a father (Ehsan Mirhosseini) going about daily tasks. He picks up his wife and daughter. They run errands and go out for pizza. He checks his mother’s blood pressure. Then he awakes at 3 a.m. and heads to work. For some reason, he hesitates when a traffic light turns green. He is an executioner, and at his job, a green light tells him to release the gallows floor.All four episodes involve people pressed into carrying out official executions in Iran. While the stories do not carry over, the themes do. In the third segment, Javad (Mohammad Valizadegan), a soldier, has committed a killing to secure a three-day leave, making a decision that Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar), also a soldier, faces in the second episode. The fourth chapter examines how the choice to act or not reverberates for years.If some twists initially seem facile, the stories deepen with reflection on the characters’ motivations at each moment. This is one of the most kinetic films ever made surreptitiously; the long takes, particularly one in which Pouya retrieves a condemned man, then crumples, are breathtaking. And to make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.There Is No EvilNot rated. In Persian and German, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 31 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      A Dirty Winner at a Lonely Berlin Film Festival

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA Dirty Winner at a Lonely Berlin Film FestivalThe Romanian director Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” took the top prize in an online-only edition that lacked the magic of in-person moviegoing.“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” won the Golden Bear, the Berlin International Film Festival’s top award, on Friday.Credit…Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmMarch 5, 2021Updated 1:01 p.m. ETBERLIN — No one wants to read more on the things we miss about going to the movies. Too much has been written about that already — and I can practically hear the pipsqueak sighing of mini-Mr. Stradivarius, stressed out by the demand for his tiny violins. But with the Berlin International Film Festival divided this year into two events — a physical edition to take place in city theaters this summer, and an online press-and-industry portion that unfolded over the past five days — the so-near-yet-so-far contrast between theatrical and home viewing has never been more stark.I’ve never felt more removed from the real Berlinale, as the yearly festival is known, nor sensed more acutely the strange sterility of pandemic-era online movie watching.“Mr. Bachmann and His Class,” directed by Maria Speth, won the festival’s Jury Prize.Credit…Madonnen FilmA jury of directors whose films have won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize, announced the competition prizes without fanfare via a video livestream on Friday. Some were among my favorites from an outstanding lineup: the top awardee, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” by Radu Jude; the Best Screenplay winner, “Introduction,” by Hong Sang-soo; and Maria Speth’s Jury Prize recipient, “Mr. Bachmann and His Class.” Others, I have yet to catch. That is always the way — but this year’s online-only presentation meant few buzzy, last-minute discoveries, found out by word of mouth.Instead the stellar program played at my personal convenience, in my living room, sometimes scarcely 12 inches from the end of my nose, on a laptop screen. The stories were teleported in perfect resolution directly into my brain, with a frictionless purity. At some point, I realized: It’s no longer even the sociability of the theatrical experience that I long for; it’s simply the interference. I miss the dust in the projector beam. I miss the tiny tactile imperfections of being in a public place that remind you there’s a world outside the film and your own echo-box brain. Without them, everything is too clean.“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” is a satire about a schoolteacher whose sex tape is uploaded to the internet.Credit…Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmSo it’s good that some of the best films were, frankly, dirty. Radu Jude’s Golden Bear-winner, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” begins with graphic sex acts, and ends with a woman in a superhero costume shoving an oversize sex toy into a priest’s mouth. So, maybe not one to have on when the kids are home-schooling. In between, however, it’s perhaps the most direct sampler of pandemic-era filmmaking we’ve yet seen, with virus restrictions shaping both the form and the content of a scrupulously untidy satire about a schoolteacher whose sex tape is uploaded to the internet.But its central section is a different beast: a compendium of bite-size segments, most just a few seconds long, into which Jude packs a hundred sometimes blistering, sometimes banal observations about life, sex and Romanian society. It’s almost like an exorcism of all of the ideas that can ferment in a mind left alone too long with its thoughts — so it might feel familiar to anyone who has ever wildly overshared on a Zoom call because it’s their first social interaction in a week.Betsey Brown in “The Scary of Sixty-First,” about two young women who become obsessed with conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.Credit…Stag PicturesBad taste is also the chief attribute of the actor-director Dasha Nekrasova’s hysterically schlocky “The Scary of Sixty-First.” In the film, two young women become obsessed (and possessed) by the sordid story of Jeffrey Epstein, as theorized on numerous conspiracy websites, after they discover he used to own their new apartment. It’s not directly about the pandemic, but the horror of the walls closing in and being Too Much Online are certainly elements many of us can relate to.Infinitely more wholesome, Natalie Morales’s “Language Lessons” is also a response to quarantine filmmaking restrictions. Told entirely via virtual-meeting app calls, it casts Morales as an online Spanish teacher who connects with a student (Mark Duplass) after the sudden death of his partner. It’s not often that films track platonic friendships as though they’re romances, and rarer still that the process happens exclusively in head-and-shoulder close-up. But the movie, while a little, well, “millennial” in its portrayal of the duo’s angsty interactions, is surprisingly easy to watch, despite the constraints of its format — a testament especially to Morales’s amiable screen presence.Mark Duplass, left, and Natalie Morales in “Language Lessons,” a movie told entirely via virutal-meeting app calls.Credit…Jeremy MackieIt would be a reach to claim any acute topical relevance in the quietly stunning Vietnamese title “Taste,” which took a Special Jury Prize in the festival program’s Encounters sidebar. But for those of us who have experienced lockdown as an infinitely repeating cycle of postures in the same few dimly lit interiors, there is a kind of kinship with its uncannily precise and minutely choreographed tableaux. The director Le Bao’s arresting debut is a largely wordless depiction of a Nigerian footballer who lives, cooks and occasionally couples with four Vietnamese women in an eerily stripped-back Saigon tenement.At the end of “Taste” a tiny rodent sticks its quivering nose out of a mouse hole, before retreating back within. Which leads me to those Berlin titles that are the opposite of brash, that beguiled me instead with their smallness — a quality flattered by the intimacy of online home viewing. And feature films don’t come much smaller than “Introduction,” the latest miniature by the South Korean auteur darling Hong Sang-soo. It is a 66-minute black-and-white scrap of a thing that still somehow manages to play as a deep breath of refreshingly cool, oxygenated air.It won’t convert anyone not already attuned to Hong’s low-key, rueful register, but for the initiated, its delicate story of a young couple navigating a fearful entree into the adult world with the well-meaning assistance of their mothers, has all of the familiar strangeness of the director’s best work.Joséphine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz in Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman.”Credit…Lilies FilmsThere’s another small, exquisitely detailed portrayal of a mother-child relationship in “Petite Maman,” the latest film from the director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Céline Sciamma. “Portrait” was something of an art-house blockbuster when it came out last year, but in “Petite Maman,” Sciamma is back in the mode of earlier films like “Tomboy,” delivering a beautifully observed growing-pains drama that is also deeply respectful of the dignity and personhood of very young children. It has a magical central twist, but the film’s real magic is in its somehow healing evocation of the bone-deep loneliness of existence, summed up by a line spoken by its 8-year old star: “Secrets aren’t always things we try to hide. There’s just no one to tell them to.”Great films often feel like a secret you’ve been told, and that’s how it is with Alexandre Koberidze’s “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?,” a gorgeous modern fairy tale about ill-starred love, mysticism, soccer and street dogs, which is also perhaps the most bewitching love letter to a hometown that I’ve ever seen. Throughout, the filmmaker’s own wry baritone narrates, and sometimes contradicts or digresses from, the story, and the effect is almost a flirtation, as he invites you to amble with him through the ancient city of Kutaisi, Georgia, making briefly visible the invisible, supernatural forces that connect us all even though we don’t believe in them anymore.Ani Karseladze in Alexandre Koberidze’s “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?”Credit…Faraz Fesharaki/DFFBFull disclosure: I got to see this one in a movie theater, at a socially distanced press screening before the festival began. (I’ve since watched it online, and its miraculousness was not lessened one iota.) So in addition to the transcendence offered by the scene in which a gang of local kids plays soccer in joyful slow motion while a gloriously cheesy song by the Italian singer Gianna Nannini plays, just this once, I also got the dust in the projector beam. It was like a glimpse of better, dirtier days to come.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Berlin Film Festival Is Delayed. Will Cannes and Venice Follow?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBerlin Film Festival Is Delayed. Will Cannes and Venice Follow?The postponement of the first major international movie event of 2021 raises the specter of another difficult year for the industry.The cast and crew of “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019.Credit…Michele Tantussi/ReutersDec. 18, 2020, 11:54 a.m. ETThe Berlin Film Festival, which was scheduled to start Feb. 11, has been postponed because of the coronavirus, its organizers said on Friday in a news release, making it the first — but probably not the last — major cultural event of 2021 to be affected by the pandemic.With coronavirus cases soaring in Germany, the Berlinale, as the festival is known, will now occur in a digital form for movie industry professionals in March, the festival said.The festival’s competition will take place as part of the March event, and a jury in Berlin will select prize winners, the release added. Berlin’s film fans will get to watch entrants at a separate event in June, involving open-air screenings as well as presentations in movie theaters.“There is a great desire to meet face to face,” Mariette Rissenbeek, the festival’s executive director, said in a statement, but “the current situation does not allow a physical festival in February.” On Sunday, Germany announced a lockdown as coronavirus cases surged, banning most cultural activities until at least Jan. 10.The delay to the first major international movie event of 2021 is likely to cause concern that other festivals might need to be pushed back, even as Europe prepares to roll out a Covid-19 vaccine.The Cannes Film Festival is scheduled to start on May 11, just weeks after the delayed Academy Awards, on April 25. Cannes organizers intend the event to occur as scheduled, Aida Belloulid, the festival’s spokeswoman, said in an email, but are “waiting until the beginning of next year to evaluate the pandemic evolution.”“Then, if we consider May won’t be possible, we will work on new dates, from end of June to end of July,” she added. Whatever date the festival occurs, it will be “a ‘classic’ Cannes,” with a full program and stars on the Croisette, Ms. Belloulid said.Earlier this year, Cannes was postponed at the last minute because of the pandemic. The organizers ended up staging a “special” edition in October, with just a handful of films and little of the festival’s usual glamour. That event received barely any media attention.In contrast to Cannes, the Venice Film Festival has yet to make contingency plans and its organizers intend to go ahead as normal, in September. “Of course we don’t know what the situation will be,” Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, said in a telephone interview, “but we were lucky enough to go ahead with the festival this year without any problems, so next year should be even better.”This year’s Venice Film Festival featured mandatory masks and a distinct lack of blockbusters, but it was still widely seen as a success, given that it was one of the few major international cultural events to actually happen in 2020.There was no reported transmission of the coronavirus during the 11-day event, Mr. Barbera said, which suggested the measures had been a success. Some element of social distancing might still be in place in 2021, he added, but that would depend on the state of the pandemic.Mr. Barbera said any changes to the film festival calendars, following the Berlinale’s move, were unlikely to affect movie release dates. The major studios and distributors will start releasing films only when movie theaters reopen, he said.“I feel the majority of big films will wait until the fall,” he said, “so that could be a huge chance for the few festivals, like us, Toronto, New York.”The Berlin Film Festival said in its news release that it was still in talks with its sponsors, including the German government, about the budget for its new events. It said it had no choice but to delay. “The Berlinale would like to emphasize once again that the health and the well-being of all guests and employees come first in all aspects of the planning,” the news release said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More