Congrats to the Taviani Bros. (who?), the inveterate sibling filmmakers whose Shakespeare-in-prison semi-doc Caesar Must Die has claimed the top prize at this year's Berlinale. Stephanie Zacharek has more about the Golden Bear winner in her review from Berlin — along with more about Barbara, whose own helmer, Christian Petzold, won the festival's Best Director award. (Tabu and Sister nabbed hardware as well.) As Stephanie predicted, Caesar Must Die secured U.S. distribution in this week in Berlin and will be Stateside later this year; stay tuned to Movieline for details about how and when you can see it, and read on for the complete list of winners. Congrats to all!
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Poor Robert Pattinson: The weight of proving himself, in a movie that doesn’t have the words “Twilight” and “Saga” in the title, is shaping up to be heavier than a vampire’s curse. In last year’s Water for Elephants, he had a charming naivete, a seemingly natural shyness that was wholly inoffensive, if not exactly memorable. And as social schemer Georges Duroy in Bel Ami, playing here at the Berlinale out of competition on the festival’s next-to-last day, he works harder to redeem himself than any actor should have to: He applies a scowl from Column A with an eyebrow furrow from Column B to express displeasure; Smirk No. 4 denotes a moment of extreme hubris. The effect is like watching an athlete trying not to break a sweat – you might want to root for him, but there’s a part of you that just wants him to let it all out already.
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Today is the next-to-last day of competition screenings here at the Berlinale, which means people are speculating about a possible winner – to the extent that speculation is ever possible. This year’s jury is headed by Mike Leigh, and at dinner the other night some friends and I were playing the “WWMLL” – What Will Mike Leigh Like? – game.
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Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s inventive, playful black-and-white Tabu — part drama, part romance, part malaria-induced fever dream — has turned out to be a favorite among critics at the Berlinale this week, alongside Christian Petzold’s Barbara, and it’s not hard to see why. Tabu was one of the few movies here to be heralded by a ripple of excitement — it seemed to be the one competition film everyone was curious to see. In the movie’s first section — despite an intriguing reference to a “sad and melancholic crocodile” — I feared the buzz would amount to nothing. And what if this crocodile never actually appeared? I wasn’t leaving without my crocodile, I decided, and luckily, I wasn’t disappointed.
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Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car, screening in competition here at the Berlinale, is a sprawl of a movie, wonderful in some small, intimate ways but confounding when you step back to look at the bigger picture.
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No one, as far as I know, has come to the Berlinale in search of Gillian Anderson, the strawberry-blonde vixen who set millions of hearts aflutter -- and not just male ones -- with her role in the supernaturally beloved ’90s show The X-Files. But Anderson has surprised those of us who love her by showing up -- in small roles, but still -- in two films here, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ursula Meier’s Sister. In Shadow Dancer, a thriller set in early-‘90s Belfast, she’s a British secret-service officer who squares off against a colleague (played by Clive Owen). In Sister, she’s the well-heeled patron of a tony Swiss ski resort -- and a mom -- who befriends a young thief and rapscallion who barely knows what it means to be a child.
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This should be interesting: Variety's Gregg Goldstein reports from Berlinale that Billy Bob Thornton is working on a script for an "'ethereal' road movie" entitled And Then We Drove. Based partly on experiences from his time with ex Angelina Jolie, Thornton says "[it's about] a guy who's on a road trip and picks up this girl along the way, and what happens to them. It's about the question of life: 'What is this? Where do I fit in?'" Or, maybe: Honey, Have You Seen My Vial of Blood? Thornton, who premiered his latest directorial effort Jayne Mansfield's Car in Berlin, will also direct. [Variety]
Nothing says “international film festival” like a 9 a.m. goat flaying, as I was reminded at Sunday morning’s screening of Spiros Stathoulopoulos’s Metéora, which is being shown here in competition. Though I wasn’t too happy about the onscreen animal suffering -- the actual slaughter of the poor beast may have been simulated, but I’m not sure -- I did find the picture bewitching in other ways.
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There were many happy faces among critics on Saturday, the third day of the Berlinale. Because despite what I wrote yesterday about the criticism the festival has faced in recent years, particularly in terms of the films chosen for competition, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this year’s festival is off to a promising start. Of the six competition films that have been screened so far, not one has set any of my random sampling of critic friends howling with derision, or walking around wearing a perpetual scowly-frowny face.
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The Berlinale is the baked potato of European film festivals, and I don’t mean that as an insult, or even a backhanded compliment. A few months back, I was asked by David Hudson, of the superb movie-resource website Mubi, to offer a few observations about the Berlinale, which I’ve been attending since 2008. That year and every year since, the Berlinale has paid my way to participate in the Talent Press arm of the Talent Campus: Along with three other mentors, I coach young critics from all over the world (there are eight participants every year) as they cover the festival through assignments they’re given each day. While I’m here, I also see as many movies as I can and write about them. Hudson was putting together a sampling of opinions from festival attendees from all over the world, in preparation for a daylong symposium that was held by the German Film Critics Association in October. One of the issues the symposium hoped to address was the festival’s diminishing reputation: In recent years, the German and international press hasn’t exactly showered the festival with kindness. (Shane Danielsen’s Indiewire report from last year was particularly damning, if highly entertaining, though I disagree with him about the smell of the venues.)
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The Berlin Film Festival and European Film Market are getting underway as we speak, exposing an all-new crop of good, bad and WTF-inducing projects we'll be hearing and/or seeing about in the year or two to come. But there are also revelations to be found regarding more familiar titles. Take Lars von Trier's already notorious, sexually explicit Nymphomaniac, for example.
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