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5 Doomed Romance Leonardo DiCaprio Movi ...
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Review: The Great Gatsby
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The Best & Worst Moments Of 'Iron Man 3'
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Steven Soderbergh's Idea For Remakes
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Robert Downey Jr.'s Career In 7 Films
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Can 'World War Z' Break Even?
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Talk: Darren Aronofsky & Clint Eastwood
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Best Of The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
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Steve Soderbergh On Cinema, Studios, Mor ...
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Most Anticipated Summer Blockbusters
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Recap: 'The King Of Comedy' 30th Anniversary ...
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Excl: Lynn Shelton To Direct 'I'm Down'
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Excl: Lake Bell Joins 'Million Dollar Ar ...
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The Essentials: Douglas Sirk
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10 Essential Cinematic Antiheroes
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The Best Commercials & Music Videos Of Michael ...
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Clip: 'Errors Of The Human Body'
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Interview: Jeff Nichols
The Playlist
The obsessives' guide to contemporary cinema via film discussion, news, reviews, features, nostalgia, movie music, soundtracks, DVDs and more.Interviews
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Interview: Noah Baumbach Talks 'Frances Ha' -
Ben Wheatley Talks 'Sightseers,' Violence & More -
Mark Romanek On 'One Hour Photo' & Leaving 'Cinderella' -
Kaya Scodelario Talks 'Emanuel & The Truth About Fishes' -
Sarah Polley Talks 'Stories We Tell' -
Alice Eve Talks Role Playing & Neil LaBute -
Lake Bell On Movie Trailers & 'In A World' -
Lynn Shelton Talks 'Touchy Feely'
The Playlist
Berlin Review: Jane Campion's 'Top Of The Lake' A Satisfying & Cinematic Crime "Novel" In The Shape Of A TV Show
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 12, 2013 11:58 AM
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- 2 Comments
Taking the concept of binge-watching to a whole new theatrical level, we were lucky enough to spend most of our Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival in a large auditorium consuming Jane Campion’s six-hour “Top of the Lake” TV series, which will air in seven episodes on The Sundance Channel starting March 18th. It was a great experience, and not just because of the quality storytelling and filmmaking on display, but because of the sense of community and buzz you get at this type of event. We saw the show divided into three two-hour chunks, and during the brief intermissions, the audience buzzed with speculation: who was the father of the unborn child? Was X dead or alive? What was the significance of Y?
Berlin Review: Wonderful 'Gloria' An Inspired Feat Of Writing, Direction & Performance
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 11, 2013 11:57 AM
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- 0 Comments
Produced by rising Chilean force-to-be-reckoned-with Pablo Larraín ("Post Mortem," "No"), Sebastián Lelio's fourth feature, "Gloria," has proven one of our most pleasant Berlin Film Festival surprises. While films focusing on female protagonists have not been in short supply during this and previous Berlinales, many of them featuring strong central performances and a realist style, Santiago-set "Gloria" is marked out by two key differences that set it apart from, and above, many surface-similar films.
Berlin Review: James Franco-Starring 'Maladies' Maroons A Dream Indie Cast In A Wasteland Of Tiresome Self-Indulgence
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 11, 2013 11:03 AM
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- 4 Comments
Carrying the dubious distinction of being a film that managed to try our patience after just five minutes, “Maladies” is for us best summed up in one word: wasteful. It is wasteful of the considerable talents of a fabulous cast, wasteful of a pleasingly off-kilter visual approach, and wasteful of our time. It is even wasteful of a director whose instincts, no matter how much he may want to kick against them, seem to lie more in the direction of the kind of classical, straightforward story he is at pains here to not give us.
Berlin Review: Biopic 'Lovelace' Oddly Uninterested In Linda Lovelace
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 9, 2013 7:41 PM
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- 3 Comments
Not so much a film about Linda Lovelace as a film about a bunch of things that happen to Linda Lovelace, including a destructive marriage to seeming complete, total, bonafide scumbag sonofabitch Chuck Traynor, today saw the first international screening of Sundance pick-up “Lovelace” at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s a glossy, starry package featuring loving '70s set design, costuming and narratively crucial hairstyling (more on that later), but the main question was always around the casting of the leading lady, especially given that the last few years have seen a flurry of names come and go from both this and rival Lovelace project “Inferno” (which famously once boasted Seyfried’s “Mean Girls” co-star Lindsay Lohan).
Berlin Review: 'A Single Shot' With Sam Rockwell Unravels From A Tight Premise Into A Downbeat, Messy Misfire
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 9, 2013 1:36 PM
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- 3 Comments
The main narrative surrounding the evolution of David M. Rosenthal’s “A Single Shot,” which premieres at the Berlin Film Festival today, has been about the longer-than-usual casting merry-go-round -- since 2009 a roster of talent as long as your arm has signed up then signed out of the film. However the fear that, as the accepted wisdom goes, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a project that takes this long to put together was somewhat mitigated by the kind of names who kept on stepping up: as worrying as it might be to lose the likes of (pre-breakout) Michael Fassbender, Alessandro Nivola, Forest Whitaker or Juliette Lewis, it doesn’t sting so hard when you get Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Jeffrey Wright and Jason Isaacs to show up instead -- all actors we admire.
Berlin Review: Matt Porterfield’s ‘I Used To Be Darker’ Has Empathy To Burn But Lacks Urgency
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 8, 2013 2:16 PM
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- 0 Comments
In between the big events that mark our lives -- the births, the deaths, the falling-in-loves, the breaking-ups, the runnings-away, the reconciliations -- there often exists a kind of pause moment. And it’s one such moment that Matt Porterfield’s Sundance-approved third feature, “I Used to be Darker,” which plays at the Berlin Film Festival today, deals with; a caesura that punctuates the Big Life Business that is going on in the disparate lives of one fragmented family.
Berlin Review: Joshua Oppenheimer’s 'The Act Of Killing' Is A Constantly Astounding, Terrifying Masterpiece
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 8, 2013 12:44 PM
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- 8 Comments
Holy fucking shit. All apologies for incoherence in the following review but having just emerged from Joshua Oppenheimer’s shattering documentary “The Act of Killing,” which screened here in Berlin this morning, I am still shaking. I may not be in the best state to write about it, in fact, but there’s no way I can think about anything else, so I’m going to try. “The Act of Killing” is truly one of the most intensely unsettling, frightening, riveting films I've seen, maybe ever.
Berlin Review: Wong Kar Wai's 'The Grandmaster' Is Occasionally Mesmerizing, Mostly Muddled
- By Jessica Kiang
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- February 7, 2013 2:05 PM
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- 14 Comments
Perhaps the best place to begin a review of Wong Kar Wai’s “The Grandmaster” is at the end -- or a few minutes after. An epilogue of sorts, which happens suddenly and far enough into the credits that maybe half the audience was watching it from the stairs, serves as a pretty representative microcosm of everything that is right about the film, and everything that is not.
The 5 Most Anticipated Movies Of The 2013 Berlin Film Festival
- By Oliver Lyttelton
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- February 6, 2013 3:26 PM
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- 0 Comments
We're still brushing the snow off our metaphorical evening wear from the Sundance Film Festival, which feels like it ended only yesterday, and yet tomorrow sees the second stop of The Playlist's 2013 festival roadshow get underway, with the opening night of the Berlin Film Festival. The earliest in the year of the Big Three European festivals (alongside Cannes and Venice), the Berlinale, founded in the German capital in 1951, is traditionally one of the most prestigious events in the movie calendar.
Berlin Film Festival Adds River Phoenix's 'Dark Blood,' David Gordon Green's 'Prince Avalanche,' 'Before Midnight' & More
- By Oliver Lyttelton
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- January 18, 2013 12:04 PM
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- 1 Comment
The Sundance Film Festival is only just getting underway today, but we're already looking further down the festival calendar. The first SXSW announcements came earlier in the week, and early this morning, the first of the big three European festivals of the year (preceding Cannes and Venice), the Berlin International Film Festival, has been solidifying the line-up for its 63rd edition.
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Recent Comments
When I saw Star Trek, I saw the same Anchorman 2 trailer I'd seen before.
To be honest. I loved Emma Stone as Gwen Stacey. I first saw her appearance in Superbad and Easy A
I really think TV is better place to flesh out and utilize Elmore Leonard material. The Arrangement
I second Glass' question- do tell!
@JD- Based on the reviews, The Past is neck and neck with ILD but then again, I'm basing this
That movie was utterly ridiculous and was saved only by F. Scott Fitzgerald's plot and
Yeah, Spielberg's gonna give Only God Forgives the Palme d'Or....
What a horrible movie. There is no there there. I'm glad I only paid $5.00 thru on-demand to
You left out "52 Pickup" starring Roy Scheider , Ann Margaret, & Clarence Williams,
http://www dot movie2k.to/Star-Trek-Into-Darkness-watch-movie-2966030.html