Stephanie Bunbury

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 74th edition February 15 with the opening-night world premiere screening of Small Things Like These, the Irish drama starring Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy. It started 10 days of debuts including for movies starring Rooney Mara, Isabelle Huppert…

The feelgood component of the action-packed Roundup franchise, says its originator, producer and star Don Lee (aka Ma Dong-seok), is that you know from the start that the bad guys are totally going to get rammed. As beefy detective Ma Seok-do, Lee has certain skills and dubious methods, both of which come…

From his breakthrough work Family Viewing, which dates back to 1987, Atom Egoyan has been exploring the possibilities of different communication technologies by showing screens within screens, stories within other stories and the ways unconnected stories may merge with each other and with real life. Seven…

"Please make me a good wife to Wolf," murmurs Agnes (Anja Plaschg) on her marriage night, head bowed in front of the crucifix she has already set up in the conjugal bedroom of the tumbledown stone farmhouse where she will live from now on. Wolf (David Scheid), meanwhile, is carousing with his fellow…

Mahin’s friend Pouran likes talking about her ailments, real and imagined. More than that, she has something on her phone she is keen to show the ladies gathered for one of their regular lunches at Mahin's place: the film she made of her colonoscopy. "That's disgusting," snorts Mahin (Lily Farhadpour). "I…

Korean director Hong Sang-soo is such a Berlinale favorite that his film in competition, featuring Isabelle Huppert as an apparently penniless tourist trying to scrape together a living in Seoul, is his sixth film to be invited to the festival since 2020 — remarkably, that’s not even his entire output…

Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) is huddled on the floor in her nightgown, trying to ring her son. Her legs and nightgown are smeared brown with her regular nightly incontinence, but it is her husband who worries her: Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer) has wandered outside again, not sure where he is and wearing no pants. Her…

Somebody — or something — is speaking from inside a timber crate. "It's so dark in here… a night so deep and opaque" read the subtitles; the voice is speaking in Fon, the local language of the West African country that was once called Dahomey and is now Benin. As the slats are nailed down, the voice is…

There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor…

When Australian writer Lily Brett published her novel Too Many Men in 2001, critics marvelled at the light, comic tone she had managed to strike in a novel about the lasting impact of the Holocaust, passed down from one generation to the next. Families have their customary jokes; they squabble over the…

Everyone knows that hotels — preferably isolated, ideally with very few guests — make the best settings for horror films. All that sad anonymity, all that provisional space ready to be filled with something really nasty. In Cuckoo, Alpenplatz, run by the excessively friendly Mr. Konig (Dan Stevens)…

Right from the start, there is no doubt where we are. Narrow, gray streets in the dim daylight of winter, peat hills between cramped villages, a crow sitting on a church spire: this is western Ireland in the '80s, when the Celtic Tiger was yet to roar and jobs were scarce, divorce was illegal, condoms…