Category: Film festival

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 …

By Robert Koehler

Even the Rain is a Ken Loach film directed by Iciar Bollain. Even more, it’s a film by Paul Laverty, Loach’s regular screenwriter. The film is a useful object in this regard: By watching Even the Rain (in Palm Springs because of its status as Spain’s foreign language Oscar submission), it’s clearer than ever that all of Loach’s recent films written by Laverty (up to and including Route Irish, one of the worst films ever to screen in a Cannes competition) are less films by Loach than films by Laverty. The same Laverty formula in the …

By Robert Koehler

Missing a film for eleven months since its premiere, particularly if it won an overrated but nevertheless weighty prize like Berlinale’s Golden Bear, can create an odd mix of sensations, with frustration (how I missed it in Berlin in the first place) to excessive anticipation (from the sheer wait). It can’t be allowed to cloud judgement, but it’s a challenge to sweep away when the film is finally seen. That was what I was going through this morning with the first screening in Palm Springs of Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey, the final part of his Yusuf trilogy …

By Robert Koehler

Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Francois Ozon–the ideal trio combo to launch the latest edition of the aggressively middlebrow Palm Springs Film Festival, which promotes a certain brand of world cinema that continues to view Europe as the center of the world. And if it stars Deneuve, all the better. The film? You may have heard of it, even though it astoundingly, amazingly, inexplicably, ridiculously hasn’t screened at a US festival until this very moment. (The closest location was Toronto, on the heels of its world premiere in Venice, which got it because Cannes stupidly passed on it …