Berlinale Part 3: The Best Films You Usually Don’t See Coming

After 10 days of fanfare and celebrity mayhem, the 75th edition of the Berlinale closes with some poignant, idiosyncratic releases from directors Richard Linklater and Radu Jude.

Berlinale 13-23 February 2025

If there’s anything axiomatic about contemporary Berlin, it’s that things usually don’t go according to plan. Despite Germany’s excellent international PR in the domains of engineering and economic + social stability, on the ground, you’ll witness anything from more than 20% of the population living in poverty, buses never showing up despite announcements, to massive syndicated strikes across a number of industries. Take the latter two this February with grisly weather where heaps of snow with ice and a cool 20 F at best await you when it gets dark past 5 pm, and you’ll know why covering Berlinale 2025 proved to be an arduous endeavor, at least for this reporter. 

Running from 13th to 23rd February, this year’s 75th anniversary of one of Europe’s three major cinema events, Berlinale came with its usual political guns blazing but also a truckload of starry appearances, carefully curated by the new festival director, Tricia Tuttle, to gain traction (she succeeded). Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton, Robert Pattinson, Jacob Elordi, Jessica Chastain, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bong Joon-ho, and countless more graced the red carpet on Berlin’s freezing Potsdamer Platz. Amid the tabloids, the fans, and endless lattes, one could easily forget about the films, the reason we are all (allegedly) there. 

Thankfully, the films at Berlinale were pretty solid this year, diverse and often outlandish. This has always been a staple of the indie and more “auteur”-oriented happenings, which Berlinale certainly belongs to, so it’s good to see that creatives from all over the world have once again demonstrated the broad appeal of cinema as a medium amid politically turbulent times. Even the darkest and saddest of the 200-plus features shown found their way to the critics’ and audiences’ hearts. Perhaps more than in recent years, people were actively discussing what they saw between screenings, positively often enough but seldom without a deep impression. At any rate, it would be enough to call this year’s Berlinale a success.

Before wrapping the impressions up, I need to share more info on the mixed-up logistics many of us accredited staff experienced on the ground. There were hardly any screenings around the main venues in the afternoon, and most Competition and Special entries were screened once, immediately before their press conference, or much later in the evenings.

Those looking to make it to conferences would often need to miss the films shown between 11 am and 3 pm, and those looking to make it back to their accommodation and sleep would have to give up the screenings at 9 pm and 10 pm. More than the sheer lack of time, the mercilessly freezing weather, issues with bus schedules, and a general public transportation strike on the 20th and 21st of February meant many of us had to cancel screenings – or stay home with extended colds afterward, as I did. 

Challenging as navigating any big city event in the winter is, it’s still good, fun, privileged work. Besides a scrambled schedule with missed deadlines, the only downside to this year’s Berlinale was not seeing enough films. In my case, the many allegedly superb films not in English had to be left out when I had no means of getting to the venues (when there is a transportation strike, cabs are nonexistent, and Bolt will charge you $30 for a mile-long ride), or when I had to favor the mainstream Hollywood or UK releases in the evening.

Still, before this pompous, accomplished jubilee edition of the Berlinale would end, two off-kilter films – one likely to become a modern continental European classic, another a likely future critical success in Hollywood – wrapped up the diverse offering in unexpected ways.

Blue Moon – Director: Richard Linklater

Here’s a simple one: Blue Moon is as close as it gets to a perfect work of art. Exceptionally written, superbly acted, and wonderfully moving, it’s a sucker punch little gem of a film, gripping as it is entertaining. After I first saw it, I moved heaven and earth to secure another ticket and see it again the following day; it’s that wonderful. It’s also incredibly sad and far deadlier than its simple tender melancholy on the surface suggests.

Biopics are Hollywood’s Bermuda Triangle, where celebrated writers and directors venture seeking revolutionary discoveries disappear in a vortex of self-indulgence and cheaply sentimental vignettes. When Richard Linklater, most famous for a thoughtful approach to melodrama, took over the thankless task of bringing to contemporary fame the life of Lorenz Hart, one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists and author of such hits as “Manhattan”, “My Funny Valentine”, and “Blue Moon” (which he despised), chances were considerable Hart’s story would end up a mawkish cautionary tale about the perils of being a hopeless romantic and a perfectionist. 

Nevertheless, Robert Kaplow’s flawlessly crisp, deliciously condensed script, which shows multiple histories in 95 minutes shot in real-time and based on Hart’s letter exchanges with author Elizabeth Weiland, proved a winner. All Linklater had to do was set up a decent chamber scenography, find some fine actors, and let this prolonged scene in which entire lives unfold breathe. 

Enter Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott, Bobby Cannavale, and Margaret Qualley. Hawke is excellent as “Larry” Hart, a burning, mannered, “youthful” 47-year-old with a deadly drinking habit and even deadlier love and envy boiling up inside him. On the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famed musical Oklahoma!, he sees his writing partner of a quarter century, composer Richard Rodgers (a mercurial Andrew Scott), team up with another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) for the first time, instantly eclipsing all the fame he once enjoyed with Hart. 

As Larry drinks himself to oblivion, reciting endless anecdotes about himself to his reliable barman Eddie (a no-nonsense Cannavale), all of his past and present ghosts will be entering and leaving the building, illuminating a piece of Larry he would usually prefer hidden. A dawdling critic, an aspiring matinée muso, and an endearing ingénue all orbit around this man who is infinitely enamored with himself but even more so with the world.

Rodgers, especially, will be the one to shake Larry’s mildly egomaniacal but fully human desires and fears. Alternately revering him and his lyrical genius and disdaining him for his alcoholism and petty indulgencies, Rodgers, fleshed out formidably by effortlessly mutable Scott, shows us Larry as a dichotomy of the extremes he, and most other people, are. 

Besides the painfully entertaining Hawke, who invests every frame with impossible grandeur from the five-foot-tall Larry Hart, Scott carries the weight of Blue Moon, analyzing conflicting emotions about another’s loved ones in a single conversation (or three). His Dick Rodgers is the future star who confronts a fading one, a man who needs to break up and who everyone knows will shine brighter without the burden of his former friend and work partner. That Scott delivers Rodgers’ inevitable indictment of Larry with grace and feeling is a testament to him as an actor and to Kaplow and Linklater. Scott eventually won the Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance. 

Both touchingly intimate and gloriously expansive, telling entire histories contemplated by a single man, Blue Moon is much more than a successful, quirky biopic. In its meditations on work, success, love, partnership, and, more than anything, friendship, it is a universal, heartfelt feature bound to win you over and stay a part of you for a while. Do not miss it.

Kontinental ‘25 – Director: Radu Jude 

The construction of meaning in a society entails modifying something old to create something new. However, the construction (of luxury new estates) in capitalism entails the utter destruction of everything but the interest of those wielding the capital. Individuals, communities, institutions, symbols, edifices, cities, and entire societies and histories are all swept under the rubble of someone else’s profit. 

Radu Jude, the most prominent Romanian filmmaker and a vicious critic of all things neoliberal knows the above all too well. Having witnessed his country dragged through the hell of “transition” imposed on Eastern (and most of Southern) Europe over decades, he’s seen things unholy wreak havoc on the bodies and spirits of his countrymen, mostly to devastating effect. Kontinental ‘25 is one of his more straightforward but nevertheless typically scathing borderline absurdist portraits of a borderline absurdist world. Set in Cluj over mere days, it tells the story of a city in general decline through the eyes of a stranded homeless man who commits suicide and a guilt-ridden bailiff struggling to come to terms with her soul-crushing job. 

Envisaged as a meditation on life within the confines of a crumbling society and rising inequality, Kontinental ‘25 begins with a homeless man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), aimlessly wandering the streets of Cluj. This city has evidently become hostile to his very existence. Through a handful of farcical scenes in which Ion is confronted by mechanical replicas in a dinosaur park or passers-by wondering about his unbecoming appearance, we quickly reach the point where it’s made clear there is no room for him in a fast, gentrifying city.

Orsolya (a poignant Eszter Tompa), a local bailiff, appears to evict Ion from the basement of an apartment building slated to become an outsized luxury boutique hotel called The Kontinental. Dejected and utterly alone, Ion kills himself before he is thrown out of his only shelter. Orsolya then takes over the film, which examines her deep guilt against the backdrop of a fragmented Romania. 

As far from joyous as can be, Kontinental ‘25, loosely inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s 1952 drama Europa ‘51, it still sneaks in plenty of absurd, tongue-in-cheek humor into its dreary backdrop. Orsolya, a Hungarian-born Romanian and a former law professor who lost her job and status, navigates Cluj day and night, seeking redemption for Ion’s suicide. Her many conversations with family members, colleagues, and acquaintances illuminate the rising issues with ethnic, class, and emotional identity. Throughout one ludicrous night, during a fateful meeting with her former student Fred (an electric Adonis Tanta), now a delivery man, Orsolya dissociates from her life as a wife, mother, and bailiff. 

Knowing Jude’s insistence on the lingering effects of anomie, one already knows nothing much will actually change. Only new levels of anxiety and discord can and will be unlocked in a world where classism, racism, nationalism, and the eradication of solidarity are encouraged. Slow but powerfully intimate, Kontinental ‘25 has lots to say about the current state of affairs in much of the modern world, most of all how individualism threatens to erase us all – physically and emotionally.