HUNGARIAN FILM AWARDED TOP PRIZE AT BERLINALE

Once again, the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, this one headed by director Paul Verhoeven, has surprised by selecting a film for its top Golden Bear award that critics had not considered to be among the top contenders. On Screen Daily‘s grid of reviews of the 18 films selected for the competition, the winning […]

AN AFFAIR TO ENCUMBER?

Five years ago, the affair between actress Kristen Stewart and the then-married Rupert Sanders, who directed her in Snow White and the Huntsman, became tabloid manna, wrecking Sanders’s marriage and Stewart’s much talked-about relationship with her former boyfriend and Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson. Last year, a similar scandal involving movie makers made the front pages […]

FINNISH FILM EMERGES AS FAVORITE TO WIN GOLDEN BEAR

If film critics decided who would win the top award at film festivals, this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival — the Berlinale — would almost certainly go to Finnish director Aki Kauismäki’s comedy Toivon tuolla puolen (The Other Side of Hope). With the other 17 films entered in the competition receiving poor-to-mediocre […]

U.S. FILMS GET SHORT SHRIFT AT BERLINALE

The Berlin Film Festival — the Berlinale — aspires to foster film as art. It does not screen $100-million Hollywood productions. In fact, it hardly screens anything at all from the world’s movie capital. This year it selected only one American film for its Golden Bear competition, director Oren Moverman’s The Dinner, starring Laura Linney, […]

BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL: IN THE SHADOW OF DONALD TRUMP

When the Berlin Film Festival — the Berlinale — opened last Thursday, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who presides over the jury, pledged to keep politics out of the jury room. “We will surely be putting aside our political prejudices when watching the films,” he told reporters covering the festival. The jurors may be doing so […]

“T2 TRAINSPOTTING” CHUGS INTO BERLIN

The box-office success of cult-movie sequels has always been elusive, and arguably none of them has become a cult classic on its own. The producers of T2 Trainspotting are clearly hoping to reverse that record. They brought their movie to Berlin on Friday to screen it out of competition at the Berlin Film Festival (the […]

A QUINTET OF SEMI-HOT REVIEWS FOR “DJANGO”

It is a musical set in the 1940s, and it tells the story of a family’s escape from the Nazis, but it’s no Sound of Music. Rather, Django is an often gripping account of famed jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt’s last days in France in 1943, his callous — often brutal — intimidation by the Nazis […]

THE BERLINALE OPENS WITH ALL THAT JAZZ

La La Land may have been about a young man seeking to stay true to his passion for classical jazz, but the film that opens the Berlin Film Festival — the Berlinale — tonight is about classical jazz itself, or more accurately a classical jazzman, Django Reinhardt. There may have been precious little jazz in […]