My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]

2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, […]

On the shuttle from the airport into Berlin I snapped some pictures as we passed Brandenburg Gate, Victory Column and the Television Tower. My hotel was just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, so several times a day, as I made my way to and from Potsdamer Platz, I would walk over the brick-drawn lines in the sidewalk that mark the former location of the Berlin Wall. East into west, west into east—that and a meal with friends at Stadtklause, the pub where Bruno S. would perform with his accordion, satisfied whatever interest I had in playing tourist. Except for […]

At the risk of being canceled, I’ll admit that in the days since I watched The Salt of Tears, I’ve found myself wondering, “Who will make films like this when Philippe Garrel is gone?” (The best answer I’ve heard so far: Louis Garrel.) By “this” I mean a stereotypically oh-so-French comedy with an existential bent. Or a season in the life of a dour-faced, impoverished young artist who beds every beautiful woman he meets and is too young and too myopic to realize he’s a gaping asshole. Or the story of a boy who loved, disappointed and mourns for his […]

Two days into my first trip to Berlin, I haven’t quite got my bearings yet—for the physical landscape of the fest or for the sprawling program, which includes more than 340 films from 71 countries. Along with being a milestone year for the Berlinale (the 70th), this is also the 50th anniversary of Forum, the festival’s program of boundary-pushing work, and the first edition under the co-leadership of Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian. Rissenbeek joined the fest after nearly four decades in the German film industry; Chatrian moved to Berlin from Locarno, where he’d served in […]

In his introduction to “The Spying Thing,” a 20-title selection of espionage films that he curated with Gustavo Beck, long-time IFFR programmer Gerwin Tamsma goes back to the deep well of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and finds in it a timely new metaphor. Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound peeping tom is now a 21st-century government or multinational corporation, collecting data from his neighbors without their knowledge or consent, constrained only by the length of his lens (technology) and by the walls of his apartment (the pesky rule of law that governs democracies and capital). Grace Kelly’s wealthy socialite, then, is the […]

“My life is not what one would term heroic.”  The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]

In The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a true-life outlaw who spent most of his 84 years robbing banks or biding time in prison, always on the lookout for the first opportunity to escape. Set in 1981, the film finds Tucker in his early 70s, living in Texas and pulling off a string of heists throughout the South. He and his partners, played here by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, became known to authorities as the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” and their m.o.–efficient robberies, executed politely and with style–became legendary. “That was when I was a really […]

Valérie Massadian makes her first on-screen appearance in Milla near the film’s midpoint. The writer/director/editor plays a small but crucial role as a housekeeper at a remote seaside hotel. We first see her in a wide shot, pushing a cleaning cart down an empty hallway. When the title character, a pregnant teenager with little education and few prospects, takes a job at the hotel, Massadian’s unnamed housekeeper takes the girl under her wing. They make a fascinating study in contrasts. Massadian’s movements are practiced and efficient, honed through decades of labor. Séverine Jonckeere, who plays Milla, is disinterested and inept, […]

With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]