This news has been hanging around for a few days, but amid the Venice hubbub, I haven’t found a moment to post it until today — though we did address it briefly in Friday’s Oscar Talk. With less than a month to go until the deadline, the pile of official submissions for the Best Foreign […]

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Unlike large voting bodies such as the Academy, the decisions of rotating festival juries are rarely easy to anticipate — when only six people are determining the awards, as was the case at this year’s Berlinale, who knows what idiosyncratic personal tastes might come into play? So it is that the only truly surprising thing […]

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The Berlinale competition drew to a close this morning, with Joshua Marston’s “The Forgiveness of Blood” — more on that in a final roundup this weekend — wrapping up a selection that’s been a typically mixed bag for the festival. Healthy critical argument has flared up over a number of titles — including lone Asian […]

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In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale. I probably should have mentioned this earlier and posted some sort of […]

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Catch up with the idea behind this series here. Can I just take a moment here to publicize that the 1980’s are by far, my least favorite decade in cinema. Despite the great titles that I’ll be spotlighting here and my feelings that it was the best time for blockbuster filmmaking, it’s just a generally […]

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