2019 BERLINALE WINNERS

Golden Bear for Best Film Synonymes by Nadav Lapid Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize By The Grace Of God by Francois Ozon Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize System Crasher by Nora Fingscheidt Silver Bear for Best Director Angela Schanelec, I Was At Home, But Silver Bear for Best Actress Yong Mei, So Long, My Son Silver Bear for Best Actor […]

BERLINALE: WE HAVE A WINNER!

Aligning themselves with most critics, the jurors at the Berlin Film Festival have awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, to Israeli Director Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms (Synonymes). The film follows a disaffected young Israeli man, a former IDF soldier (Tom Mercier), who becomes incensed by his country’s treatment of Palestinians and moves to Paris […]

CRITICS FIND 2019 BERLINALE FILMS UNEXCITING

The collection of films selected by Dieter Kosslick and his associates as he presides over his 18th and final year as director of the Berlin International Film Festival — the Berlinale — is taking a beating from critics. The British trade journal Screen Daily, which publishes a daily “grid” indicating how a selection of eight […]

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE AND HE KNOWS WHAT IT IS

Although director Agnieszka Holland scatters clips of George Orwell (played by Joseph Mawle) typing his manuscript for Animal House throughout Mr. Jones, she could just as tellingly (apart from commercial considerations) have inserted the rantings of any contemporary would-be autocrat.  Her based-on-true-facts film takes place in the early 1930s. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton), […]

ISN’T IT GOOD, NORWEGIAN WOOD? CRITICS REPLY

In her review of Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), which premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival, the Hollywood Reporter’s Deborah Young described the film as “a hugely accomplished meditation on life, guilt and responsibility” and predicted that it would “have no trouble finding its preordained audiences and […]

FRENCH FILM SPOTLIGHTS SEX ABUSE BY LYON PRIEST

Veteran French writer-director François Ozon, who generally makes women the hub of his screenplays, has now turned his camera instead on a group of men who courageously take on the Catholic Archdiocese of Lyon, France for its alleged actions to cover up abuse by a pedophile priest. Gràce á Dieu (By the Grace of God), […]

69th BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL OPENS

After the traditional red carpet procession of dignitaries and the principals of the opening-night film, The Kindness of Strangers, the 69th annual Berlin Film Festival — the Berlinale — kicked off Thursday night. The opening-night audience gave a standing ovation to outgoing festival director Dieter Kosslick, who, in his 18-years of supervision, lifted the festival […]