The only American narrative in Berlinale’s Competition selection this year was Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols’s cryptic homage to utopian sci-fi and early Spielbergian iconography, and something of a return to the more fantastical genre territory seen in his breakout, Take Shelter. In the film, which reportedly had a budget of $18 million and tends to look like it cost ten times that, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are on the lam in Texas following their apparent kidnapping of a young boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a “special child” coveted by the CIA, cultish rural religious organizations, and other […]

With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]

Away from the spotlight of the Berlinale’s (increasingly arbitrary-looking) pick of films competing for the Goldener Bär, the festival’s Forum section sits pretty as a well-established delivery system for reliably bold films that can range anywhere from quirky American character studies to rigorous, avant-garde documentaries. Many Forum artists and filmmakers are unknown quantities in North America, and walking into most of the screenings is as close I get lately to genuine tabula rasa cinema experiences; you really don’t know what you’re going to get here. Lately, the Teutonic-favored American artist/filmmaker James Benning has been taking his feature-length works to the […]