Berlinale Films Ranked, Weekly Reel #65
In which I account for all the films I watched, with rankings and recommendations for when they trickle out into theaters later this year.
I can’t provide the usual Watch Now, Save for Later rankings because of their precarious release schedules, so I’ll do a full ranking along with my Letterboxd score. Check out my last post, which wrapped up my experiences as well as the political controversy.
My Berlinale stats:
40 screenings (including one repeat viewing and one that I left a third of the way though for scheduling reasons).
1 live-talk.
2 non-world/international premieres (After Hours and The Departed).
By section: 16/20 Competition; 8/22 Special; 5/15 Encounters; no Shorts; 4/34 Panorama; 2/30 Forum; 1/17 Generation; no Retrospective; 2/11 Classics and Homage.
1. Gloria!
Although it has one or two graphic scenes, Gloria! was the most enjoyable viewing experience at the Berlinale, partly because of its pop-thumping Baroque-meets-electronic soundtrack but also due to its proximity to so many ‘serious’ movies. This film, which has some plot/stakes problems that’s quickly overcome by a foot-tapping tempo, is the formidable debut-feature from Italian singer-songrwriter-actor Margherita Vicario, who already has the know-how to incorporate music into a film and make it as close to a musical as possible without crossing that line—though Vicario should surely make a proper musical in the near future. The plot centers on a supposedly mute girl who’s treated poorly from the conductor priest and musicians she looks after. Over time, after a discovery of the new grand piano and anxiety induced from composing a fresh piece for the Pope, the girls form a small repertoire and showcase their ability to create complex yet fun musical arrangements that fosters a close communal sisterhood. Vicario stated in the press conference that she wanted to reveal the musical world these real-life women lived in, giving them a voice and positive comradery while consciously avoiding the trap of two female characters “being bitchy” to each other. Although I would’ve dropped the epilogue appearing after the best climax I watched in the entire festival, this film is an excellent debut.
2. Hors du temps (‘Suspended Time’)
I already wrote a fullish review for this film, which was my most anticipated film from a favorite director (Olivier Assayas), which didn’t disappoint.
3. Love Lies Bleeding
Like Hors du temps, I wrote about this film in a previous post on what the Americans were up to at Berlinale. I should note that I enjoyed all four A24 films at the Berlinale, which included this, A Different Man, I Saw the TV Glow, and Architecton.
4. A Different Man
See the previous entry, where I include a short review of this film after Love Lies Bleeding. Congrats to Sebastian Stan, who won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance in this film.
5. Langue Étrangère (‘Foreign Language’)
This made-for-Arte, Franco-German film is about a teen-ager from Strasbourg going to stay with her pen pal in Leipzig, whose parents set up the arrangement against their full intents. At first from a cold remove, the two teens begin to bond over their dissatisfying home-family lives (with an always impressive supporting performance from Nina Hoss as the German mother), seeking to escape through basement parties and radical leftist events. The Strasbourg girl invents certain realities to help bond with her pen pal, which over the course of the film unravels when they become best friends, switch cities, and chase a fantasy. While this film isn’t just for Gen Z, it importantly centers the story on the concerns of high-schoolers today with a sympathetic and mostly non-ironic touch that many filmmakers tend to rely on and/or dismiss. But it also doesn’t completely take their side over their parents, who receive just as much sympathy in navigating that period of time for all involved.
6. Favoriten
A documentary centered on the experience of a group of immigrant children from grades two through four in the densely multi-cultural area in Vienna called Favoriten. In what is essentially a continuation of the Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse genre, we watch the highs and lows of children struggling their way through a foreign culture with the assistance of a highly talented teacher. Although it’s a highly enjoyable watch from beginning to end, it relies too much on a greatest hits edit rather than letting scenes play out with their own distinct stories, but this is just a nitpick. You’ll laugh a lot, cry at times, and learn about the confusing-to-outsiders German-language education system that puts children on their life path after fourth grade. Favoriten won the Peace Film Prize for its “powerful message of peace and the skilful aesthetic execution of their themes,” which doesn’t really fit this film but congrats anyway.
7. Direct Action
One of the most interesting film viewing experiences of the festival, which I’ll default to my short Letterboxd review. Winner of Best Film in the Encounters Section and a Special Mention in the Documentary Award Category.
8. La Cocina
I reviewed this film in one of my first dispatches from the festival, which now feels a lifetime ago. La Cocina was one of the front runners of the festival because of its dramatic audio-visual impact and early screenings but didn’t maintain that pace as the other competition films were screened.
9. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
A love letter in the form of a documentary from Martin Scorsese to the working relationship of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Though not directing, Scorsese narrates and provides mini-film history lessons on the duo and their influence on some of his films. One of the delights was watching clips from their epic films on the big screen, which is seldom possible outside of the rare theatrical retrospective.
10. My Favourite Cake
I briefly reviewed this after La Cocina. Being a fan of Persian cinema, I was looking forward to this and others from Iran, which seem to all be timely and dangerous in ways that Western films can’t be. My Favourite Cake won the main award from the independent Ecumenical Jury (international film organisations of the Protestant and Catholic Churches) as well as the FIPRESCI (international film critics association) Jury.
11. Matt and Mara
The best Canadian film at the festival, it’s about Mara, a creative writing professor who specializes in stage adaptations and poetry, who struggles between loving her musician husband and writer ex from undergrad. Although the story is a little too obvious regarding her preferable yet complicated relationship with writing compared to not enjoying music, this is the kind of contemporary drama that American filmmakers shy away from too often today. Propelled by the charisma of BlackBerry’s Matt Johnson, this film deals with a relationship’s ambiguities and pitfalls in a very natural way.
12. Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs)
Another Hong Sangsoo film starring Isabelle Huppert but on a tiny budget. Huppert plays a French “teacher” in Korea who has a peculiar way of teaching the language through speaking English with her new pupils. Each time she comes across a new person, a cycle begins , which doesn’t create a clear narrative point until a blockage disturbs them. Most of the film’s action/humor come from Huppert’s expert micro-expressions and mysteriously physical center of gravity that only she seems to have access to. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, which surprised Hong Sangsoo, who was confused by what the jury saw in his film.
13. Sasquatch Sunset
An expert exercise in troll filmmaking, where the entire point of this silent (if a sasquatch shits alone in the woods, is it even real?) film is watching famous actors where an outfit that obscures their appearance and ability to speak. It’s understandably dismissed by many people who like their films to have plots and/or stories, but that’s not the point here. It’s in the extreme levels of empathy one has towards seeing mythical beings being vulnerable and empathetic themselves with one another, but even that analysis may be pushing it too far.
14. I Saw the TV Glow
The most anticipated release from Sundance, this film by Jane Schoenbrun zags in a filmmaking style that feels completely unique. It’s subversive in all the right ways, even from being a consciously subversive film itself, which jumps through its runtime faster than we can begin to understand the static noise enveloping its characters. Another A24 release that will have to fight an uphill battle against Love Lies Bleeding and A Different Man for the next awards season attention.
15. Elbow
Gegen die Wand single-handedly brought the German-Turkish-in-Berlin sub-genre (that I can now somewhat appreciate as a Berlin resident) to the mainstream when it won the Golden Bear exactly twenty years ago. This film continues in that tradition, unfortunately because the assimilation story of Turks in Germany has always been (and perhaps will always be) a fraught one. But the problem is that this film is told in the sub-genre’s minor key. Nonetheless, it’s enjoyable and Melia Kara’ debut performance as the protagonist is wonderful.
Here is where the films start to become hit or miss, which I would recommend with caution.
16. Architecton
Rock porn montages about concrete, Ancient Rome/Turkey, and a wizard creating a magic circle in his yard by the horses. Definitely not for everyone but I sympathized with its thesis: why do we build ugly things that only last several decades when we know how to make beautiful things that last millennia?
17. Small Things Like These
Another entry into the Bleak Irish Cinematic Universe along with God’s Creatures (also starring an Oscar nominee of that year with non-Irish Emily Watson) that crafts an entire film around the highly prized RCMF (resting Cillian Murphy face). The film has flashbacks into Murphy’s character’s past when he received a heating pad instead of a puzzle for X-mas, which may of well have been coal to him, and that’s why he decided to then become the manager of a coal yard thirty years later. Murphy has the best going-through-some-heavy-shit face based on generations of hard-earned Irish repression. Emily Watson won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance as a terrifying holy woman.
18. Sex
A wacky Norwegian comedy about two cis-hetero men who confront their sexuality when one has a sexual encounter with a man and the other has wet dreams about David Bowie. The humor is about as dry as the icy-winter snow that clouds the Nordic countries, which knows when to hit the comedy gas for their mid-life drama. The scene with the doctor had the audience falling out of their seat laughing more than any other film I watched at the festival. Winner of the Ecumenical Jury prize in the Panorama section, CICAE (International Confederation of Art House Cinemas) Art Cinema Award, and Label Europa Cinemas Award.
19. The Great Yawn of History
An older man hires a younger man to find a treasure and kill the person protecting it in a cave. Nice to watch a film set in Iran but not in Tehran, in those beautiful axis-of-evil mountains and sandy dunes. It tells a relatively uncomplicated story dealing with the religious persistence of trying and failing to achieve the hidden goal that will provide one with a better life mixed in which classic Persian socio-cultural problems. Winner of the Special Jury Award in the Encounters section.
20. Sons
A Danish prison guard working the easier floor of the prison sees her son’s murderer being sent to the high-security floor. Although she’s not well-equipped in handling the intensity, she gets transferred to that area and slowly begins fucking with him, which becomes out of control after a while. It’s not a bad movie but I’m not sure the thesis was worth the intense, highly ‘serious’ squeeze.
21. Every You Every Me
A John Cassavetesesque story about a failing blue-collar marriage that uses a conceit of changing the actor playing the husband depending on how the wife sees him, which is completely pointless (subjectivity is inherent) and distracts from the two lead performances. This had some serious potential to be really great and someone should’ve raised doubts about the switcheroos.
22. Seven Veils
The worst Canadian film I saw at the festival, but not horrible, about Amanda Seyfried playing a director staging the Salomé opera. It divides the attention between her own traumatic past confronting the similarities the play is present to her, but fails to achieve that symbiosis that makes sense from the highly over-used trauma plot.
23. Shambhala
A woman living in a small village in Nepal gets married but her husband goes off on a trade mission soon after. She may or may not have had an affair with the local teacher, but word quickly gets to the husband on the road, who decides not to return. Convinced of her innocence, and having become pregnant (we’re not sure whose), this woman goes off to find her husband on an epic cross-Himalayan quest with a monk. I found this to be too long, which isn’t good for an epic, but also without the subversions of an epic that something like this could’ve (or rather should've) done.
24. Cuckoo
Fans of horror, of which I am not one, may like this a lot more than I. Post-Euphoria Hunter Schafer does a decent job leading the film as an American confronting the strange quirks of Bavarian conservatism and German humor.
25. Dahomey
Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, which I wrote about in my last post.
26. Janet Planet
Extremely Kelly Reichardt coded, slow and methodical treatment of middle-aged woman going through various relationships while her daughter is home for the Summer. Most of the humor comes from the minute-expressions of the daughter but doesn’t offer any character growth or story.
27. Spaceman
The latest Netflix film from Adam Sandler, also starring Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano. This is one of the serious Sandler flicks, but perhaps the worst of the bunch. He plays a solitary astronaut on his way to a space anomaly in the solar system who experiences psychotic periods of imagining a spider-monster-alien helping him through his failing marriage. It’s got a little bit of Solaris, a dash of 2001, but someone accidentally put in a handful of who gives a shit. Although this wasn’t for me and many others, I’m still encouraging Sandler to stay on this route rather than reverting to the comedies.
28. Henry Fonda for President
Boilerplate documentary about a movie star that doesn't dig into any of the more interesting aspects of his life, career, legacy, etc. and goes out of its way to juxtapose ideas/representations/depictions without any synthesis or conclusion. As with a large majority of the audience I watched this with, this film is for those old-heads who want to reminisce about a early-to-mid-century actor.
29. Hands in the Fire
A Portuguese woman is documenting an old manor houses on film for a documentary. Her last house has some freaky things going on, while the family living there is hiding something. While it seems like a horror or suspense story is being set up, it becomes a muddled mess that tries to resolve itself through representation, memory, and theatrical audiovisuals. If someone understood what the point was, please e-mail me.
30. Who Do I Belong To
A Tunisian family loses two sons to ISIS training, then one returns with a niqab-clad wife after the other is killed. People in town start to go missing and the resolution only muddies the water on how this terror group corrupts all. Tries being too much with too little.
Here are the real stinkers to avoid.
31. Treasure
Lena Dunham plays a New Yorker who meets with her Polish Holocaust-surviving father (played by non-Pole Stephen Fry) in Poland to explore the places of his childhood, including Auschwitz. Though this story is based on real events from her memoir, it was only half-baked in its execution and depicted the Polish characters as one-dimensional suspects. Also, I don’t know how conscious the filmmakers were in creating such a direct metaphor for what’s happening in the West Bank: NY Jewish woman has the potential to reclaim a house from a Polish family that had lived there since her family was sent to concentration camps. Handled very clumsily I think.
32. Oasis
A short doc about the failure of the new Chilean constitution, from the protests that sought to upend the previous Pinochet one with the vote to not ratify the new one. It offers brief, un-narrated glimpses into different public events during this process, not taking one side or the other but becomes unmoored to any purpose beyond being some kind of C-SPAN fly on the wall to largely uninteresting events.
33. The Strangers’ Case
War porn that hammers and numbs all the nuance away. Winner of the Amnesty International Film Award (lol).
34. Another End
A post-religious bore-fest sci-fi about grief with a not-good twist ending. Like its sleek finished futuristic surfaces, all energy and uniqueness is sanitized away. They should have changed the pov to either of the female characters, which would have been a thousand times more interesting.
35. The Devil’s Bath
Schlecht and provocative without any substance. Based on real events that took place in Austria in the eighteenth century, where it was a sin to commit suicide. So instead they killed children, confessed to a priest to be absolved, then were put to death. One of the best examples of a film showing how bad things used to be, aren’t you glad to be living now? This will be a big hit among the Goth and sadomasochistic crowds who want doomgloom vibes and don’t want to be bothered with plot, character arc, or a thesis. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
36. L’ Empire (The Empire)
Winner of the Silver Bear Jury Prize, which is one of the best trolls I’ve ever seen from a film festival. When the French hit, they hit hard. But when you take those big swings, an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s Third) could launch a film deep into la merde terrestre.
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