Nearly 125 years after her assassination, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria — or Sisi to her enduring cultists — continues to inspire a veritable industry of portraiture in Europe: In the last year alone, a novel, two TV series (one of them a glossy Netflix affair) and two feature films…
Berlin Film Festival 2023
It might have been a few decades since you left school. You might imagine the modern classroom — especially one in a decently funded, mid-sized German high school — to be as alien to your own educational background as to be unrecognizable. And yet one of the remarkable aspects of…
The official awards ceremony of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is under way, with Kristen Stewart’s jury set to announce their winners from the Competition selections. This post will be updated as they’re announced. COMPETITION Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: “Afire,” Christian Petzold Silver Bear Jury Prize: “Bad Living,” João…
Misery loves company, which may account for Portuguese director João Canijo’s decision to split his angst-ridden hotel-set project into two complementary films. Both were selected for the Berlinale, with the half centered on the hotel guests (“Living Bad”) landing in the Encounters section, and “Bad Living,” which revolves around the…
“Till the End of the Night” opens with what initially seems a Brechtian flourish: a nifty time-lapse shot of a bare shell of an apartment being painted, fitted, decorated and accessorized to an apparently lived-in state, as a vintage German torch song by Heidi Brühl crackles over the soundtrack. It’s…
There’s a parched austerity to the landscape of the Australian outback, along with an embedded history of conflict between Indigenous and invading occupants, that makes it irresistibly well-suited to screen westerns. But there’s a loneliness to it, too, a sense that its quiet vastness could swallow you whole and without…
There’s a parched austerity to the landscape of the Australian outback, along with an embedded history of conflict between Indigenous and invading occupants, that makes it irresistibly well-suited to screen westerns. But there’s a loneliness to it, too, a sense that its quiet vastness could swallow you whole and without…
If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny,…
In time, stories like “20,000 Species of Bees” will come to feel as commonplace within the coming-of-age genre as tales of first love or heartbreak: a young girl, unhappy in her skin and at odds with her family, finally recognizes her gender over the course of one pivotal summer, and…
Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you…
It is probably Australia. But it could be anywhere where the sun is hot enough to bake the earth into boundless stretches of cracked crazy-paving. It is probably an alternate recent past. But it could be any period in human history when mankind has divided itself into categories of oppressor…