Rory O'Connor

1 month ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

It’s mid-July and I’m sitting in my living room, wondering what Ben Burtt, a man responsible for some of the most beloved cultural artifacts of the 20th century, will think of the decor. He appears on my screen calling from Locarno, where he’s just received a lifetime achievement award. I start by thanking him genuinely for his contributions to cinema, and something in that choice of words makes him blush. Burtt was born in Jamestown, New York, in 1948.

2 months ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

The last time Hong Sangsoo failed to feature in a Berlinale program, Childish Gambino’s “This is America” was in the charts and Green Book was on its way to beating Roma at the Oscars. (2019 notwithstanding, you have to go back to the Obama years to find a selection without the South Korean’s name.) In just those six years, the festival has witnessed three different creative directors, weathered a global pandemic, and buckled under the weight of its own political fealty.

2 months ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

The Blue Trail, the lively new film fromGabriel Mascaro, takes its name from the secretions of a mythical snail. Azure and oozing, the substance, when dropped on the iris, is rumored to grant a vision of things to come. This news is welcomed with admirable disinterest by Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a woman of a certain age who has, due to recent state insistences, decided there’s no longer much use in looking ahead.

2 months ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier.

2 months ago | thefilmstage.com | Rory O'Connor

Few things loosen the grip of winter like a sun-kissed film. Add listless days and young love to the narrative and you might even forget the icy chill outside. Snow was gently falling around the Zoo Palast before an early afternoon Berlinale screening of The Botanist, the debut feature of writer-director Jing Yi and as transportive a slice of summer melancholy as one could ask for.