Berlin Review: Rebecca Miller’s ‘She Came To Me’ With Anne Hathaway, Peter Dinklage & Marisa Tomei

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.

The competition winners of the 73rd Berlinale are about to start rolling in as the festival draws to a close Saturday evening.

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.

Dame Helen Mirren ditched her signature bob for ageless platinum waves as she attended the Berlin premiere of Golda.The actress, who last year admitted to still loving her former boyfriend, Liam Neeson, stunned as she attended the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in Germany on Monday and was pictured with long flowing hair extensions. Helen, 77, sported an off-the-shoulder floor-length black dress that featured a low-cut ruffled neckline, which she paired with gold chandelier earrings as she walked the red carpet.

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.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Berlin Film Festival has returned to its first fully in person edition since 2020. But this year, the Berlinale has come back with a vengeance, and added something that it wasn’t especially known for in its pre-pandemic days: star power. Indeed, it’s been hard not to bump into a famous person in the German city — almost giving this previously mostly auteur driven gathering a vibe that more closely resembles the latest versions of Sundance or Toronto. Artistic director Carlo Chatrian told Variety Sunday that A-list names help raise awareness for the festival’s core mission – to celebrate movies and encourage audiences to return to theaters.

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.

There’s a rich history of movies being entirely at odds with their cryptic titles—step forward Quantum of Solace—but for his follow-up to The Wound, South African director John Trengrove has picked a doozy, a title that sounds more like a dystopian Adam Sandler comedy than the dour story of urban disintegration that it actually is. Images of star Jesse Eisenberg sporting a mop of red hair for the film have been also something of a misdirect, perhaps giving some the impression that Manodrome, which premiered in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, could be some kind of satirical emo Fight Club for sad-sacks. Fight Club comparisons actually do turn out to be (lightly) relevant, as are callbacks to Taxi Driver, but Manodrome is so achingly laborious and serious that it won’t be encroaching on either for virtual shelf space in the Toxic Masculinity section of anyone’s streaming library.

With this year’s selection, the Berlinale seems to be creating space in the festival calendar, between Sundance and SXSW, for a particular type of American indie: the melancholy, slight, intensely personal and hence rather divisive kind, in which vaguely famous actors—usually the comedic kind—play downbeat iterations of their more familiar selves. It may not be a coincidence that Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg debuted here rather than home turf in 2010, but Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, which premiered in the festival’s Encounters strand, makes Baumbach’s problem child seem positively commercial by comparison. Fortunately for all involved, Universal have already picked it up; this is definitely not the type of movie to thrive in today’s marketplace.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Berlinale red carpet on Saturday became a protest platform against Iran’s repressive regime when a group of Iranian filmmakers and talents, joined by jury president Kristen Stewart, chanted “Women, Life, Freedom!” and demanded the release of imprisoned journalists and an Iranian rapper. Actress Golshifteh Farahani, who is also on the jury; “Holy Spider” actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi; and “The Siren” director Sepideh Farsi were among dozens of Iranian film professionals participating in the protests hosted by Berlinale co-directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. Protesters with signs demanded freedom for female Iranian journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi who are behind bars, accused of “conspiring against national security” for being the first to report on Mahsa Amini’s death, and for the release of dissident Iranian hip hop artist Toomaj Salehi who has been accused of spreading propaganda and could face the death penalty.

Kristen Stewart joined Iranian filmmakers in a demonstration showing solidarity for Iran’s Women Life Freedom protests on the red carpet of the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday.

Celebrities were out and about this week on red carpets, TV talk show sets and on the streets of Los Angeles and New York. Alec Baldwin was seen strolling down the streets of Brooklyn after picking up his morning coffee on Wednesday.  The actor's outing came after it was reported that Dave Halls, the assistant director of his movie "Rust," may testify against him in the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin and armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed are facing charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Hello and welcome back to your weekly International Insider. Berlin’s back and with most of our team in the German capital, it’s Jesse Whittock here bringing you the latest from the worlds of TV and film.

.Attending the premiere of her rom-com She Came to Me at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, the wore a sheer mesh Valentino gown with leather bowties over a nude bodysuit. She paired the daring dress with a set of opera gloves and black pumps, which was exactly how the look was , minus the mesh turtleneck detail and tulle hat. Instead, Hathaway wore her hair up in an Audrey Hepburn-esque updo with her face-framing bottleneck bangs kept loose and a particularly glowy makeup look. Anne Hathaway attends the "She Came to Me" premiere and Opening Ceremony red carpet during the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2023.Anne Hathaway attends the "She Came to Me" premiere during the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2023.Hathaway was joined on the red carpet by jury president Kristen Stewart, who dressed in an intricate floral Chanel gown with a whimsical bow-tie-inspired choker. Kristen Stewart attends the "She Came to Me" premiere during the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2023.She Came to Me stars Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) as a celebrity composer who sought a way out of writer's block by marrying his therapist (Anne Hathaway).

The Berlin Film Festival’s opening-night red-carpet gala Thursday stayed on schedule despite a pair of climate change activists who apparently glued themselves to the carpet in front of the Berlin Palast.