In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 17, 2015Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015