Berlin Film Festival 2025: All Of Deadline’s Film Reviews

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its seventy fifth anniversary version February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged movie that takes inventory of German society within the first quarter of the twenty first century. It begins 11 days of debuts together with for movies starring Jessica Chastain, Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Rupert Friend, Marion Cotillard, Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Emma Mackey and extra.

The 2025 Berlinale runs by February 23.

Keep checking again beneath as Deadline critiques the very best and buzziest movies of the pageant. Click on the titles to learn the complete critiques.

Section: Competition
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
Deadline’s takeaway: Richard Linklater’s Broadway chamber piece appears to be like again to a misplaced time and mourns a misplaced soul in Lorenz Hart because the booze is about to devour him. In a bravura theatrical efficiency, Ethan Hawke makes the lyricist’s genius really pathetic. — SB

Section: Competition
Directors-screenwriters: Gabriel Mascaro, Tibério Azul
Cast: Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, Miriam Socarrás, Adanilo, Clarissa Pinheiro
Deadline’s takeaway: Set aglow by the earthy pressure of Denise Weinberg as Tereza, The Blue Trail posits a river journey as a path to freedom, and its unpreachy heat — regardless of occasional lags in momentum — presents refreshing rewards. — JW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Michel Franco
Cast: Jessica Chastain,  Isaac Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell
Deadline’s takeaway: Michel Franco’s skewqering of woke hypocracy is thuddingly apparent, each on the stage of metaphor — as a fable of North-South exploitation, which is certainly one of Michel Franco’s said functions — and as a drama of thwarted love. — SB

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Dag Johan Haugerud
Cast: Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Ane Dahl Torp, Anne Marit Jacobsen
Deadline’s takeaway: While Dreams would possibly sound like a novelist’s movie, it’s fairly successfully staged, and fortuitously its director and star stay dedicated to the thriller of need and the work-in-progress that’s life.

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Vivian Qu
Cast: Liu Haocun, Wen Qi, Zhang Youhao, Zhou You, Peng Jing
Deadline’s takeaway: Surprisingly gritty examine of individuals left behind or residing within the margins fuses gangster realism with social drama and leavens each with a splash of surprising humor. The subtext of Girls on Wire is extra highly effective than what passes because the plot. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran
Deadline’s takeaway: The complicated dependencies and jealousies between moms and daughters aren’t precisely virgin territory, however the e book’s writer Deborah Levy and Lenkiewicz have a troublesome tackle the way in which the mom’s sins are visited on her little one that’s frank and recent sufficient to make us gasp. — SB

Section: Competition
Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noé, Marine Gesbert
Deadline’s takeaway: The Ice Tower is filled with brilliantly conceived and rendered pathways that finish in cul-de-sacs; it’s beguiling, however hardly satisfying. While it’s at all times a pleasure to observe Marion Cotillard piece collectively a personality, and it’s pleasure simply to have a look at her, it’s not sufficient. — SB

Section: Special Gala
Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Cast: Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, Dylan Torrell
Deadline’s takeaway: Despite the subtropical trappings, the principle character Tom’s stasis has a elementary ordinariness, and that turns his bother in paradise right into a extra common name to cease sleepwalking by life. — NR

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Radu Jude
Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Șerban Pavlu
Deadline’s takeaway: Radu Jude’s assault on gentrification in Romania finds him in a surprisingly contemplative temper as he bundles up his typical firecracker issues. The filmmaker is on, if not his finest habits, not less than the form of habits that received’t get him thrown out of a diplomatic reception — SB

Section: Special Gala
Director:-screenwriter: Nadia Fall
Cast: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler, Margherita Schoch, Jürg Plüss
Deadline’s takeaway: Petra Volpe’s busy, pressing cancer-ward procedural strikes like a thriller and is strictly what it says it’s: a shift within the lifetime of a nurse, a pile of incidents encountered at velocity. And by all of it, there’s a sense of imminent hazard. — SB

Section: Out of Competition (Opening Night)
Director-screenwriter: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, Tala Al-Deen, Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause
Deadline’s takeaway: Beware novel psychological therapies from Austria: You by no means know the place they might lead. Tom Tykwer exams Germany’s white liberal guilt, however why it needs to be so lengthy is as a lot of a puzzle because the workings of the sunshine remedy. It is surprisingly watchable, although. — SB

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Huo Meng
Cast: Wang Shang, Zhang Yanrong, Zhang Chuwen, Zhang Caixia
Deadline’s takeaway: Rather than a static tribute to the countryside, Huo’s beautiful roving eye for composition and mild hand with drama hint the challenges and enduring bonds amongst a number of hard-working generations of Chinese farmers, set in the course of the Nineties in a rustic on the cusp of huge change. — NR

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Iván Fund
Cast: Mara Bestelli, Marcelo Subiotto, Anika Bootz, Betania Cappato
Deadline’s takeaway: Iván Fund’s melancholy street movie is a meditation on life, dying and hope and presents an immersive, atmospheric coming-of-age story. These folks’s lives are very a lot rooted within the right here and now, and so they’re making an attempt to reside them out as finest they will. — DW

Section: Out of Competition
Director-screenwriter: Bong Joon Ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun
Deadline’s takeaway: Mickey is a part of fixed experiments to assist researchers see what causes dying and illness, so he’s killed repeatedly, at all times being reprinted to proceed the method. The thought-provoking satire is a not-that-absurd take a look at the place we simply may be headed as a society. — PH

Section: Competition
Director: Johanna Moder
Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, Claes Bang, Julia Franz Richter
Deadline’s takeaway: Johanna Moder’s newest rivals David Lynch’s Eraserhead as a visceral evocation of recent parenthood. This movie is a bit like screaming your lungs out on a carnival experience, because the leads do early on: petrifying, however you’re glad you probably did it.— SB

Section: Special Gala
Director: Justin Kurzel
Cast: Jacob Elordi, Ciaran Hinds, Odessa Young, Olivia DeJonge, Simon Baker
Deadline’s takeaway: Despite this being a sequence, Justin Kurzel pays little to no consideration to the standard episodic arc. How effectively its moody environment and slowly unfolding story will play in a loungeroom is open to query. In the cinema, it’s completely immersive. — SB

Section: Panorama
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Cast: Aivan Uttapa, Gustavo Sanchez Parra, Andrea Suarez Paz, Rosa Armendariz, Diego Olmedo, Melanie Frometa
Deadline’s takeaway: At its coronary heart, Olmo is a straightforward story about immigrants, coming of age, rising up, taking duty, love, friendship, a stereo, a barbecue, curler skates and above all household. — PH

Section: Dramatic
Director: Lionel Baier
Cast: Dominique Reymond, Michel Blanc, William Lebghil, Aurélien Gabrielli, Liliane Rovère
Deadline’s takeaway: Its Paris in May 1968, and bohemian household’s life turned the other way up in Lionel Baier’s comedy. One character says there’s nothing incorrect with having a great creativeness: It provides luster to a life that may in any other case appear boring. And there may be nothing boring about life in The Safe House. — SB

Section: Competition
Director: Kateryna Gornostai
Deadline’s takeaway: Timestamp is extraordinary deep-cover documentary concerning the results of struggle in on a regular basis Ukraine that, regardless of the tough front-page relevance of its subject material, has a wonderful old style formalism in its modifying and composition. It can also be a celebration of nationwide character, depicting a era that has solely recognized battle and but, someway, refuses to be outlined by it. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Hong Sangsoo
Cast: Ha Seongguk, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee, Kang Soyi, Park Miso
Deadline’s takeaway: In What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong Sangsoo takes a tough take a look at the creative pursuit and at sincerity in relationships, with a seemingly easy story that has a little bit of a sting in its tail.

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Frédéric Hambalek
Cast: Julia Jentsch, Felix Kramer, Laeni Geiseler, Mehmet Aleşçi, Moritz Treuenfels
Deadline’s takeaway: It seems Marielle is aware of an entire lot after immediately growing telepathic skills. It’s a great premise, and Hambalek performs it effectively by maintaining it as pure as potential, minimizing the paranormal aspect and homing in on traditional male/feminine habits. But that’s the issue: It’s all relatively too predictable. — JW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Ameer Fakher Eldin
Cast: George Khabbaz, Hanna Schygulla, Ali Suliman, Sibel Kekilli, Tom Wlaschiha, Nidal Al Achkar
Deadline’s takeaway: Ameer Fakher Eldin’s atmospheric sophomore function retains the viewers at a sure take away, refusing clear-cut explanations or easy emotional catharses. — JW