After nearly four hundred films screening over ten days to 21,000 accredited guests and a third of a million ticket buyers, the Berlin International Film Festival drew to a close this past Sunday. The 68th installment of Europe’s largest film festival was a robust edition, with an unusually-high number of worthy films spread over the Berlinale’s dozen sections. As he did in once already in 2014 with “The Grand Budapest,” Wes Anderson

Why The New York Times, in their own June 9th ranking of the twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century, felt the need to take this moment to reflect on the best cinema of our still-young century is anyone’s guess. My suspicion is that they are just starved for content during the summer months, traditionally the worst time for serious-minded moviegoers, although there are some promising films coming soon

Midway through the 70th Cannes Festival the focus has veered sharply away from missing persons to domestic entanglements: or put another way, from people who have checked out of your life – voluntarily or involuntarily – to those you have no choice but to coexist with. It’s always difficult living in the shadow of a famous parent, but what if that parent isn’t exactly the genius you always thought he was? That question hugs

“La Chambre Bleue” (“The Blue Room” in the original French), the extremely-talented actor Mathieu Amalric’s directorial debut, screened on Friday. Based on a slim 1955 novel by police procedural author Georges Simenon, it relates, or rather reveals, its story in a tortuously piecemeal fashion. In the course of an interrogation, we are introduced to Julien (Amalric), his mistress (Stéphanie Cléau) and his wife (Léa Drucker). What has transpired between them and the reasons for Julien’s interrogation gradually come into focus. Shot using the academy ratio of 1:33 (also used in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”

(CONTAINS SPOILER ALERTS) Atom Egoyan’s to-catch-a-child-abductor caper “The Captive” was the third competition entry to arrive here. The motif of young ones in distress amid snow-clogged landscapes will no doubt bring to mind the director’s harrowing “The Sweet Hereafter,” which was a big prizewinner here in 1997. Sadly “Captive” does not come close to “Hereafter” in emotional force and restraint. Instead it brings to

This is Wong Kar Wai's first martial arts outing, not to mention his first film since his embarrassing English-language attempt “My Blueberry Nights” from 2007.

Wong spent three years researching “Grandmaster,” which tells of Kung Fu masters in Northern China and Hong Kong in the years before WWII until the fifties, and he seems to have gotten all the details, down to the buttons on

The last of the snow around Potsdamer Platz has melted in time for the 63rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. This year’s opening film, from festival jury president Wong Kar-Wai (pictured at left), was the big-budget Kung Fu epic "The Grandmaster," shown here in its world premiere a month after opening in China. Expectations ran high for the arthouse auteur’s first martial arts outing, not to mention

Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, a meditative fable about love, memory and loneliness that jumps deftly between contemporary Lisbon, colonial Africa and the landscape of dreams has been gathering steam on the festival circuit, notably in Berlin this month. The film takes both its title and structure from F.W. Murnau’s final cinematic statement, a collaboration with Robert Flaherty. Shot in grainy black and white, the film begins with a brief

Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car is the director’s return to the big screen since 1999’s All the Pretty Horses, adapted from the Cormack McCarthy novel. Thornton said he was delighted to be back to directing his own material. He has chosen a quirky tragi-comedy set in the American south in the 1960s that is a double portrait of two families, one American, the other British. It has been twenty years since Naomi Caldwell left her

Viva Italia! Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) has become the first Italian film in over two decades to carry the Golden Bear, top prize of the Berlin Film Festival. In last night’s award ceremony, the eight-member international jury, headed by British-director Mike Leigh and featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, awarded the Taviani’s docudrama the statuette. The last Italian film