Now that the 2016 Berlin Film Festival has officially come to a close, and I’ve had a full day to get my bearings (get it?), it’s time I ran down the Top 5 films I’ve seen at the festival. Now, it would’ve been more than 5 had I not felt too disappointed (Midnight Special) or indifferent (Soy Nero) towards many of the films I saw (some of which were so horrendous and inconsequential, they didn’t even call for coverage)—but these are things you cannot predict when it comes to festivals. Especially one like the Berlinale, which has such a wide range of selections for its competition titles.

Read below for my 5 favorite films from the 66th edition of the Berlinale. They’re all quite different from each other, but every one is highly recommend for when you’re in a specific kind of mood for a specific kind of movie night. Unfortunately, many things went against me in Berlin and prevented me from watching the eventual big winners like Fire At Sea (Golden Bear), Death In Sarajevo (Jury Prize) and United States of Love (Silver Bear for Screenplay), but that doesn’t mean the films below are any less deserving of recognition and praise.

Favorite 5 Films of the 2016 Berlin Film Festival

#5. War On Everyone

Sandwiched between philosophical quips that give the film its few injections of thoughtfulness, John Michael McDonagh’s War On Everyone is mainly filtered through a scandalous, satirical and borderline psychedelic vision of American police work. Skarsgard and Pena make the unlikely central duo in this bad-cop-worse-cop buddy comedy work with such a generous dose of hilarity and raunchiness that you’ll easily forgive the film its naive moments and predictability. It’s so unabashedly anti-PC that it’s definitely not recommended for the sensitive souls out there. But that’s part of the appeal. [Review]

#4. Being 17

Andre Techine’s spirited film about two teenage boys in a French mountain countryside town is brimming with raw, untethered emotion and naturalistic performances. So much so that you’ll end up understanding Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Tom (Corentin Fila) through so many scenes where a darting glance speaks the loudest. Flowing like an evergreen waterfall, Being 17 captures teenagehood on the precipice – and only falters near the end, but by then your heart won’t care that much. [Review]

#3. Zero Days

It’s a bit funny that I caught the two films above and Alex Gibney’s Zero Days on my very last day of movies in Berlin. It’s like the festival took pity on me for drudging through the pain of watching Creepy or almost being struck by angina pectoris while watching Lav Diaz’ 8-hour mega-epic (more on that at the end). In any case, Gibney’s Zero Days is a must-watch documentary by everyone interested in understanding just how far our world has advanced. Michael Mann’s Blackhat was pummeled by critics, but it’s getting a bit of a boost with a recent director’s cut – and will surely be looked at more closely once Zero Days hits public theatres. Cyber warfare is now, and countries need to start talking about it. [Review]

#2. A Quiet Passion

Terence Davies’ soft, luscious, and impossibly refined biopic of Emily Dickinson should appease lovers of exquisite shot composition and immaculate sense of character depth. Davies’ camera glides through the Dickinson household, while Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, and the rest of the dazzling ensemble dive into Davies’ treasure chest of a screenplay in search of gold. They keep finding it in almost every scene, and thanks to Florian Hoffmeister’s blindingly beautiful cinematography, the audience feels the glow right on their skin. Aside from a couple of slips, A Quiet Passion enthralled me and I was a bit shell-shocked from how closely I felt to this woman, this American introverted poet from the 1800s felt more real to me than most of the characters I’ve seen on the screen in Berlin. [Review]

#1. Things To Come

All due respect to Davies, but nothing, and no one, felt more real than Mia Hansen-Love’s Things To Come and Isabelle Huppert’s Nathalie. It’s hard to fathom how a young director like Hansen-Love can show so much maturity, poise, control, and life experience while still in her early 30s; inspiring what will very likely be one of the most tender and memorable roles for the iconic French actress. Watching Nathalie go through the motions of losing touch with modern school system, letting go of her husband and kids who have moved on, trying to connect with today’s youth, and hopelessly falling in love with a cat ended up being the very best cinematic experience I’ve had at the festival, and indeed, the year so far. What makes it all the more special is that it was the very first film I saw at the Berlinale. [Review]

The Albert Bauer Honorable Mention

Lav Diaz’ new film goes against the conventional grain so much, you can almost feel the granulation forming on your skin as you sit there watching it. With a colossal running time of 485 minutes (nothing Lav Diaz fans will be too surprised about), A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery is made of static shots of various characters lamenting, musing, longing, confessing, discussing, sharing, divulging, singing, listening, and crying over the intolerable cruelty suffered by the Filippino people under an oppressive Spanish rule. It’s absolutely stunning, with the greatest production design and cinematography (well, Crosscurrent might slightly have the edge in cinematography, but they’re milliseconds away from each other) I’ve seen at the festival, but the indulgence is, at too many moments, insufferable.

This weekend, the 2016 Berlin Film Festival came to a close with the festival’s international jury awarding eight films that played in the main competition. Berlin, which used to be looked at as a tier below Cannes and Venice, has slowly shed that perception over the years thanks to premiering titles like The Grand Budapest Hotel and 45 Years (the declining stature of Venice might also be a factor too, but that’s a story for another day). Jury president Meryl Streep announced the winners with her fellow jury members, which included Clive Owen, past Berlin winner Małgorzata Szumowska and Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher.

The winners (listed at the bottom of the page) also help tell us a few things about Berlin and the state of world cinema right now. Here are a few things we learned:

Berlin isn’t afraid to take risks

Lav Diaz has been making films for nearly two decades, but his uncompromising approach to filmmaking and duration has acted as a sort of barrier to competing at a major film festival (when he does screen, he’s usually pushed to sidebars or out of competition slots). So it came as a shock when the Berlinale announced his latest film, the 8-hour A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, would actually premiere in the main competition. Berlin is the first of the three major festivals to give Diaz a spot on the main stage, and that alone helps establish the festival as a sort of risky alternative to Cannes (which caused a minor stir last year when it refused to consider Miguel Gomes’ epic Arabian Nights for the main competition) and Venice. Berlin still has a way to go with establishing an identity for itself—some of their competition selections still seem random—but if it continues to make moves like this one, it might start carving a place out for itself on the festival circuit where even the boldest and most unconventional works can coexist in competition with more friendly and prestigious festival fare.

The Alfred Bauer prize needs to go

First off, I want to be clear: I don’t think the Alfred Bauer prize is a bad idea. The prize, which some might consider third place, is an award “for a feature film that opens new perspectives.” It sounds like a nice way to honour a bold or daring title in competition but, in reality, it’s just a way for the jury to look like they’re not excluding “difficult” cinema. This year, the winner didn’t come as a surprise at all: Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery pretty much had this one locked up from the start. So while having Diaz in competition is great, the presence of the Alfred Bauer prize feels like Diaz’s film never had a fair shot at the Golden Bear to begin with. Unfortunately, even if the prize went away or changed its purpose of avoiding the exclusion of certain types of films, the association will probably still be there (much like how Best Director at Cannes has turned into “let’s give it to the most stylish and/or difficult one”), and until it’s gone the prize is going to look less like an award and more like an excuse.

Are you listening, Cannes?

Cannes shouldn’t have to worry about losing its status as the most prestigious film festival in the world (even if festival head Thierry Fremaux seems hellbent on turning Cannes into a laughing stock), but with every passing year, it looks more like a festival that needs to get with the times. And for a festival that loves to make egregious decisions, perhaps its most egregious one is the continued exclusion of documentaries from its main competition. The last time a documentary competed for the Palme was in 2004 when Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 walked away with the main prize, a decision that still irks some to this day. Perhaps that’s why Cannes hasn’t put a documentary in competition since, but Berlin doesn’t seem to have any biases when it comes to format. This year had two nonfiction films in the main competition, with Gianfranco Rosi’s immigration documentary Fire at Sea taking home the Golden Bear. Berlin isn’t the only major festival to show some love for documentaries either; Rosi’s previous film Sacro GRA won the Golden Lion at Venice, yet if either of them tried to compete in Cannes they would probably get denied. Perhaps Rosi’s two wins can be a sign to Fremaux and Cannes that, as documentaries continue to expand and evolve, the borders between fiction and nonfiction will continue looking arbitrary and archaic.

The unstoppable Mia Hansen-Løve

It’s only been less than a decade, but Mia Hansen-Løve has gradually climbed her way into the top tier of European directors working today, and with Things to Come she seems to have finally cemented her place. It wasn’t until 2009, with her second feature Father of my Children, that Hansen-Løve started making a name for herself (partially helped by her film earning a prize at Cannes), and with her next feature Goodbye First Love the fan base grew even more. 2014 turned out to be her biggest year, with her EDM tale Eden earning rave reviews and distribution deals around the world. Things to Come has Hansen-Løve going in an opposite direction from Eden (or, to put it properly, she’s just continuing to go in her own direction), this time crafting a story around a middle-aged philosophy professor (Isabelle Huppert) instead of a young DJ, and from the sounds of it the film is her strongest work to date. It received near-unanimous praise from critics (including high marks from Nik when he saw it), walked away with a Silver Bear for Best Director, and (perhaps most surprising) scored a slew of distribution deals, including a US deal with IFC Films. Not bad for a film with no major appeal beyond the presence of Huppert.

2016 Berlin Film Festival Winners

Golden Bear for Best Film – Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize – Death in Sarajevo, directed by Danis Tanović

Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize (for a feature film that opens new perspectives) – A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, directed by Lav Diaz

Silver Bear for Best Director – Mia Hansen-Løve for Things to Come

Silver Bear for Best Actress – Trine Dyrholm for The Commune, directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Silver Bear for Best Actor – Majd Mastoura for Hedi, directed by Mohamed Ben Attia

Silver Bear for Best Script – Tomasz Wasilewski for United States of Love, directed by Tomasz Wasilewski

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (in the categories camera, editing, music score, costume or set design – Mark Lee Ping-Bing for the camera in Crosscurrent, directed by Yang Chao

Alex Gibney’s excellent new documentary, Zero Days, is infused with a sense of urgency, relevance, and terrifying propinquity. You’ll never look at your cell phone the same way again.

The way countries fight wars has evolved away from the sea (19^th century) and the sky (20^th century) to what it is today: a bunch of 0’s and 1’s in mind-bogglingly complex computer codes with the enormous potential to shut down a country’s entire nervous system, rendering them vulnerable to danger and destruction. It’s the 21^st century, and the name of the game is cyber warfare. Nations have already caught on whether they can talk about it or not, something viewers will either accept or be infuriated by. The documentary tells the story of Stuxnet, a kinetic cyber weapon of potential mass destruction, which was behind various reactor failures in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility during President Obama’s first year in office.

Interviewing a range of professionals and people in-the-know, from Symantec coders to government insiders, nuclear physicists, and one anonymous NSA source that becomes the mother load of insider intel, Gibney and producing partner Marc Shmuger approach the subject of Zero Days as a techno-thriller choking on red tape, brimming with confidential state secrecy and mysterious agendas. As the source of Stuxnet unravels to something that ultimately makes it “look like a back-alley operation,” Zero Days will grip the viewer in ways that something like All The President’s Men must have been gripping when it opened people’s eyes to the Watergate scandal.

In the post-Snowden era of leaked information, it’s often humorous to see how much Gibney still runs into dead-ends and walls. Frustratingly, at a certain stage, there is a bit too much focus on finger pointing, which will give conspiracy theorists who have deluded anti-government stances more rope than they deserve. But Gibney pulls back on the politics just in time to conclude the frightening findings on a note of openness and discussion. If cyber warfare is the new normal, which technological advancement has turned into a foregone conclusion, nations need to start talking about it honestly and openly. Engaging from start to finish, Zero Days reminds us that Gibney is at his very best when documenting universal subjects as opposed to the Going Clear and Man In The Machine docs of last year, which, though compelling in their own right, are limited by the very nature of their own subjects.

Rating:
8/10

The French have a special knack for telling naturalistic, intimate stories. The nation’s treasured André Téchiné has been due for a strong film, since his post-2000 output (with the exception of Witness) has been leaving too much to be desired. To fill this void and remind everyone why some hail him as the greatest post-New Wave director, Téchiné focuses on the youthful crossroads of desire in Being 17 in order to capture the complexity of a relationship between two boys. From mutual animosity to forced friendship to the awakening of something neither expect, Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Tom (Corentin Fila) evolve through an expertly paced 2 hours on screen in ways that should leave audiences celebrating the spirited farrago of youth.

The lively beautiful rush of the opening credits create a comforting ease that’s usually attributed to someone who’s got a world of experience to work with. “Here is a director who knows what he’s doing, put your trust in him and enjoy this emotional ride,” they seem to say as the scenic country setting whizzes by over glorious music. The vibrancy of the opening foreshadows the tone that will go on to pervade over the entire film and the tense push-and-pull dynamic between Damien and Tom. They’re schoolmates, a couple of high-school loners who get picked last for basketball practice, and who—for no discernible reason—become enemies.

Tom lives in the mountains with his adoptive mother Christine (Mama Prassinos) and father Jacques (Jean Fornerod), and is in a constant state of detached ambivalence with the world around him, feeling assuaged only when swimming naked in the lake or tending to the farm animals. Damien lives with his mother, Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain), the country doctor with a heart of gold, while his father Nathan (Alexis Loret) is on active tour duty as a helicopter pilot. Damien practices defensive techniques with neighbor Paulo (Jean Corso), an old-school vet and friend of his dad’s, and loves to cook meals for his mom. When Marianne gets called in to see a sick Christine, she takes a liking to the quiet and polite Tom, who pays her with a chicken in the film’s first organic laugh-out-loud moment.

When it’s discovered that Christine is pregnant with another child, a surprise considering the many miscarriages she had to endure before adopting Tom, Marianne suggests that Tom stay with her and Damien after school, in order to get his grades back up and not lose three hours commuting from the farm. Reluctantly the two boys agree to this arrangement, but tensions escalate until they decide to fight it out once and for all on a mountaintop. When the rain interrupts them mid-fight, however, they seek refuge in a cave and share a sneaky joint in silence. That’s when something shifts in the atmosphere.

Téchiné, and co-writer Celine Sciamma (the writer/director of the excellent Girlhood) have a gracefully raw cinéma vérité approach to their subject, creating a sense of effortless familiarity and attachment with the two leads. It reminded me of Blue Is The Warmest Color in many ways, but most of all in its agenda-free approach to the theme of homosexuality; without putting it in your face (in contrast to, for example, how it’s done on the small screen in American shows like Sense8). There’s no preaching and no politics here; just organic evolution of confused teenage feelings, and super strong character-building, blossoming into something fundamentally universal. Klein is the more experienced of the two young actors in the lead, and while he is undoubtedly strong, the revelation is Fila, who makes his screen debut with subtle ferociousness and irresistible charismatic presence. Of the adults, Kiberlain gets to the do most and she is wonderful as the lonely, warm-hearted, motherly Marianne.

The story’s build-up and progression in the first two thirds of Being 17, laced with intelligent and spontaneous humor, is rock-solid. It’s when we get into the third trimester that faith gets lost, thanks to some see-through conventional plot engineering and a roundabout focus on Marianne. The closing moments as well break the naturalistic spell with an overloaded dose of sugary optimism, in stark contrast to the rest of the film’s prudence. But even with its noticeable rough edges, Téchiné’s film breathes with a poetic temperance; a beautifully structured, finely acted ballad on teenage angst and passion.

Considering how perceptibly poignant his first two features are, it was hard to picture a John Michael McDonagh movie quite like the unapologetic and misanthropic War On Everyone. But hey, you know what they say: everything is bigger in America. With War, McDonagh turns away from the finesse we witnessed in The Guard and Cavalry, perhaps as a way to satirize the version of the US everyone else sees. It’s tonally erratic, loud, and rude, and a hundred times funnier than his previous works. Unhinged, like a rabid dog running around that you still have the urge to pet, this anti-hero buddy cop movie has cult status written all over it, giving us a good hard look at the funny side of Alexander Skarsgard and reminding us that Michael Pena is a comedic national treasure.

Terry (Skarsgard) and Bob (Pena) are close friends and partners on the force, a job they use as a springboard and get-out-of-jail free card to do shady, corrupt business. Never starting their sentences with “You have the right to remain silent,” Terry and Bob abuse lowlifes to score drugs and money while trying to keep their private lives in some kind of order (but not really giving a shit about it). Bob is married to Delores (Stephanie Sigman), with whom he has two overweight sons; Terry is the loner alcoholic with the vibe of private eye in the 1940s from a parallel universe with a country twist, one that plays Glenn Campbell 24/7 on the jukebox. When a major deal goes bad, a British criminal (Theo James) gets on Terry and Bob’s radar, and the shitstorm starts brewing.

If you start looking at War On Everyone as anything other than a hilarious journey with entertainment as the only destination, you’ll be left with a pretty shallow outer shell. It’s all about setting up scenes, throwing punchlines, working off of McDonagh’s zing-tastic screenplay, and the unlikely dynamic that builds between Skarsgard and Pena (oh, and Caleb Landry Jones looking he stepped out of a post-modern stage play of A Clockwork Orange is not to be missed). Underneath the garish surface, there’s philosophy a-brewing; but too many swerves to random dead-end scenes stopped me from wanting to explore further. Luckily, it keeps getting back on the main road with a mean streak of anti-PC humor that’s ballsy, vibrant and refreshing.

Rating:
7/10

As I mentioned in our Top 10 Anticipation feature for this year’s Berlinale, the last film Dogme 95 alumnus Thomas Vinterberg directed was the hushed-up epic Far From The Madding Crowd. With his latest, re-teaming with old-school buddy and fellow Dane Tobias Lindholm on the typewriter (err, computer), Vinterberg narrows his focus on a tight-knit self-made commune in 1970s Copenhagen, creating a film that’s all the better for being so intimate in scope. Acting thesps Ulrich Thomsen and Trine Dryholm join Vinterberg and Lindholm for the project, and the fact that all four crossed professional paths at one point or another gives The Commune a sense of instant familiarity; something that keeps the film glued together even when it threatens to fall apart in the third act.

Local news anchor Anna (Dryholm) is happily married to a professor of architecture Erik (Thomsen). Together with their 14-year-old daughter Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen), they move into Erik’s old childhood home after his father passes away. In order to spice up their lives and fill the house with more excitement, Anna has the idea to create a commune and invite all the fantastic people they know to live with them. It’s the 1970s, and co-op lifestyles are all the rage. A group of colorful characters round up the household, and everything is rosy up until Erik meets and falls hard for 24-year-old mini-Brigitte Bardot Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann). Instead of pulling a fit, kicking him out, filing for divorce, or anything else we might expect a woman living in the 21^st century to do, Anna suggests something much more radical: invite Emma into the commune and see if they can all make it work.

While Anna’s blasé attitude towards Erik’s infidelity takes a bit of getting used to, Dryholm—with the support of Lindholm’s crackling screenplay—does an outstanding job of making us understand why she wants to give the unusual scenario a go. Besides, the foundation of a commune during the 1970s is built on open-mindedness and acceptance. The realizations that Anna goes through, while predictable, keep The Commune interesting throughout. It’s not long before we realize that the crux of the matter lies in the struggle between personal issues in an open-space environment. The central performances are fantastic, Lindholm packs in enough boisterous humor to keep entertainment levels high throughout, and Vinterberg’s direction is airtight; but there is a disingenuous imbalance in the characterization of all other members beside the original family unit, including much too much focus on an overtly engineered character that transforms from young boy to old ploy at the drop of a hat.

Rating:
7/10

The Night Manager packs so much promise with its cast, crew, and material that it would’ve definitely made our Top 10 Anticipated were it not designed for the small screen. And while we’re mostly all about movies here on Way Too Indie, this BBC/AMC co-produced miniseries gets special coverage for a number of reasons. It’s the latest John Le Carré material adapted for the screen, it packs a wallop of an ensemble cast in Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki, and it’s directed by Oscar-winner Susanne Bier. So there was very little standing in the way of me catching the first two episodes at the Berlinale, and I’m happy to report that the pieces are aligned just right to make this one of the most talked-about TV events of the year.

Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a hotel night manager with a mysterious past who becomes privy to a massive state secret involving aspiring British Lord and all-around millionaire entrepreneur Richard Roper (Laurie). Together with British intelligence handler Angela Burr (Colman), who’s got something of an obsession with catching the crooked Roper, Pine will infiltrate Roper’s inner circle in an attempt to build enough surefire evidence to bring him down once and for all.

That’s the gist of it, and the first two episodes lay the foundation in tantalizing fashion. Beginning with a sleek, sexy, opening credit sequence that sees fighter jets morphing into champagne bubbles and a chandelier crashing in a mushroom-cloud puff, the world of The Night Manager is one of elite danger. The golden color tones, postcard locales (especially breathtaking once the story moves to the alpine top of Zermatt, Switzerland), and lavish lifestyles that festoon the series create an impossible-to-decline invitation. This being a John Le Carré story, the air is full of suspense and intrigue from frame one, when we meet our hero during the eve of the Arab Spring in Cairo.

As one might expect, the actors fire on all cylinders. Hiddleston gets to show why he’d make a perfectly cool (if perhaps still a little too dainty) James Bond, Colman steals every scene she’s in, Laurie is absolutely scrumptious as the sleazy, serpentine Roper, and Hollander makes a fantastic early impression as Roper’s Iago-esque right-hand man Corcoran. If there’s a weakness to be detected, it’s in the series’ iffy structure involving time-jumps and a weak groundwork in establishing a key relationship between Pine and one Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika). Regardless, the first two hours of this miniseries flew by thanks to the story’s reliable espionage elements and tangible charisma seeping through every element. The cliffhanger that ends the second episode had me digging my nails into the seat, so April 19^th—which is when the series is to premiere stateside on AMC—can’t come soon enough.

Rating:
8/10

Even though Emily Dickinson would become one of America’s most celebrated female poets, she led a hard life in the 1800s. She didn’t share her family’s ecclesiastical leanings, her passion was firmly rooted in poetry (not homemaking), she judged those around her too harshly, and, of course, she was a she. Beside her innate urge to express herself through poetry, which she would write in the quiet of night while the rest of the world slept, Emily’s other passion was her bottomless love for her close-knit family. Through exquisitely framed medium shots, supple camera movements, and a screenplay full of wealth and wit, legendary British filmmaker Terence Davies creates a lush biopic that does justice to a unique artist, slightly meandering on a few tangents along the way.

It feels like Cynthia Nixon is in the middle of her own Nixonassance, especially when you consider her searing portrayal of last year’s indie hit James White in addition to the powerhouse portrayal she conjures up here in A Quiet Passion. She so wholly embodies the poetess, you’d think she found a time machine to travel back to the 1800s and trace every inch of gesticulation and countenance befitting the introverted and rebellious woman. Emma Bell does a fine job as Young Emily in the first part of the film, when we get introduced to the Dickinson household and get a taste of conservative life in Massachusetts. But once Nixon enters the stage, you hear pins drop till the final curtain.

Scenes flow into one another like liquid being poured by The Queen’s butler, tracing the ebbs and flows of Emily’s emotional and mental state as she comes to terms with her own personality, the love she feels for her family, and her growing bitterness towards high society values. Her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle, continuing to prove how unforgivably underused she is), her brother Austin (a slightly spotty Duncan Duff), her father (a brilliantly stoic Keith Carradine), her sweet mother (an outstanding Joanna Bacon), and Austin’s wife Susan (a revelatory Jodhi May)—all play vital roles in shaping Emily. Outside her immediate family, no one makes a bigger impact than Miss Buffam (a sensational Catherine Bailey); with a wit and banter second to none, she outplays every man in the room and always leaves room for more. It’s little wonder that Emily becomes instantly infatuated with her spirit. A Quiet Passion exposes a singular personality through the relationships and conversations she has with those closest to her. And for much of the running time, it’s consuming to the point of forgetting everything else in the world.

Davies’ bountiful screenplay takes the cake in terms of how rhythmic and effortless the viewing experience feels. It’s so vibrant with its verbiage, 1800s colloquialism, and sharp comebacks that there are scenes where it almost trips over itself, creating the “too much of a good thing” excess feeling. The first half of the film also overflows with a wonderful sense of humor. Then there’s, of course, the director’s signature painterly camera movements, pivoting around interiors to create an astonishing sense of intimacy and closeness. He would stay on characters during their most fragile moments (especially during the heart-wrenching scenes featuring Bacon) and gradually grind the viewer’s emotions into sawdust. The way he transitions from the early to the later years during a photo shoot sequence is breathtaking. All this is helped by Florian Hoffmeister’s brilliant work with lights and shadows; whether by candle or by sun, the glow that overwhelms A Quiet Passion is palpable.

Moving beyond the formal aesthetics and award-worthy performances, it’s Emily Dickinson’s character that keeps the film’s heart beating. Her flaws, her virtues, her desires, her idiosyncrasies, her painstaking love and love-wound pain—all are ironed gently to create a truly complex and mesmerizing personality. Affronted by obviousness in every aspect of life and art, so sharp in demeaning the overt piety and patriarchal Puritanism she was faced with on a daily basis, the Emily Dickinson that emerges is one fiercely intelligent, determined, funny, empathetic, and infinitely interesting woman. This, above all else, makes A Quiet Passion the magisterial film that it is, and confirms Terence Davies as director who knows how to tackle femininity from all angles.

While all this stands, the picture does tend to lose the plot on a few occasions, especially towards the end during what looks like a fever dream sequence involving Emily and an anonymous man. It’s a jarring moment that broke the magic spell for a few brief minutes, and though I understand its intention, I find myself wishing that it were executed in a more refined way. A blasphemous thought to have considering this is Terence Davies, but there it is. The in-and-out narration of Emily’s select poems will also ignite frustration in a lot of viewers I imagine.

Thanks to these quibbles, the film is a step below the enchantment of Sunset Song and The Deep Blue Sea. But no matter how well versed you are with Emily Dickinson’s poems, A Quiet Passion still manages to envelop the senses in warm, gentle waves of cinematic opulence for most of its running time.

If there was one movie that I wanted to watch at the Berlinale and say, “now here’s a movie Donald Trump needs to see,” it would be Rafi Pitts’ Soy Nero. The reality is much harsher: it’s hard to think of anyone really needing to see this movie, regardless of their politics, prejudices, or nationality. The story of a young Mexican-American who becomes a Green Card soldier in order to secure his US citizenship and not be deported back to Mexico is ultimately too bare-boned and thinly spread to resonate beyond any given scene. And in most scenes, it’s the kind of resonance that spins its wheels to produce a deafening sound only to signify nothing much at all.

Nero (Johnny Ortiz) is caught by the US authorities trying to cross the border back to the States. He says he grew up in California, and is attending university, but he’s got no ID to back him up so, naturally, they don’t believe a word. He witnesses a burial of a Green Card soldier, a Mexican national who joined the US army to become a citizen only to end up dying in action. Nero absorbs his feelings and continues on his path back home to the States. He eventually reaches Beverly Hills to stay with his cousin Jesus (Ian Casselberry). From there, the story is divided between Nero’s short stay in L.A. and his wartime experience in the Middle East.

Pitts creates a dislodged atmosphere of ambivalent uncertainty throughout, which is just about the only thing that kept my attention with Soy Nero. The most entertaining sequence involves Orange Is The New Black‘s Michael Harney, who plays a random American Joe with such unpredictable verve, he keeps the tension tight and manages to make a conversation about windmills totally engrossing. But he’s in it for a moment, and from there on, the story rolls on with the intensity of a tumbleweed. And it tumbled on. It’s a cascading series of mini-disappointments as Nero goes through all the familiar motions, rarely expressing himself other than literally vocalizing his thoughts. Most of the action in Soy Nero is inert and primarily revolves around Nero slowly discovering something that’s fairly obvious from the start.

As for the second part in the war zone, it’s too staged to feel real. A nameless desert with only a couple of people posted at guard is meant to instil a sense of barren existentialism, but ends up feeling stretched out and headed towards pointlessness. Even a sort-of-funny conversation about West vs. East coast rappers feels stagnant because we’ve heard it all before. But it’s when Nero has to verbalize the absurdity of fighting this war just for a Green Card when I completely checked out, realizing that Pitts is attempting to reveal something new by recycling the old.

Rating:
6/10

The subject of white male platonic bonding is as far from today’s film trends as you can possibly get. Even with its shortcomings, then, the heart of the matter in Michael Grandage’s star-studded Genius goes refreshingly against the grain. Add to that the look in the life of American author Thomas Wolfe (whom many, I suspect, readily forget in lieu of the William Faulkner’s and Ernest Hemingway’s of his time), and a shiny spotlight on the behind-closed-doors role of the editor, and there’s plenty to bite into here. Of course, with a cast featuring Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, and Guy Pearce, you walk in confident that if all else fails, at least the performances will keep you glued. And they do, but even beyond the curious choice of a dreary gray monochrome as the film’s primary palette, there’re a number of things that bog Genius down. The source is, as ever, the screenplay; in this case, John Logan’s adaption of A. Scott Berg’s biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. That said, Grandage takes the lion’s share of the blame for leaving the autopilot on his director’s chair and not trying something a little more enticing in way of presentation.

As it bizarrely shifts from black-and-white into colour, Genius opens with the famous editor of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins (Firth), receiving the bulbous first draft of what will eventually become “Look Homeward, Angel.” “Is it any good?” he asks, to which the deliveryman responds, “Good? No. But it’s unique.” That hooks him in. Of course, it turns out to be more than just good or unique, as we follow Max’ endearing routine of reading the manuscript until he reaches the end and gets that look—the title of Genius appearing to make sure there’s no confusion on our part either. During this routine, we get a passing glance at Max’s household, his wife Louise (Linney) and five daughters. Being surrounded by women all his life ends up playing a big part in the strong connection he develops with the erratic, enigmatic, and entirely insufferable Thomas Wolfe (Law).

Genius packs most of its meat into scenes featuring Wolfe and Perkins, as they bulldoze through Wolfe’s protracted manuscripts, first ‘Angel,’ and then—in a period of over 2 years!—Of Time and The River. Debating over how to cut down the chapter where his character falls in love with a blue-eyed girl is the film’s pinnacle; infinitely charming and richly insightful in the dynamic between ambitious author and economic editor. Threatening to steal the show from the two men, though, is Nicole Kidman, who pulls off a fiery and embittered turn as Aline Bernstein—a woman who left her husband and two children to be Wolfe’s full-time lover. Her whole life, it seems, revolves around this man who is too busy wrestling with his mountainous ego to return the love, and if the role weren’t so utterly thankless, Kidman surely would have soared even higher.

The two men’s flippant attitudes towards their respective other halves is never fully addressed (and, ironically enough, Max seems to care more about how much Mrs. Bernstein is suffering while completely ignoring his patronizing attitude toward his own wife). Among other issues that arise out of Logan’s screenplay are the peppered stings of obviousness throughout. The most articulate example comes when F. Scott Fitzgerald (Pearce) talks of “genius friendship,” and the double meaning of the title is neatly spoon-fed. There’s also Law’s exuberant performance as Wolfe. Showy, and something that must have been a lot of fun for the actor, but with just a bit too much pep in his step. This ultimately works against the film’s final moments.

It’s the prickly characterization of Thomas Wolfe that undoes Genius in the end. Whether by weighing the importance of the female characters (especially Kidman’s Aline, as Linney’s Louise is, sadly, much too minor to even mention) a bit more significantly, keeping Law’s performance in firmer check, or fine-tuning the screenplay so that the author’s moments of clarity have bigger impact; I feel Logan and Grandage could have handled it better. The fact that he’s not the main star leaves the film all the better for it. Firth’s mighty sensitive performance as the heart of the film keeps the strength of friendship resonating throughout, and is more than enough reason for a solid recommendation.

Poetry is in the art of subtle suggestion, the lyrical rhythm of words, and the invisible reveal of universal emotion. The more you talk about how poetic something is, the less poetic it becomes. Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent practices the opposite philosophy; literally writing out its poetry on the screen, drowning in a self-referential sea of airy profundities, and so deeply steeped in Chinese tradition that most of us unfamiliar are left one step behind with every turn.

Gao Chun (Qin Hao) travels up the Yangtze River, taking with him mysterious cargo for a shady businessman. His father recently passed, and tradition dictates that he must capture a black fish and let it die of natural causes onboard the ship in order for his father’s soul to be set free. But Gao Chun seems more interested in An Lu (Xin Zhilei), a mysterious woman he keeps seeing at every stop he makes. When he finds an anonymous book of poems on his ship, poems named after the ports along the Yangtze river, Gao Chun embarks on a (mostly inward) journey of discovery. On this so-called journey, he comes to terms with his feelings toward his father. He also remains determined to find out who this mythic woman really is and understand the spirit of the Yangtze river through the poems. Or something.

The end result kept me at bay with its molasses-like pace, overly pontificating screenplay, and awkwardly staged scenes (I’m thinking here mostly of those featuring the two central lovers). Thanks to majestic cinematography from master DP Ping Bing Lee (who is responsible for shooting the most beautiful film of last year, The Assassin) and a deeply emotive score by An Wei, it’s beautiful to look at and listen to. But I’d be surprised if the storytelling doesn’t leave many losing patience and scratching their heads.

Rating:
6/10

Psychopaths and unresolved mysteries in a grim detective tale should be surefire material for someone like the prolific Kiyoshi Kurosawa to successfully tackle, right? Especially when you consider it’s adapted from a celebrated, award-winning novel. The Japanese director’s latest film was one of ten films we’re most excited about for Berlinale. Needless to say, I was very eager to watch Creepy. Alas, the film is an unfulfilling experience; incredulously dull, unwittingly absurd and comical, and featuring the most plank-like lead performance I’ve seen in quite some time.

After a psychotic incident almost kills him, detective Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) quits the force to teach criminal behavior and settle into his new home with doting wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi). He randomly discovers an old unsolved case involving three missing people while Yasuko tries (and doesn’t stop trying…) to befriend their strange new neighbor, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa). The parallel narratives converge, obviously. Nishijima plays detective Takakura with all human dimensions scraped off, leaving a vacuous non-person with the instincts of a blind wombat to handle a complex case and keep missing every red flag possible. It’s in Kagawa (reteaming with Kurosawa after Tokyo Sonata) where Creepy, appropriately, lives and breathes. His volatile, eccentric performance is the greatest joy in an otherwise detached, lethargic, and predictable picture.

It really shouldn’t be this easy to trivialize a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. Even his misses (Journey To The Shore, Real…) usually have something exciting to latch onto. Perhaps he’s been working a little too much? Or his efforts were mostly concentrated on his upcoming Mathieu Amalric film The Woman in the Silver Plate? Either way, apart from a couple of neat camera movements where action is allowed to speak louder than words, Creepy is so disposable it hardly feels directed at all.

Rating:
5/10

After making films about social recluses (Curling), ex-convicts (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear) and venturing into documentaries on animals (Bestiaire) and factory workers (Joy of Man’s Desiring), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté sets his sights on the upper class in Boris Without Béatrice. Its story, about a successful businessman confronting his own privilege after a surreal encounter, will undoubtedly rub people the wrong way given its sympathetic view towards an unsympathetic protagonist, but fans of Côté’s precise, arresting style will find plenty to enjoy, even if it’s in strictly formal terms.

James Hyndman plays Boris Malinovsky, a middle-aged man as arrogant as he is successful. Early scenes establish Boris’ rich lifestyle and hubris, like when he gets furious at the cashier of a high-class clothing store for asking him too many questions or crashes a town hall to lambast the mayor for not prioritizing an unpaved road near his house. But Boris’ obnoxious sense of pride and short temper might be influenced by added stress at home; his wife Béatrice (Simone-Élise Girard), a minister for the Canadian government, has come down with a severe depression that’s left her mute and bedridden. Boris, unable to deal with his wife’s ailment, hires Klara (Isolda Dychauk) to take care of her while he continues an affair with co-worker Helga (Dounia Sichov). It’s a typical case of someone using their wealth to fill the holes in their life with something else, rather than putting the work in to try and gain back what’s lost.

For a character so stuck in his own self-inflated world, it will take a lot to shake Boris from his foundation. Enter Denis Lavant as an unknown stranger, who leaves a message in Boris’ mailbox urging him to meet late at night in a nearby quarry. Their meeting, which feels like Côté’s version of the Cowboy scene in Mulholland Drive, has Lavant (who electrifies the film just by showing up in a kurta) explaining to Boris that he’s the cause for Béatrice’s condition, and in order to cure her, he needs to change his life. The encounter throws Boris into a crisis that makes him re-evaluate his life while diving further into his selfish comforts when he starts an affair with Klara.

While Boris Without Béatrice may be Côté’s first time dealing with affluent characters, he’s far from the first filmmaker to explore the problems people can afford to have, and the thematic familiarity can make certain stretches feel a bit stale. But one of Côté’s strengths has always been his ability to build an enclosed yet well-realized universe within each of his films, so it comes as no surprise that his style fits nicely when operating within the bubble of someone’s privileged existence.

Teaming up with cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, Côté extends the functional qualities of the narrative to the film’s visuals. Just as every action in the film leads to a direct reaction involving some other aspect of the story— Béatrice’s health improves or worsens depending on how Boris acts—Côté uses environments to make a direct commentary on each character’s current state, whether it’s obscuring Béatrice behind reflective surfaces or using the vertical lines throughout Boris’ sleek estate to make him appear separated from others within the same scene. Côté’s efficiency when it comes to establishing information through visuals is most effective when using flashbacks to show Boris reflecting on happier times with his wife. Shooting these (brief) moments in warm tones on what looks like 8mm film, the organic and textured look of the footage establishes that, despite his bad behavior, Boris’ love for Béatrice is real.

For any shortcomings Boris Without Béatrice might have storywise, Côté’s direction and his ensemble pick up the slack. It may lack the same unpredictability that made Vic + Flo Saw a Bear so strong, but Côté has firmly established himself as one of Canada’s strongest and most consistent directors working today.

A good film doesn’t always have to make sense. In some cases, a film’s perceived impenetrability might act as an invitation to theorize and discuss what’s going on; in other cases, a film can hit certain emotional notes or elicit reactions through its own filmmaking to create a rich experience. None of those scenarios apply to Daniil Zinchenko’s Elixir, which tries for a combination of sci-fi, fairy tale, religious parable, and political commentary, and winds up with a painful, mutated mishmash Seth Brundle would be proud of.

Taking place in a large, forested area, Elixir sets up a storyline it barely follows: a scientist (Oleg Rudenko) working on an elixir that can resurrect the dead assigns his assistant (Sergey Frolov) to collect the ingredients necessary to complete his mixture. Those ingredients are DNA from two cosmonauts, two guerillas, and “Him,” which might refer to a carpenter (Aleksandr Gorelov) getting hunted down by a businessman (Dmitriy Zhuravlev) because of his ability to turn water into oil.

A large amount takes place at a swamp within the film’s vast, rural setting, which turns out to go well with the slow, trudging experience of watching Elixir. Zinchenko’s blunt, obvious symbolism, and references to contemporary Russia aren’t hard to grasp, but understanding how all the pieces fit together is another story altogether. Adding to the frustration is Zinchenko’s decision to frame most of his film in long shots so he can deliberately obscure what’s going on in a scene, a choice that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than providing more confusion (at one point he even blocks a scene so the main action gets covered by a bush in the middle of the frame). If there was a feeling of cohesion with any of this, or at least a sense that Zinchenko wasn’t just combining a bunch of underdeveloped ideas, Elixir might have provided some fun with its eccentricities. Instead, it’s just a pile of mush made up of boring quirks and unsubtle metaphors, adding up to pure, wasteful nonsense.

Dreams and reality collide, or rather blandly coexist, in Petr Oukropec’s In Your Dreams!, a coming-of-age tale that combines a teenage girl’s burgeoning emotions with parkour, the form of acrobatic urban exploration that became a passing fad in the early 2000s. Beginning at an off-season ski resort high up in a range of mountains, 16-year-old Laura (Barbora Štikarová) practices back flips while her father (Ivan Martinka) gets ready for the two of them to go out climbing. A tense climbing sequence establishes Laura as a teen whose craving for independence can make her reckless, as she climbs too fast and winds up slipping (lucky for her, the safety harness she complained about moments earlier saves her from falling to her death). This opening, while brief, makes a big impression thanks to director of photography’s Tomáš Sysel gorgeous visuals, using the film’s Cinemascope ratio to capture the jaw-dropping vistas provided by the high-altitude location.

The promise of a film filled with such eye-watering imagery soon dissipates as the movie has a literal and figurative comedown, with Laura abruptly cutting her trip short so she can go back to be with her mother (Klára Melišková) in Prague. Laura’s interests lie more with climbing buildings than mountains, and upon arriving back at her mother’s apartment she goes out with her friend Kaja (Veronika Pouchová) to audition for a spot on a parkour team. Kaja realizes that Laura’s desire to join the all-boys group might have more to do with her crush on Luky (Toman Rychtera), the cocky leader of the team, and after trying out Laura catches his attention, along with the group’s videographer Alex (Jáchym Novotný).

The emotional rush of potentially getting the boy of her dreams starts overwhelming Laura to the point where, when she’s taking the elevator down from her apartment, she falls into a dream world where she finds herself on a beach with Luka by her side. Oukropec’s structuring of his film between Laura’s dreams and the real world feels strange at first, especially when there’s no apparent reason for why she goes into fainting spells whenever she steps into an elevator (after the first incident, a doctor examines Laura but concludes it’s just the boundless mystery of female hormones). And it’s not that Oukropec needs to provide a logical, reality-based reason for his trips into the surreal; he just needs to make the transitions convincing within the realm of his own film, and on that front he comes up short. Compared to the opening minutes, Laura’s dreams look bland in comparison, filtered through drab greys and taking place in the same dull location that implies her own lack of imagination more than anything. It’s a problem that makes Oukropec’s intention of In Your Dreams! as a character-based piece fall flat, with every glimpse into Laura’s head too uninteresting to make anything register.

And once Laura’s dreams and reality begin influencing each other, it’s apparent that the film really has nowhere to go aside from watching its protagonist get over her crush through dreaming. Other aspects of Laura’s life, like a potential romance with Alex or the increasing presence of her mother’s new boyfriend in the apartment, get discarded altogether in the final act, leaving them unresolved or flat-out ignored. There’s also a brief episode where Laura questions whether or not her dreams are more than fantasy, since Luky vanishes after she dreams of him getting locked away, but Oukropec barely commits to Laura’s distressed state. At one point she starts imagining a dog from her dreams following her around in real life, and the development is treated so inconsequentially it just feels like a strange quirk rather than a sign of her further disconnect from reality. Even worse is the way Oukropec decides to wrap things up, letting the contrived climax play out entirely in Laura’s dream world that results in a near-incomprehensible plot resolution. The lazy execution of the film’s more imaginative side keeps Oukropec’s film tethered to its own uninteresting and poorly developed reality, with only Štikarová’s strong performance forming some sort of ground to stand on among the half-baked ideas. Aside from its visuals and some neat parkour stunt work, In Your Dreams! has about as much staying power as the majority of our own dreams.

There’s no away around it, and it pains me to believe it considering how big a fan I am of his previous films, but Jeff Nichols‘ much-anticipated Midnight Special is a disappointment. How a film that packs so much promise with its director, cast, and synopsis can leave such a flat impression is something that I’ll be mulling over during Berlinale and beyond. A story of a close-knit family with a boy who’s got special powers, on the run from a religious cult and the government, pulsates with potential. But not even the commanding Michael Shannon can save this film from being Nichols’ first major misfire.

As most disappointments often do, things start off so well. With zero exposition, we’re thrust into the action of Ray (Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton, at his understated best here) on-the-run with 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) and before the brilliant title sequence even comes up, we’ve already got a hundred questions. Why is the young lad wearing goggles? Who are these men? Why is the government, who is making this national news, after them? The mystery is instantly gripping, and even more so once the Ranch—a cult that believes Alton’s words are gospel—gets involved. They want him because they believe he’s their savior, the FBI and the NSA are after him because they think he’s a weapon, and all Roy wants to do is bring him back to his mother (Kirsten Dunst) and make sure he’s where he’s got to be on Friday, March 6th, a.k.a. Judgement Day. Oh, and the boy speaks in tongues, has telepathic connections with radio signals, and shoots blue light from his eyes.

Basically, you’d have to check your pulse if you weren’t totally sucked in by the halfway mark. But as the mystery begins to unravel further, delusions of grandeur set in. The big mystery, all those gripping question marks, amount to one big “OK, that’s it?” shrug by the end. Adam Stone’s cinematography is excellent, the performances are predictably stellar, Nichols expertly directs a couple of stand-out sequences, but the story gets lost in a vague haze of questionable decisions and a final climax utterly deflated of the emotional oomph it’s supposed to have. It has its grand familial Spielbergian flourishes, but Midnight Special ends up being disappointingly ordinary and surprisingly forgettable.

Rating:
6.5/10

Pensive and intellectual to the core, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come is a remarkably intriguing follow-up to her previous film Eden, mostly in how natural it feels even with subjects that seem (on the surface, at least) like they couldn’t be farther apart. For those who’ve never seen the director’s 2014 EDM tale, it follows a young man (a semi-biographical extension of her real-life brother) as he grows up in the early ’90s Parisian dance music scene. Things to Come centers on a woman, decades older than Eden’s protagonist, who teaches high-school philosophy in Paris and lives with her two children and husband of 25 years. At a certain point, it becomes clear that the City of Love isn’t the only thing binding the director’s latest films. Hansen-Løve is fascinated by the idea of human growth, and her creative way of expressing is growing itself.

Things to Come is a gentle wind; it flows so effortlessly, you can almost feel the warmth of its silky texture on your skin. This is generated by the way Hansen-Løve and her DP Denis Lenoir wield the camera around with a spontaneous, fluid spirit, but much of it is also attributable to a marvelous doyenne of the acting world, who carries the entire weight of the film on her shoulders as effortlessly as ever. Isabelle Huppert has an uncanny knack of conveying a remarkably large range of emotions: turning down-to-earth into larger-than-life with one pout, one sideway glance, or an ever-so-slight intonation in a spoken word. She embodies Nathalie, the philosophy professor who is suddenly faced with a concept she’d long forgotten about. In her own words: “total freedom.” Her husband, Heinz (Andre Marcon), has left her for another woman, and she has retouched base with former student Fabien (Roman Kolinka), whose combination of youth and intellect make him especially interesting for Nathalie. In some other film, perhaps, their relationship would be replete with perverse suggestions; under Hansen-Løve’s wing, their bond is strictly platonic and cerebral.

As the film follows Nathalie and her various evolutions—adapting to a new school regime that takes a modern marketing ax to her dear philosophy, dealing with a demented mother (Edith Scob), etc.—questions are mulled over in the refined, graceful way one images an oenophile tasting vintage wine. Is there a practical place for philosophy in today’s world? What does a woman over 40, whose kids are all grown up and whose memories are now tainted by her husband’s decision, have to hold on to? Is burying yourself in intellectual thoughts and readings enough to be happy? Hansen-Løve bears her old soul through the way she deals with these questions, with just the right balance of humor and melancholy. There’s just enough style to keep it at an arms-length from being a slice-of-life picture in the cinema verité sense, but the story, the characters, and the ideas on display keep the film firmly rooted to the ground and in reality.

Women’s stories, female directors, roles for women over 45—these debates are very much at the forefront of today’s film conversations. Things to Come is a serendipitous celebration of all three. Mia Hansen-Løve, still in her 30s, shows immense sensibility and maturity in tackling insular subject matter that would have most studio heads bolting for the door. In Isabelle Huppert, she has found the perfect collaborator—an actress of incredible depth and range, who makes every frame that much more fascinating to behold. Now, when I think about Eden and Things to Come as companion pieces, it’s hard to imagine another director who handles the subject of “moving on” with the kind of delicate deftness and assuredness that Mia Hansen-Løve demonstrates.