Berlin Review: Jesse Eisenberg In John Trengrove’s ‘Manodrome’

Netflix has just dropped a brand new clip for Murder Mystery 2!

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was named Favorite Movie at the 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards tonight. Other big winners include Wednesday as Favorite Family TV Show, and its star Jenna Ortega as Favorite Female TV Star (Family), along with kid-fave SpongeBob Squarepants as Favorite Animated Show and Stranger Things alum Millie Brown Brown, who scored the Favorite Movie Actress award for Enola Holmes, and Enola Holmes 2. The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder landed the top Favorite Kids TV Show honor. See the full list below.

Jenna Ortega, Dwayne Johnson, Dove Cameron, Miranda Cosgrove, Olivia Rodrigo and Kelly Rowland are among the star-studded talent confirmed to appear at the 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, TheWrap can exclusively report. The live event, which will air Saturday at 7 p.m.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director With the Oscars right around the corner, it’s good timing for Ruben Östlund’s satirical dark comedy “Triangle of Sadness” to make its streaming debut on Hulu. The film is up for three Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, so make sure to catch up on it before the 2023 Academy Awards air on March 12.

The Weeknd is set to star in an as-yet-untitled feature film, which he also co-wrote and is co-producing. The film also stars Jenna Ortega of ‘Wednesday’ fame and Barry Keoghan, who recently appeared in ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’.Co-written by Reza Fahim, Trey Edward Shults, Kevin Turen and Harrison Kreiss, details of the film are currently being kept under wraps.

With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy called Aitor, is feeling his way toward a new identity as a girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.  

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

29th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, honoring the best film and TV performances of the past year, were handed out live.For the first time since 1998, the ceremony was not broadcast on TV. Instead, it aired on Netflix's YouTube channel after it was announced that the platform will begin streaming the ceremony live in 2024, as part of a multi-year partnership with SAG-AFTRA. Going into the awards,  and both led with five nominations each, including four individual acting nods and one for ensemble.

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

Willem Dafoe gets a dream role with Inside, a combo of art film in more ways than one, psychological thriller, heist movie, and survival tale all rolled into one in which Dafoe’s Nemo is center stage, alone, the entire time.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody suit up for the premiere of their new movie, Manodrome, during the 2023 Berlinale International Film Festival held at Berlinale Palast over the weekend in Germany.

For almost four years of siege in the 1990s, the city of Sarajevo concussed from shelling, the rumblings of armored vehicles and the repeated pop of sniper fire.

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Most big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front. So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out. Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.

Based on the synopsis alone, one would think John Trengove’s “Manodrome” to have two feet in satire: Jesse Eisenberg is Ralphie, a father-to-be lulled into a libertarian masculinity cult led by Adrien Brody. It is odd, then, to see the South African director mindlessly bypass the clever beats of parody in favor of a dreary mishmash of classics such as Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and David Fincher’s “The Fight Club.” With a kid on the way, losing his job was not on Ralphie’s plans.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The first rule of “Manodrome” is you don’t talk about “Fight Club.” “Fight Club” looms large over writer-director John Trengrove’s unsettling second feature, even if no one overtly mentions David Fincher’s provocative late-’90s movie in this dark psychological-thriller-cum-social-critique, which finds the state of masculinity even more fraught than Fincher did a quarter-century ago. Trengrove, who is gay and hails from South Africa (his 2017 debut “The Wound” was shortlisted for the Oscar international prize), brings a queer sensibility to his otherwise unsatisfying analysis of contemporary manhood, enlisting Jesse Eisenberg to play yet another scrawny white guy seeking outlet for deep wells of festering aggression.