‘Dark Glasses’ Review: Dario Argento’s Giallo Is A Gruesome And Unpretentious Late Work From A Master [Berlin]

Resembling more of a personal tribute than exhaustive biography, Pietro Marcello‘s Lucio Dalla documentary, “For Lucio,” takes its title as an invitation. A rambling eulogy that is just as often confusing as it is profound, Marcello’s wisp of a film (running less than 80 minutes) may be missing key context for those not already versed in the life and music of the politically-oriented Italian singer-songwriter.

Nominations have been announced for this year’s Irish Film And TV Academy Awards (IFTAs). Scroll down for the full list.

Many of Hong Sang-soo’s films are structured around a woman’s solitary wanderings. The single ladies played by Kim Min-Hee in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “The Woman Who Ran,” or Lee Hye-Young in “In Front of Your Face,” are free radicals, moving from encounter to encounter and disrupting the equilibrium of the people they meet, as meandering conversations reveal a friend’s dissatisfaction or a couple’s disagreement.

Gail Halvorsen was a United States Air Force pilot known as the “Candy Bomber” for dropping candy over Berlin from his airplane during the Berlin airlift in 1948.  Gail Halvorsen joined the Air Force as a pilot during World War II, serving as a transport pilot in the South Atlantic. After World War II, Berlin was divided into four sections occupied by the United States, France, England, and Russia.

Leaves rustle in the wind, sand swiftly lifted from the ground as it resumes its nomadic journey, taking from one place to give to another. Around it, all seems to be consumed by stillness, but, in the safety of this deceiving quietness, life bursts through settled roots to create anew.

Jamie Lang SF Studios has announced that the 2021 Berlin Generation Kplus player “Nelly Rapp: Monster Agent” is getting a sequel. The original was a hit among kids and parents alike in its native Sweden and won a pair of Swedish Guldbagge Awards. Based on Martin Widmark’s popular children’s books of the same name, the film features rising star Matilda Gross as the titular Nelly, a young girl who, along with her dog London, are dragged into a world of ghosts, vampires and werewolves.Johan Rosell will direct with Jon Nohrstedt and Niklas Larsson producing for SF Studios.

Succession boss Jesse Armstrong has said that there’s going to be a very definite moment when the story of Logan Roy and his rotten cabal is over and HBO is taking its lead from its creator.

It sounds like the set-up to a French New Wave film: a French au pair falls in love with an Irish pickpocket leading to a whirlwind romance that changes both their lives. It might be twee, but Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert) lived it, and on a long, rainy, nighttime drive reflects on the intense, yet fleeting relationship of her youth.

Sat in front of a computer, musician Nick Cave reads a few questions aloud. These are deeply existential musings sent in by people he has never met.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt’s no spoiler to say that Luigi Pirandello dies nine minutes into “Leonora addio.” This alternately playful and lugubrious work of reflection isn’t really about the controversial Italian writer’s life at all, but rather his legacy, and in a less literal yet ineluctable sense, that of film directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.Over the course of half a century, the two cinematic siblings made movies together — including 1985’s “Kaos,” an omnibus-style collection of five Pirandello stories — bookending their career together by winning top prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals (for “Padre Padrone” and “Caesar Must Die,” in respectively). And then, in 2018, Vittorio died.

Jamie Lang Belgium’s Panenka, producers of recent VRT breakout hit “Two Summers” – which premiered last week to a jaw-dropping 51% market share in its prime-time slot and which will soon be released worldwide by Netflix – will virtually pitch one of their upcoming projects, “This is Not a Murder Mystery,” at Berlin Co-Pro Series.One of 10 such projects set for this event, Co-Pro Series marks the first public pitch for “TINAMM,” with the creative team looking to the right co-production and distribution partner to help realize their murder mystery series. Panenka producer Kristoffel Mertens hosts the virtual Co-Pro pitch with co-creators Paul Baeten and Christophe Dirickx.Baeten is a novelist, essayist and TV screenwriter, whose credits include two seasons of the acclaimed drama series “Over Water” and the aforementioned “Two Summers.” Dirickx has written and produced several feature films, including Cannes players “The Misfortunates” from director Felix van Groeningen and Frank Van Passel’s “Manneken Pis.” International Emmy-nominee Hans Herbots (“The Spiral”) and Matthias Lebeer, a winner of two Golden Lions at Cannes for his work on GT Academy Europe, will direct.

The streets outside her window are dripping with hope, and yet Élisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is lost. It is Paris, 1981, a new president has been elected, and Élisabeth’s husband has left, claiming the thrillingness of motion by moving in with a new girlfriend while his ex is left with the stagnance of remaining, the apartment where they’ve raised their children, Judith (Megan Northam) and Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), at once comfortingly familiar and dreadfully new.

Of all the unsolved mysteries in Claire Denis‘ new Berlin Competition film, the biggest may just be its U.S. retitling to a generic and not particularly representative “Fire.” The film’s English title in the rest of the world, “Both Sides of the Blade” — a line from the terrific Tindersticks track that ends the film —is not just cooler and more compelling.

Manori Ravindran International EditorMia Wasikowska will take on the lead role in “Little Joe” director Jessica Hausner’s cult thriller “Club Zero,” Variety can reveal.The Australian actor will portray an unusual schoolteacher in Hausner’s second English-language film, which begins shooting in the U.K. and Austria in July.Wasikowska was most recently seen in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cannes-premiering film “Bergman Island.”In “Club Zero,” Wasikowska’s teacher takes a job at an elite school and forms a strong bond with five students — a relationship that eventually takes a dangerous turn.Discussing the film at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event last year, Hausner described the film as “a lot about eating,” relating to eating disorders and “eating behaviors.” This will be Hausner’s sixth feature.

Demystifying and questioning the very notion of authenticity, Jason Kohn’s informative and oddly riveting, diamond-documentary “Nothing Lasts Forever” is ostensibly about the oft-antagonistic relationship between natural and synthetic diamonds. Yet, diamonds are an in-road as Kohn explores the commodification of such abstractions as love and desire, questioning how exactly a shiny rock — one that isn’t even that rare — became a physical manifestation of commitment.

Dario Argento’s Berlin Film Festival Special Gala entry Dark Glasses plays out almost like a parody of his earlier work. Co-written with Franco Ferrini, it’s a lurid giallo about a killer slaughtering women in contemporary Rome. It lacks the suspense and style of Argento’s work in the 70s and 80s, while repeating various themes. 

Violence and motherhood make for an unusual combination in Ursula Meier’s Berlin Film Festival competition title The Line (La Ligne). Set in remote present-day Switzerland, it stars actor-singer-playwright Stéphanie Blanchoud as Margaret, whose anger towards her mother Christina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) frequently turns physical. While she’s a grown woman, there’s something primal and childlike about Margaret’s visceral fury that suggests a disorder that’s never named.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAt 81, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is busier than ever.The director of a string of cult chiller classics starting in the 1970s, including “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” “Suspiria” and “Deep Red,” was at Cannes last July with his acting debut in Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex,” about a pair of old lovers. Argento was also celebrated last year with a new book by Italian critic Steve Della Casa and a retro at New York’s Lincoln Center.

When you think of the Mount Rushmore directors of horror, names like Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and George A. Romero all come to mind immediately.

Jessica Kiang How do you make something real out of something that was artificial to begin with? Should you even try? François Ozon has, with “Peter von Kant”: a deconstructed, gender-swapped and then fastidiously reconstructed overhaul of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” 50 years on, Fassbinder’s film remains as close to un-remake-able as any ever made, mainly because it remakes itself every second as it goes along. If this makes Ozon’s version, which opens this year’s Berlin Film Festival, an oddly self-invalidating proposition from the get-go, that impression only deepens as the minutes tick amusingly but inconsequentially by.For the uninitiated (who are very obviously not the audience for this inside-baseball bauble), Fassbinder’s film is the story of a sadomasochistic lesbian love triangle between a successful fashion designer, her model protégée and her mute assistant.