Berlin 2023 Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

The 2024 Berlinale kicks off next month on February 15 with “Small Things Like These,” starring Cillian Murphy. But right before then, a winner from last year’s festival hits theaters in NYC.

Since his breakout performance in “1917,” George Mackay has surprised audiences with several challenging roles. Sure, he did “Munich – The Edge Of War,” another historical drama, two years later.

Of all the buzzy films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, like “Past Lives,” “Eileen,” and the Grand Jury Prize winner “A Thousand And One,” Ira Sachs‘ “Passages” is undoubtedly the sexiest. And by year’s end, it may rank higher than those other three on critics’ top 10 lists for 2023.

Syndey Sweeney is already an it-actress for HBO, thanks to her turns on “The White Lotus” and Sam Levinson‘s “Euphoria.” Now add “Reality” to that list: Sweeney stars as American whistleblower Reality Winner in Tina Satter‘s “Reality,” fresh off its world premiere at the Berlinale in February.

Stateside cinephiles know György Fehér for his collaborations with fellow Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr on his masterpieces “Sátántangó” and “Werckmeister Harmonies.” But the late Fehér was a filmmaker of his own right, although his films prove challenging to see outside his native country. READ MORE: American audiences get a chance to see one of Fehér’s two feature films next month in NYC, when Film Society At Lincoln Center screens a 4k restoration of “Twilight,” Fehér’s 1990 serial killer drama.

In “Kill Boksoon,” a female hitman finds out that killing is simpler than raising a kid. Fresh off its world premieres at the Berlinale last month, South Korean director Byun Sung-hyun‘s new film stars “Secret Sunshine” actress Jeon Do-yeon as an assassin that sees her family and professional lives collide to antic results.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

The films of Jennifer Reeder have an unmistakable vibe. Her acclaimed short films, including “All Small Bodies” and “Crystal Lake,” have been shown on The Criterion Channel, and her feature film “Knives and Skin” has been shown at Berlin and Tribeca.  READ MORE: ‘Inside’ Review: Vasilis Katsoupis’ Heist Thriller With Willem Dafoe Is Formulaic Yet Never Dull [Berlin] Reeder’s films, which have been described as the meeting point between David Lynch and John Hughes, share little in terms of plot, but all bear an unmistakable eeriness, an otherworldliness that could only be Reeder.

In 1991, “Street Fighter” made history by introducing the world’s first playable female character in a fighting game, Chun Li. An expert martial artist and Interpol officer, Chun Li has a notorious sense of justice, with much of her arc dedicated to a tireless search for revenge for the wrongful killing of her father.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

There’s a pretty traditional formula that most music documentaries follow. They’ll often center around a standard birth to mainstream success overview, populated with talking heads and contemporaries to contextualize the music, politics, and social scenes.

Director Vasilis Katsoupis tells the audience exactly what “Inside” is about to do from its very first scene. The disembodied voice of Willem Dafoe narrates a childhood fable fished from the depths of memory.

From “Rosa Luxemburg” in 1986 to 2012’s “Hannah Arendt,” the films of Margarethe Von Trotta, an icon of the New German cinema, have put strong female protagonists center-stage in renditions of German history. For her latest, Von Trotta paints a portrait of German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, author of essays, radio dramas, and opera libretti.

The audiences at Berlin International Film Festival tend to be respectful and engaged.

Young Belarusian Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is impatient for a better life in Europe. Coming from a country under dictatorship and with very strong Russian ties, the political isolation of which has made it suffocating for the younger generations, he is seduced by the idea of a borderless, communal whole where everybody counts for something.

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.

Like so many young performers, Sydney Sweeney proved that she was a star before she could get the chance to prove that she was a well-rounded actor. Her name-making gigs as a vindictive, canonically gorgeous high schooler on TV’s “Euphoria,” a vindictive, canonically gorgeous college sophomore on “The White Lotus,” and a vindictive, canonically gorgeous recent grad in the “The Voyeurs” all required her to channel an innate charisma toward variations on a broadly consistent type, her abilities yet to be stretched far enough to chart their full potential.

With an admirable cohesiveness, Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo (“Prayers for the Stolen”) has curated a body of work that often returns to familiar questions, subjects, and even precise images of evolving girlhood and untarnished nature. The filmmaker’s most fixed preoccupation is the spaces women carve for themselves and each other in communities where their safety, needs, and aspirations often suffer the tacitly violent tactics of patriarchal social norms.  Back to her documentary roots, Huezo follows her acclaimed fiction debut, “Prayers for the Stolen” (“Noche de Fuego”), with another multigenerational saga of mothers and daughters in a remote locale.

There is a particular kind of audacity reserved for the wealthy and the well-meaning. Multi-award-winning actor and humanitarian Sean Penn co-directs “Superpower” with Aaron Kaufman, known mostly for his commercial work and his collaboration with writer-director Robert Rodriguez.

To this day, I am traumatized by the notion I could have killed my little brother. Six years younger, we had an age difference primed to maximize annoyance, his constant nagging the spark for my first foray with untethered fury.

Michael Cera is at the Berlin International Film Festival for the world premiere this weekend of Dustin Guy Defa‘s “The Adults.” In the film, Cera stars as a man who returns to his hometown as he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters (Hannah Gross and Sophie Lillis) and bridge the gap between his childhood and adult life.

Few objects hold a bigger sway over contemporary life than the smartphone. Now, the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the world’s first smartphone, gets the big screen treatment.

Kristen Stewart wasted no time making her presence felt as jury president of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival. Screendaily reports that Stewart had some cutting things to say about the state of the film industry at the festival’s Competition press conference, particularly its obsession with money over artistic merit.

Miss Whit Stillman and his charming, highly literate cinema? Well, not to worry: the filmmaker has his first project since 2016’s “Love & Friendship” lined up. And it’s Stillman’s first foray into TV, too.

Christian Petzold is no stranger to the Berlin International Film Festival. Three of his last four films debuted at that prestigious event.

Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, with “Seberg” in 2019 and “Spencer” in 2021. Now she has another to add to her upcoming projects, but this one has a meta twist.

American audiences know Korean actress Jeon Do-yeon best for her role in Lee Chang-dong‘s 2007 film “Secret Sunshine.” Now it’s time to catch her Jeon in more bloody and offbeat fare, as she stars in “Kill Boksoon,” an assassin flick set for a world premiere at Berlinale 2023 before it hits Netflix in March. READ MORE: Berlin 2023: New Films From Sean Penn, Jesse Eisenberg & More Announced In the film, Jeon stars as Gil, a single mom who must juggle the demanding career as a professional killer with her role as a mother to a teenage girl.

We are currently in the middle of the Sundance Film Festival, which kicks off the year’s major film events lineup. And sandwiched in between Sundance and the upcoming SXSW Film Festival is none other than the Berlin International Film Festival, which just unveiled its competition lineup, filled with some interesting selections.  READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2023 Every year, the competition in Berlin is filled with diverse selections, a mixture of veteran filmmakers and newcomers, big stars and unknowns, and representatives from all over the world.