By Michael Roddy Art expert Mihail (veteran Bulgarian stage director Galin Stoev, in fine form) works in Montreal for collector Christophe (Christian Bégin) who has become obsessed, through seeing online videos, with an eight-year-old supposed art prodigy in rural Bulgaria named Nina (twins Ekaterina and Sofia Stanina). If the girl is who she is made…Read more Uprooting ripples down the years in Berlinale “Nina Roza”
reviews
Hüller superb as 17th-century woman passing as man in “Rose”
By Michael Roddy Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”, "Toni Erdmann") gives a textbook performance of subtlety and craft as the titular character in the Berlinale competition film “Rose”, based on the true story of a woman who dressed and passed as a man not in the modern-day metrosexual world, but in the strictly gendered…Read more Hüller superb as 17th-century woman passing as man in “Rose”
Do-gooder can’t stop progress, or death, in Jude’s “Kontinental ’25” at Berlinale
A homeless man, dressed in tattered clothes and shouting out swear words at random, packs trash into a carryall as he lurches along the leaf-strewn paths of a forlorn amusement park, whose chief attraction is clunky, animatronic dinosaurs. When he leaves the park and walks into the city of Cluj, in northwestern Romania, he passes…Read more Do-gooder can’t stop progress, or death, in Jude’s “Kontinental ’25” at Berlinale
“La Cocina” looks at illegal immigrants through a kitchen lens
Rooney Mara as Julia and Raúl Briones as Pedro in "La Cocina" Once in a while a film comes along that is so audacious and outrageous it takes your breath away. One such was the 2014 Argentine film “Wild Tales”, a series of vignettes in one of which two male drivers fight to their deaths…Read more “La Cocina” looks at illegal immigrants through a kitchen lens
Dumont’s “L’Empire” sci-fi satire fails on liftoff at Berlinale
Anamaria Vartolomei as Jane in Bruno Dumont's Berlinale competitor "L'Empire" The highly anticipated space sci-fi offering “L'Empire” from Bruno Dumont, one of the leading lights of French intellectual cinema, failed to achieve warp speed at the Berlinale, where it had its premiere on Sunday and is in contention for the festival's main Golden Bear prize.…Read more Dumont’s “L’Empire” sci-fi satire fails on liftoff at Berlinale
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