Tagged berlinale 2019

For a film set in motion by a death, Dafne bursts with life. The titular heroine (Carolina Raspanti) suddenly loses her mother in the film’s opening minutes – the accident is never fully explained, but...

The recruitment of white Europeans to the cause of ISIS is a topic which keeps coming up in films. Prolific French director André Téchiné is the latest to add to this list with his newest film, Farewell to...

When a film opens with its lead announcing in voiceover that the summer will never end, the beast of cliche rears its deadly horns. Sho Miyake’s decision to have wayward slacker Boku (Tasuku Emoto) declare...

Hormigas – or El despertar de las hormigas (The Awakening of the Ants) – is a quietly emancipatory film from Costa Rican writer-director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss, following the daily existence of her...

Sometimes, a film entrances so entirely that its plot matters little. This is the case with Turkish drama A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler), which follows its three headstrong heroines as each return...

Cold winds sweep the icy Canadian landscape in Denis Côté's newest film. Ghost Town Anthology borrows its title from the name given to abandoned rural small towns: as people – in particular the younger...

Documentaries are meant to show facts objectively, but when the narrative style loses personal accounts in its passivity viewer engagement is tested, if not abandoned entirely. Kameni Govornici (The Stone...

Agnieszka Holland’s account of the man who exposed Stalin’s Ukrainian famine is a straightforward account whose tone occasionally jars with genre touches – these dynamic choices would work better if...

This review was originally published as part of our Berlinale festival coverage on 11/02/2019. Gentrification is the enemy in Bait, Mark Jenkin’s black and white drama set on Cornwall’s fishing coast...

The tale of the spy who got in too deep and let their emotions best them is one as old as the spy thriller genre. While there have been fun twists on that trope, unfortunately The Operative doesn’t bring...

Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva) is 32 and unemployed, her degree in history useless on the Macedonian job market. She's living with her parents again, where she is constantly taunted by her mother for her current...

A film which opens with a closeup on its subject’s privates will not be to everyone’s taste. It is hard to separate the pornography throughout The Blue Flower of Novalis (A rosa azul de Novalis) from its...

There are touches of Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Assassination Nation in the decayed suburbia that defines Jennifer Reeder’s quasi-surrealist exploration of communal trauma. Knives and Skins paints a...

If Wind River were crossed with Love With the Proper Stranger, the result would be something akin to Öndög, Wang Quan’an’s gorgeous, meditative police drama turned romantic comedy based on real events....

Were it not for the closing credits, it would be easy to mistake La Arrancada for fiction instead of fact. Set in modern day Cuba, it follows Jenniffer – an aspiring professional athlete – as an injury...