
Berlinale: The Message (El Mensaje) (2025)
★★★☆☆
The Message is a beguiling, opaque film in Competition at the Berlinale.
★★★★☆
Paternal Leave is charming and heartbreaking at the same time. It’s the debut feature written and directed by Alissa Jung.
★★★★☆
Berlin Film Festival 2025
★★★★☆
Memories of a Burning Body is an incredibly moving, candid docufiction about older women’s sexuality, directed by award-winning Antonella Sudasassi Furniss.
★★★☆☆
Who Do I Belong To, an unsettlingly topical first feature by Meryam Joobeur, looks at identity in a post-ISIS world and sets out to challenge perceptions and prejudices.
★★★☆☆
Brother’s Keeper: Ferit Karaha’s tragic tale of boarding school brutality to Kurdish boys in snowy eastern Turkey.
★★★☆☆
Orlando, My Political Biography by trans activist Paul B Preciado is a moving documentary inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel.
★★★☆☆
The Heart of an Oak, directed by Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux, edited by Sylvie Lager, is a year of magnificent photography in the life of the creatures – animals, birds and insects – that live in or around a huge 200-year-old oak tree in a forest in France.
★★★★☆
Elaha, directed by Milena Aboyan, is a powerful contemporary story about the conflict between tradition and modernity in the life of a young girl from an immigrant family in Germany.
★★★★☆
Opponent, written and directed by Milad Alami, is a powerful, must-see film about the refugee experience and conflicted desires.
★★★★☆
Berlinale 2024: Awards
★★★★☆
Reas is an extraordinary documentary and musical by Lola Arias set in a women’s prison in Argentina, unlike anything you have seen before.
★★★★☆
The Editorial Office, the second film by Ukrainian Roman Bondarchuk, is a vicious, powerful satire of a post-truth world.
★★★☆☆
Who Do I Belong To, an unsettlingly topical first feature by Meryam Joobeur, looks at identity in a post-ISIS world and sets out to challenge perceptions and prejudices.