Berlinale 2019 – all our coverage

Berlinale first look: Brief Story from the Green Planet attempts an otherworldly embrace of tolerance

One of the more upbeat of Berlinale Teddy Award winners, Santiago Loza’s low-budget curio champions three Argentine misfits on a self-fortifying alien rescue mission, finds Paul O’Callaghan.
Thursday 28 February 2019

Berlinale first look: We Are Little Zombies rocks out to the sound of grief

Four teenagers meet at a funeral and form a guitar group in this riotous, self-aware twist on a coming-of-age drama, writes Ella Kemp.
Wednesday 20 February 2019

A Dog Barking at the Moon review: an impressive and painfully honest family portrait

Xiang Zi’s first film addresses the family traumas of her childhood with maturity, humour and grace, writes Rhys Handley.
Wednesday 20 February 2019

Berlinale first look: A Colony captures a high-schooler’s tribal angst

Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s film follows a shy pre-teen as she comes to understand what it really means to be an outsider in small-town Canada, writes Kambole Campbell.
Wednesday 20 February 2019

Berlinale first look: MS Slavic 7 draws strength from the written word

This enchanting hybrid film about a box of archived letters may well be a breakthrough for independent filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz – a sweetly awkward tale of personal discovery, writes Ian Mantgani.
Wednesday 20 February 2019

By the Grace of God first look: François Ozon delineates a triptych of church trauma cases

François Ozon tamps down his natural filmmaking flair to tell the urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines story of Lyon’s Catholic Church abuse scandal, writes Jamie Dunn.
Saturday 16 February 2019

Piranhas first look: tracing the rise of a Napolitan criminal whippersnapper

Another gripping Saviano adaptation, from the Gomorrah writer’s latest book, Claudio Giovannesi’s film is an authentic account of Naples’ Littler Caesars, writes Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 16 February 2019

So Long, My Son first look: brooding around the decades of China’s one-child policy

Sixth Generation veteran Wang Xiaoshuai returns with an epic melodrama that hops across the tail-end of the 20th century, charting a complex if cumbersome emotional history of the country’s population-planning programme, writes Nick James.
Saturday 16 February 2019

Synonyms first look: Nadav Lapid muddies the dreams of an Israeli in Paris

Nadav Lapid’s boldly unsubtle allegory unsettles the audience’s understandings almost as aggressively as he does the political binaries of his young expat protagonist made over in a supposedly cosmopolitan Europe, says Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Friday 15 February 2019

Varda par Agnès first look: Varda adds another layer to her life in cinema

Agnès Varda’s latest self-portrait in film folds her recent career masterclass tour back into movie form, musing imaginatively on a selection of her works, subjects and experiences, writes Elisabet Caneza.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Bait first look: Mark Jenkin heralds the new weird Britain

Hand-cranked, caustic and wild-eyed, this home-brewed Cornish tourist-botherer captures the native temper of a blasted isle, says Ian Mantgani.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: Flatland is an intriguingly kitsch South African western

Jenna Bass scales up to this wild genre mashup that explores the social rifts which still divide the country, writes Andrew Gutman.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: Out Stealing Horses recounts a golden summer touched with tragedy

Hans Petter Moland merges Buddhist philosophy with postwar nostalgia in this evocative tale of a childhood remembered in old age by a lonely Stellan Skarsgård, writes Caitlin Quinlan.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind takes a fresh look at a familiar crisis

Chiwetel Ejiofor writes, directs and acts in this smart and unpatronising biopic of a young man who came up with an ingenious solution when his village in Malawi was stricken by drought, wries Kambole Campbell.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: Light of My Life navigates a world without women

Writer-director-producer Casey Affleck stars in this intimate film as a father guiding his young daughter through a dystopic society from which her gender has been obliterated, writes Ella Kemp.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: Buoyancy is a harrowing thriller about modern slavery

This assured debut by Australian writer-director Rodd Rathjen focuses on a young teenager put to work on a fishing trawler by a ruthless human trafficker, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

37 Seconds first look: debut filmmaker Hikari looks at desire and discrimination with compassion

A young woman with cerebral palsy defies expectations by writing adult comics in this open-minded, sympathetic and occasionally outlandish debut film by Hikari, writes Kambole Campbell.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Berlinale first look: God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya is a vivid feminist satire

Teona Strugar Mitevska’s first film in the main competition has proved a crowd-pleaser and no wonder, with a compelling lead performance from Zorica Nusheva as a young woman standing up to patriarchal church authorities, writes Geoff Andrew.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

I Was at Home, But… first look: an elegantly radical mystery

Classically composed and gorgeously immersive, the new film from Angela Schanelec is a bizarre, mystifying work that is oddly comforting despite its many puzzles, writes Jessica Kiang.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Ghost Town Anthology review: Denis Côté explores a community haunted by grief

The Québécois filmmaker’s unsettling look at a small-town tragedy resists the temptation to become a horror movie, but instead offers a thought-provoking study of how we cope when our loved ones are taken away, writes Geoff Andrew.
Wednesday 13 February 2019

Mr. Jones first look: Agnieszka Holland reprises the exposé of Stalin’s Ukrainian genocide

Agnieszka Holland’s period biopic honours Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s muck-raking reporting on the 1930s Holodomor genocide-famine in unsurprising but deft ways, says Nick James.
Monday 11 February 2019

Fourteen first look: etching an unstable friendship

Dan Sallitt’s first feature since 2012’s wonderful The Unspeakable Act follows a fissile teenage friendship across its prolonged adult half-life, writes Jamie Dunn.
Monday 11 February 2019

Öndög first look: a winding portrait of a tough dame on the Mongolian plain

Out on the Mongolian steppe, Wang Quan’an fashions a shaggy-camel story that dispenses with its police-procudural clothing to probe the heart of a gnarly herdswoman, writes Andrew Gutman.
Monday 11 February 2019

Berlinale first look: Earth presents a symphony of Anthropogenic destruction

Austrian nonfiction monumentalist Nikolaus Geyrhalter attends to seven hi-tech Western mining sites busy ravaging our planet, observes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Sunday 10 February 2019

Berlinale first look: The Golden Glove wallows in obscenity

Fatih Akin’s relentless rendition of the sexual sadism of 1970s Hamburg serial killer Fritz Honka plumbs the lowest depths of human turpitude, says Jessica Kiang.
Sunday 10 February 2019

Berlinale first look: The Blue Flower of Novalis is verité portraiture to reckon with

Gustave Vinagre and Rodrigo Carneiro’s raw, ribald chronicle of the ebulliently gay Marcelo has wit and pathos to match its bare-faced cheek, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Saturday 9 February 2019

Berlinale first look: The Kindness of Strangers is a misty-eyed Manhattan McFlurry

Lone Scherfig’s hokey fairy tale delivers Zoe Kazan’s runaway family into an entirely spurious New York, says Jessica Kiang.
Friday 8 February 2019