‘Tina’ Film Review: Tina Turner Documentary Reaches for Pain and Glory But Falls Short

Also Read: Spike Lee Returns as Cannes Jury PresidentOfficial dates still need to be confirmed, but the pre-screenings will begin no earlier than May 24.

Tina Turner is a musical icon with very few peers. Not only did her career span decades, inspiring millions with her ridiculous number of hit songs, but her style, performances, and attitude would go on to carry a legacy of its own.

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).

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.

This year, more than most, Berlin's European Film Market was an opportunity to gauge the health of the global indie industry. Judging from the business done over the past week — the 2021 EFM wraps Friday — the general assessment would be: The patient is stable and the prognosis is promising.

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.

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.

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.

The latest from T.J.Martin and Daniel Lindsay, directors of “Undefeated” and “LA 92,” “TINA” looks like another documentary that came off of a factory line, complete with the usual panning shots of contact sheets, dramatic zooms into rolling tapes, cross-cutting between audio interviews and their published print versions, melodramatic score cues doing their best to emulate Philip Glass.

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.

Opening with a very real-looking hardcore sex tape, and climaxing with a deranged orgy featuring super-sized dildos, Romanian writer-director Radu Jude's latest taboo-busting polemical comedy is refreshingly untroubled by tasteful restraint. Shot during COVID lockdown last summer, with cast and crew all wearing anti-viral masks, the snappily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming.

EXCLUSIVE: New York-based distributor FilmRise has struck a deal with sales firm WaZabi Films for U.S. rights to TIFF 2020 and Berlin 2021 drama Beans.

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.

Hungary’s most recent contribution to the implacable flow of war films pouring out of Eastern Europe is a far cry from the Russian tank operas and spectacular disaster films like Battle of Leningrad. Denes Nagy’s sensitive first featureNatural Light (Termeszetes feny), bowing in Berlin competition, is the opposite of these: a slow starter high on atmosphere but low on action, whose horrific main event takes place discreetly off-screen.

Spain brings an extraordinary gamut of movie titles to Berlin. Some highlights:“All the Moons,” (Igor Legarreta)A France-Spain co-production, “All the Moons” tracks two vampires in the northern Spain during the last Carlist war.