'Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn': Film Review | Berlin 2021

Magnolia Pictures has acquired the North American rights to Berlin Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn by Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude. The satire follows a high school teacher struggling with the fallout of her sex tape leaking online.

Christopher Vourlias Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which won the Golden Bear for best film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has sold to major territories for Heretic Outreach, Variety has learned exclusively.The Romanian writer-director’s latest feature is an irreverent satire about a schoolteacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), who finds her reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is uploaded on the internet.

Starting a serious art-house movie with an amateur porn video might seem bold, but for Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn it was a winning move. The jury of the 71st Berlinale picked the Romanian drama, in which a schoolteacher is caught up in a scandal after a homemade sex tape with her husband (that video we see at the top) gets posted online, for this year's Golden Bear as the best film of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival.

Young Europeans' swerve toward the right and far right gets another movie thrown at it with the premiere of Je Suis Karl, from German director Christian Schwochow (November Child, Cracks in the Shell).

BERLIN -- Judges at the Berlin Film Festival announced Friday that the satirical movie ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ by Romanian director Radu Jude has been awarded this year’s top prize, saying it has the “rare and essential quality of a lasting art work.”The film about a teacher facing scrutiny over a sex tape “captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time,” the Berlinale jury said as it awarded the film its

When filmmaker Maria Speth brought her documentary crew to a provincial German school, her goal was "open-ended observation." Observing a classroom where jam sessions and juggling lessons are as likely as lessons in math and grammar, she achieves that and more with Mr. Bachmann and His Class, one of the most effortlessly absorbing and deeply encouraging nonfiction films of recent memory.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Pornfrom Romanian director Radu Judehas won the Golden Bear for best film at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival. A scathing social satire about sex, lies and videotape, the movie was shot entirelyduring COVID lockdown last summer, with cast and crew all wearing antiviral masks.

Naman Ramachandran The Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear for best film has been won by “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc), directed by Radu Jude and produced by Ada Solomon.The international jury, made up of former Golden Bear winners, includes Mohammad Rasoulof from Iran, Nadav Lapid from Israel, Adina Pintilie from Romania, Ildikó Enyedi from Hungary, Gianfranco Rosi from Italy and Jasmila Žbanić from Jasmila Zbanic from Bosnia and Herzegovina.More to

Not long into I'm Your Man, Dan Stevens' character, a genial android named Tom, arranges a perfectly contrived combination of romantic clichés for his would-be partner, Alma. The rose petals are "artfully" strewn, the candles flicker, and flutes of bubbly are ready for sipping beside the bubble-filled tub.

Refresh for latest…: The Berlin Film Festival is unveiling its Competition winners this afternoon following five days of virtual screenings. Given the ongoing pandemic, this year was a hybrid event that included the European Film Market and the competition films being made available only to industry delegates and the international jury from March 1-5.

There’s a brief shot early on in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s wondrous romance and Berlinale competition entry What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?) that might seem to illustrate something quite mundane. The male protagonist’s soccer practice session has ended.

There's sardonic self-deprecation in the part Daniel Brühl has chosen for himself in his first feature as director, that of a European movie star sweating over an audition for a Hollywood superhero film that stands to push his fame — and his bank account — to the next level. But celebrity entitlement is only one part of the package.

EXCLUSIVE: Julie Taymor is attached to direct Gun Love, an adaptation of the Jennifer Clement novel. Babylon Berlin‘s Liv Lisa Fries is attached to play the role of Margot in the ensemble cast. Marissa Kate Goodhill (Come Away) wrote the script.

Adding another strong voice to the chorus of anti-capital-punishment films coming out of Iran is Ballad of a White Cow (Ghasideyeh gave sefid), a drama almost entirely centered on the wife of a condemned man who is wrongfully executed for murder in the opening scene.

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won wide acclaim and festival prizes with his 2015 breakthrough feature, the bittersweet ensemble drama Happy Hour. But the nuanced, novelistic eye behind that delicately observed five-hour epic seemed to desert Hamaguchi on his 2018 anti-romance Asako I & II, which premiered to lukewarm reviews in Cannes.

In Dasha Nekrasova’s feature directorial debut, The Scary of Sixty-First, New York City is a desolate place. The sky is a muddy beige with no indication of sun.

There's a gorgeous scene early in Petite Maman that epitomizes the unfussy economy and emotional perceptiveness of Céline Sciamma's films. Watching intently from the back seat of the family car as her mother climbs in, stifling tears, and they head off to begin packing up the home of the maternal grandmother who has recently died, the film's 8-year-old protagonist asks permission to break out the snacks.

Despite its simple title, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’ latest feature is far from a simple shoot-'em-up cop movie. It’s more like a cop movie written by Jacques Derrida, directed with nods to Wes Anderson and Jean-Luc Godard and then remixed by Abbas Kiarostami in its efforts to tear down the fourth wall.

Toward the end of Tina, the revealing documentary tribute by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin for HBO, Tina Turner is seen in an extended concert clip performing the Beatles' "Help" as a decelerated ballad — intimate, melancholy and full of feeling.

Most cop movies — and most movies in general — spend the first reel setting up a story that usually kicks off after an “inciting incident,” to quote various screenwriting manuals, which takes place within the first ten or 15 minutes. For the rest of the film, we then watch how that incident unravels and affects the lives of all those involved.