Wrapping the Berlinale.

Before drawing attention to a few of the highlights of this year's Berlinale in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis maps its spot in the festival circuit: "Less glittering than Cannes, more relevant than Venice and considerably less Hollywood than Toronto, this is a film festival where history and politics do more than just converge on-screen at a comfortable remove; it is where movies sometimes come uncomfortably alive, with stories that blur the boundaries between the world on-screen and that outside the theater."

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez lists those award-winners once again; Zsolt Gyenge has a brief chat with Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami; and Dee Jefferson meets Ghosts director Christian Petzold.

Filmbrain still has mixed, albeit mostly frustrated, feelings about that one.

Sven Semmler's picked three personal favorites: Kakushiken oni no tsume (The Hidden Blade), Sekai no Owari (World's End / Girl Friend) and Riyuu (The Motive).

The Movie Review Query Engine has a page set up to collect reviews of the films that screened in Competition; so far, though, besides those for the American films, very few reviews have been gathered.

Nearly every major German paper has, by now, run a summing up. Opinions vary, but overall, there's a sense that, while everyone's still wild about festival director Dieter Kosslick, with this, his fourth run, the honeymoon is finally beginning to wane. The old frustrations about what sort of festival the Berlinale is supposed to be are coming back: Critics want to see a more politically and cinematically challenging selection of films in the Competition; sponsors and Chamber of Commerce-types want to see more stars (one sponsor even put this demand into words: "Glanz statt Substanz," "glamour over substance").

Kosslick forges ahead along an impossible tightrope, offering, on the one hand, Paradise Now and The Wayward Cloud, and on the other, in order to draw Cate Blanchett and Will Smith to Berlin, The Life Aquatic and Hitch. Short of a radical and very risky rethink, there may be no way out of this dilemma. When the grumbling dies down, though, I can only hope that it becomes clearer what all Kosslick has achieved in these few short years outside of the Competition programming trap: The Talent Campus, with its hundreds of burgeoning filmmakers from around the world mingling with the experienced and the lauded; the World Cinema Fund, steering worthy but otherwise hopeless projects towards realization; and, granted, thanks in no small part to the American Film Market's schedule shift, an exploding European Film Market.

Meantime, for those who either read German or care enough to run a page or two through Google:

• Cristina Nord in die taz.
• Anke Westphal in the Berliner Zeitung.
• Fritz Göttler in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
• Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau.
• Verena Lueken in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
• Hanns-Georg Rodek in Die Welt.

And for those still in Berlin, Thomas Groh points to a series of films screened in the Forum section that will be shown again at the Kino Arsenal all this week.

Posted by dwhudson at February 22, 2005 5:57 AM