Ethan Hawke He is not only one of the biggest stars of this year's Berlinale, but also one of the festival's most beloved actors, having presented all three installments of the Linklater's Trilogy, Boyhood and, just a year ago, Blue moonfor which he is nominated for an Oscar. But even he was caught up in the controversy this Tuesday during the presentation of his new work, the magnificent adventure film. The weight, because of the controversy surrounding this edition: the absence of a condemnation from the Berlinale regarding the genocide in Palestine and the power struggle between the press and the festival management regarding the questions that demand an explicit stance from creators on hot political issues

In 2021, after more than 90 years serving lunches and dinners in Barcelona's Raval, Pol Rodríguez's parents had to close their family restaurant, Can Lluís. They were evicted by the investment fund that owned the building, with whom they had been negotiating to buy the premises for seven years. Rodríguez, who was then writing a film about homeless people, felt that "reality was entering the project" and turned his family's experience into the starting point for a fictional story about the housing conflict, the predatory voracity of capitalism, and the resilience of people who feel betrayed by ineffective laws.

It's becoming a genre in itself: the only redeeming feature of a failed film is Amy Adams's performance. After Nightbitch, The woman at the window either Hillbilly elegyTo the list of blunders, we must add the family melodrama. At the sea, which premiered this Monday in the official competition of the Berlinale. In the film, the actress ofArrival She plays the director of a dance company who reconnects with her family after spending six months in a rehabilitation center for alcoholics. Childhood trauma and addiction are the major themes of this film directed by Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó, a director who tends to have little faith in the viewer's intelligence and, therefore, often underlines all the ideas in the stories he tells. Adams, who did not present the film at the Berlinale, brings depth to a character who has hit rock bottom after a life in the shadow of her father, a successful choreographer, a functioning alcoholic, and a negligent father figure—qualities she has inherited more or less unconsciously. At the sea It delves into the wounds of this woman in crisis, with no desire to return to her former self, forced to rethink her work and marriage, and perhaps even to sell the house where she grew up, a beautiful beachfront mansion in Cape Cod, the summer retreat of New York's wealthy. As Fragments of a Woman (2020)A superior film by the director himself, Mundruczó brings to the screen a work by his wife, the playwright Kata Weber, but here the protagonist's emotional journey lacks depth and substance. Amy Adams' talent demands more stimulating challenges, and her career needs a good shake-up.

It makes sense that if Germany hosts the world's largest heavy metal festival – the Wacken Festival, with more than 200 bands – the country's major film festival is the chosen venue to premiere the season's heavy metal documentary. The Ballad of Judas PriestMoreover, it has in its favor an element highly valued at the Berlinale: the vindication queer through the figure of its iconic singer, Rob Halford, who came out in the late 90s after nearly three decades of imposed silence regarding his sexual orientation.

They're not always well executed, but there are many interesting ideas in them. The momentThe film presented this Saturday at the Berlinale features singer Charli XCX playing a fictionalized version of herself. This decision creates a curious tension and ambiguity, because the film draws on the singer's recent biography, but manipulates and alters it through the mechanisms of fiction. "I've spent my whole life preparing for this role, I'm very much a method actor," Charli XCX joked at the Berlinale, explaining that the film stems from the "extreme leap" she experienced when her last album, Brato, It became the album of the summer of 2024. "I went from being an artist who moved on the fringes with an almost exclusively gay audience to suddenly having a massive audience. I felt like I was losing control of something I had always been able to control, and that made me think about how we communicate art and how we communicate art and.

During the opening ceremony of the 2011 Berlinale, the first covered by ARA, the most notable absentee was Iranian Jafar Panahi, a jury member who had been banned from traveling to the festival by his country's authorities. His empty chair on the stage became a symbol of indignation and solidarity with the oppressed filmmaker. In 2023, the festival went a step further, announcing a ban on companies and media outlets with ties to the governments of Iran and Russia, which had just invaded Ukraine. That same year, the protagonist of the opening gala was another absent figure: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. who performed a ten-minute teleconference interventionThese are some examples of the character of a festival known for its commitment to political and social causes, always ready to take a stand and raise its voice, except for its refusal to condemn the genocide in Palestine, in line with the position of the German government, the festival's main source of funding. This contradiction became visible and was unfortunately amplified this Thursday when Wim Wenders, the president of this year's jury, justified the Berlinale's lack of a political stance. "We shouldn't get involved in politics," he said, gesturing with his hands. "If we make politically engaged films, we enter the realm of politics. But we must be a counterweight to politics (...) and do the work of the people, not the politicians." That a director who has almost never been interested in politics, like Wenders, would express himself in these terms is perfectly legitimate, but to do so as president of the jury of the Berlinale, the quintessential political festival, borders on cynicism.

Ivan runs into a former schoolmate at the Almería greenhouse where they both work, and their mutual attraction leads to a night of confidences and sex on the beach. It is, as the director says ofIvan & HadoumIan de la Rosa (Granada, 1988) describes it as "a classic love story with characters that aren't," because Ivan is a trans man and Hadoum is the rebellious daughter of North African migrants. This is perhaps what allows them to accept each other naturally and without prejudice. But the film, a Catalan co-production premiering this Friday at the Berlinale in the Panorama section, stems from overcoming the conflict with trans identity, a theme the director, who trained as a chess player, already explored eleven years ago in his short film. Victor XX"Now the conflict has to do with other things, with choosing what kind of person you want to be and empowering yourself through love and desire," explains De la Rosa, who in 2022 was, with the short film Farrucas, the first trans filmmaker to win a Gaudí award

"You know the expression for better or worseWell, I'm entering the phase for bad of my life," says the protagonist of Blue moon, presented this Tuesday at the Berlinale. The phrase could serve as a summary of the vital moment of Lorenz Hart that he tries to capture Richard Linklater in this film about one of the greatest lyricists of American popular music of the 20th century, who formed a successful tandem with composer Richard Rodgers: My funny valentine or the same Blue moon are two of hundreds of songs they created until Hart's alcoholism pushed Rodgers to seek out a more reliable lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. The night in 1943 in which the film is set Blue moon It is precisely the premiere of the musical Oklahoma!, Rodgers' first collaboration with Hammerstein, a stratospheric success that, in some way, closed the door to resuming the Rodgers & Hart tandem.

The last few weeks have not been easy for you. Michel Gondry. After having filmed a musical based on Pharrell Williams' childhood, Golden, one of the most anticipated releases of 2025, Variety revealed a few days ago that the editing had been cancelled and the film would never be released because the producers and Gondry considered that the material was not up to expectations. To dry the sorrows of such an ambitious and frustrated project, there is nothing better than to present another one at the antipodes: Maya, give me a title, a long animated film that collects the animated shorts stop motion that Gondry has been making for years for his daughter Maya, hand-animated pieces with colored cardboard, scissors, adhesive tape and a smartphone. The French director introduced him to the press at the Berlinale, although he did not accept "questions about Pharrell".

In Marion Cotillard She doesn't hesitate to play with her image as a great diva of modern French cinema. She already did it in the drama Family Matters by Arnaud Desplechin, where she played a proud actress entrenched in her hatred towards a writer brother, and now she returns to the role of a famous actress in The Ice Tour, by the French Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a modern and perverse reinterpretation of the tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen which was presented this Sunday in the competition of the Berlinale.

It seems like an eternity ago the celebrated victory of thriller Korean Parasites at the 2020 Oscars, perhaps because only a few days later the pandemic broke out and everything that preceded it belongs to another world. However, five years later everything is still the same as in those unforgettable Oscars: Bong Joon-ho's smile, his presence alongside actress Sharon Choi and a surprising, politically incisive and memorably staged film. In the case of Mickey 17, presented this Saturday at the Berlinale, is of an interstellar scale: the return of the Korean director is a science fiction comedy set in a spaceship that travels to space to colonize a distant planet, and the protagonist is a Robert Pattinson given over to comedy with a display of grimaces and physical humor reminiscent of both Buster Keaton and Jim Carrey.

Angela and Hector have created an almost perfect world. Their love is a shell of affection and trust that makes them invincible, or so it seems until motherhood endangers this bubble of happiness. The story sounds familiar, almost universal, but director Eva Libertad adds a component that changes everything: Angela is deaf and Hector is not. The Catalan production Deaf, which premieres this Saturday in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, takes as its reference the point of view of Ángela, who is played with absolute dedication by Miriam Garlo, the director's sister and the first deaf actress to star in a film in Spain. "Society does not educate us to relate to difference or disability," says Libertad. "If I know anything about deafness it is because Miriam is my sister. It is as if, without knowing it, we had been preparing all our lives to make this film."

Angela and Hector have created an almost perfect world. Their love is a shell of affection and trust that makes them invincible, or so it seems until motherhood endangers this bubble of happiness. The story sounds familiar, almost universal, but director Eva Libertad adds a component that changes everything: Angela is deaf and Hector is not. The Catalan production Deaf, which premieres this Saturday in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, takes as its reference the point of view of Ángela, who is played with absolute dedication by Miriam Garlo, the director's sister and the first deaf actress to star in a film in Spain. "Society does not educate us to relate to difference or disability," says Libertad. "If I know anything about deafness it is because Miriam is my sister. It is as if, without knowing it, we had been preparing all our lives to make this film."

Something is moving in the cinema being made in Catalonia, if we pay attention to the two Catalan short films that will premiere at the Berlinale which begins this Thursday: Almost September, by Lucia G. Romero, and Juanita, by Karen Joaquín and Uliane Tatit. And not because they are directed by young women, which is no longer a novelty in Catalan cinema, but because of the naturalness with which they deal with realities that fiction tends to problematize. Almost SeptemberFor example, the conflict in the protagonists' sexual-affective relationship does not arise from the fact that they are women or that one is racialized, but from the other's fear of abandonment. And that Juanita The fact that it is starred by a racialized teenager is a minor detail in the short's reflection on the cultural clash between the aesthetic stereotypes of a migrant family of Dominican origin and those of the host Catalan society.