Author: Robert Koehler

By Robert Koehler

It’s both a strange year and a good year to be away from the Cannes film festival. To not participate in the annual May ritual of descending on the Cote d’Azur (always via TGV off the plane at Paris De Gaulle) and subject yourself to ten days of virtually nonstop viewing from 8:30 a.m. until past midnight–minus times away at the laptop to shoot out hopefully crafted critical responses, composed recklessly when the films are still warm, an athletic process that turns movie watching into an exercise in extreme physical focus toward the screen and away from …

By Robert Koehler

The Turin Horse begins with a micro-fiction by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, reminiscent of both Donald Barthelme’s short fictions placing historical figures in fictitious situations and W.S. Merwin’s prose-poems which combine many different values, but frequently stress two: radical brevity and openness. Krasznahorkai wrote “The Turin Horse” micro-fiction in the early ’80s, and his friends Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitsky first heard it in a public reading at that time. The story simply tells of a horse in 1888 being mercilessly beaten by its frustrated owner for not budging, and how Nietzsche, passing by on the street in Turin, …

The Residents

By Robert Koehler

The Berlinale is stumbling, bumbling along through its final days, and here’s what can definitively said: Even with more than enough films that don’t belong in a major lineup, the competition isn’t completely bad, and Forum is–with a few exceptions–a bust. While not quite a reversal of fortunes, the relative rise of the competition and decline of Forum is what the 61st edition of the Berlinale is going to be remembered for–that and the premiere of The Turin Horse, Bela Tarr’s last film. (Or so he claims, as of today.)

Berlin’s competitions haven’t been …

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

By Robert Koehler

Some small items, as it gets colder and colder in Berlin….

Barring a miraculous upset at the last moment, expect the first significant prize out of the Berlinale from the International Film Critics Federation (FIPRESCI) to go to Bela Tarr’s extraordinary, Beckettian competition film, The Turin Horse. More on Bela’s horse in an upcoming posting…

The eight-day schedule of press screenings for the Forum section ended yesterday, exactly as it began: With a genre film that may have come straight from the head of Tony Scott. The first Forum …

By Robert Koehler

Good, the first controversy at the Berlin film festival. Why “good”? Controversies keep you warmed up, which you need to do in Berlin, where the snow fell today for the first time since Thursday’s opening with the Coens’ wonderful and genuine Charles Portis adaptation True Grit.

But to the real stuff: Don’t believe the trades on the first excellent competition film, Ulrich Koehler’s Sleeping Sickness. (No, there’s no relation–not that I know of.) In the least problematic of the three English-language trade reviews, my Variety colleague Boyd Van Hoeij incorrectly observes that the film “mostly …