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‘The Dinner’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
Two couples gather to eat at one of those insanely foo-foo cuisine-as-postmodern-art restaurants, and the scalding putdowns and toxic truths fly. It’s a dramatic format that reaches all the way back to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” yet Oren Moverman’s adaptation of the Herman Koch novel is more than the sum of its pressure-cooker gambits. It’s a rousingly dark and suspenseful clash, as Steve Coogan (cast against type as a bitterly unhinged history teacher) and Richard Gere (as his smooth politico brother) square off, with Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall — as their deceptively recessive spouses — nudging their way into the fray. The performances are skillful and juicy, but the movie also zeroes in on an act of cruelty that speaks to the death of empathy in our time. –Owen Gleiberman
‘Final Portrait’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
It’s 1964, and Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush), famous for his spindly emaciated sculptures that look as if they weren’t so much carved as dripped, offers to paint the portrait of his friend James Lord (Armie Hammer), an author and art critic. For two weeks, Lord shows up at Giacometti’s studio in Paris — a dusty cluttered garret at the end of an alleyway — and that’s more or less the entire movie. Which is exactly why Stanley Tucci’s minimalist biopic works so niftily. Instead of laboring to tell an artist’s life story, Tucci re-creates Giacometti’s late period in quick light brush strokes, giving us the sensation that we’re just hanging out with him: at the studio, where he’s a self-flagellating perfectionist who can never bring himself to complete a work, or at the local bistro, where he guzzles red wine and canoodles with his prostitute muse. The movie is a portrait of the artist as aging monomaniac-scamp, and Rush’s portrayal — tender, jabbering, bellicose, delightful — hits the true note. –Owen Gleiberman
‘Return to Montauk’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
At 77, director Volker Schlöndorff (“The Tin Drum”) has done something as unlikely as it is enjoyable: He has made his tasteful, Euro-literate version of a Lifetime Movie — and in its soapy middlebrow way, it’s his liveliest and most youthful-spirited movie in a long time. As Max, a world-famous novelist who arrives in New York to plug his latest masterpiece, Stellan Skarsgård appears to be playing an adult with a philosophical bent, but, in fact, his character is an arrested adolescent who uses his high-minded Continental glamour to excuse a wayward life of “freedom.” Though married, Max can’t stop himself from reconnecting with Rebecca (Nina Hoss), his lover from years before, and as the two take a day trip out to the end of Long Island, it’s not just the sparks that get rekindled; it’s the truth of why those embers faded. Hoss, achingly beautiful, does a full-on portrait of emotionally ravaged middle age. –Owen Gleiberman
‘In the Intense Now’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
In this remarkably resonant and personal documentary meditation, Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles, using nothing but super-8 home-movie footage and newsreels, interweaves three iconic political upheavals of the late ’60s: the Paris uprisings of May 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czecholslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring, and the rise of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. In Prague, Salles captures the unbearable heaviness of tyranny, and how the death of freedom there had to do not just with the thumb of the Soviets but with the Czech people’s resignation. In China, which Salles sees through the eyes of his mother (who documented a trip she took in silent footage), he paints a provocatively blissed-out portrait of the national cult that flourished under Mao: a vision that’s naïve, yet also haunting. It’s in Paris, however, where “In the Intense Now” finds its most indelible moment, exploring how the May ‘68 eruption of student protest, mass workers’ strikes, and national soul-searching reshaped the consciousness of France. Throughout the film, Salles chronicles events but also dares to infuse them with his own radical romanticism. –Owen Gleiberman
‘The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov’
The Vladimir Putin regime, as much it’s been in the news lately, doesn’t exactly broadcast its clampdowns on freedom. And that’s part of what makes Askold Kurovk’s brave and scrappy exposé so vital. It’s about what happened to the celebrated Ukranian film director Oleg Sentsov after he went public attacking the annexation of Crimea: He was arrested and charged with terrorism, all so that he could be made an example of. (The message to elites and intellectuals was: Lodge the wrong sort of protest, and this is what will happen to you.) The movie is a protest against Russia’s ominous machinery of political imprisonment — but seen against the backdrop of President Trump’s ongoing apologia for Putin, it’s also a bulletin that reminds us of the oppression Trump’s lies are covering up. –Owen Gleiberman
‘A Fantastic Woman’
Image Credit: Courtesy: Participant Media
Ever sound in their judgment when it comes to foreign-language fare, Sony Pictures Classics made the smartest purchase of the festival by scooping this stylish, riveting and very moving transgender drama from Chile. Anchored by a luminous breakout performance by transgender actress Daniela Vega, it could be the most candid and empathetic study of the social and institutional discrimination faced by trans people to hit arthouses since “Boys Don’t Cry.” Its sensitivity and formal expertise will come as no surprise to anyone who saw director Sebastian Lelio’s “Gloria,” a wise, bittersweet comedy of middle-aged rebirth that charmed the Berlinale in 2013: that film deserved more exposure and awards traction than it ultimately received, so here’s hoping Lelio has better luck this time. –Guy Lodge
‘The Party’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
Overlength was the biggest recurring problem I had with films at this year’s Berlinale: promising, well-founded stories that ultimately soured because they didn’t know when to quit. So what a joy to see Sally Potter’s riotous real-time farce unexpectedly cut and run at the 70-minute mark — just before its key joke threatens to run out of gas. Unapologetically slight it is, but this breezily topical tale of a haughty British politician (Kristin Scott Thomas) whose life swiftly falls apart on the evening she celebrates her greatest career triumph gave a rather dour festival its purest shot of energy. Not all viewers will tune its very arch English humour, but for those who do, the banter is fast, nasty and delivered with gleeful relish by a consummate cast of pros, including Cillian Murphy, Timothy Spall and a divine, award-worthy Patricia Clarkson. –Guy Lodge
‘On the Beach at Night Alone’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
Hong Sangsoo’s detractors — and this critic, admittedly, used to be one — complain that he makes the same film over and over, with only minor variations. And that’s mostly true, but over his last few works, those variations have added up to a distinct, melancholic maturation. Once again, his latest deals with love, loneliness, filmmaking and the loosening of tongues by Korea’s notorious soju liquor, as a celebrated actress (Kim Minhee) struggles to find herself — first in Europe, later at home — following a bitter breakup with an older, married director. It’s a mellow, low-key talkfest, but given a painful stab of genuine heartache by the wonderful Kim — who, following a striking breakthrough as one of the leads in last year’s Korean hit “The Handmaiden,” here delivers the richest performance in Hong’s filmography. –Guy Lodge
‘Felicite’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
African cinema is still woefully under-represented on the international festival circuit, but Berlin has stuck by to Franco-Senegalese auteur Alain Gomis — who notches up his second Competition appearance with this sensual, deep-feeling portrait of poverty and poetry on the streets of Kinshasa, and rewards the festival’s loyalty with a genuinely unique, inventive vision. Singer-turned-actress Véro Tshanda Beya makes one of the festival’s most transfixing debuts in the title role, as a single mother and bar singer who turns to an unlikely source of help when her son is hospitalized, but it’s the rumbling energy of Kinshasa itself that is the real star of the film: A natural visual (and musical) storyteller, Gomis ensures distant viewers can practically smell the city’s sidewalks. –Guy Lodge
‘Animals’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
The sidebars at Berlin are a dangerously mixed bag: there’s little way of telling in advance whether that quirky-sounding outlier in the programme will prove a singular gem or a burial-ready obscurity. One of the most pleasant surprises in the Forum programme this year was this wickedly surreal, perverse marital comedy from Polish original Greg Zglinski, in which an Austrian couple lose all sense of themselves — and each other — on a professional sabbatical to idyllic rural Switzerland. I’ll save the details for my full, forthcoming review, but suffice to say this identity doubling and talking cats are among the elements thrown into this strange stew, which stands comparison to the work of Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos while remaining entirely its own creation. I hope distributors are feeling adventurous. –Guy Lodge
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