STARS OF BERLIN
Diverse films debut in hunt for fame, Golden Bear
Wes Anderson's latest, the animated “Isle of Dogs” with its all-star voice cast including Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton, world premieres and opened yesterday's 68th Berlin Film Festival.
The mammoth Berlinale, in venues all around the city, runs through Feb. 25 and showcases around 400 films. The most prominent are its 24 marquee-topping Competition pictures (only 19 however are actually in competition) angling for the Golden Bear, the top prize awarded by the jury headed by veteran German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run,” “Berlin Babylon”).
World premieres abound, including Norway's “U-July 22,” a recreation of 2011's horrifying slaughter of 77 people, many of them children, by a lone gunman on the island of Utoya, and “7 Days in Entebbe,” about the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane and the daring Israeli rescue, starring the UK's Rosamund Pike (“Gone Girl”) and Germany's Daniel Bruhl (currently starring on TV's “The Alienist”).
Steven Soderbergh premieres “Unsane,” his first ever horror outing starring Claire Foy (“The Crown”), a film he reportedly shot secretly in one week on his iPhone.
Gus Van Zant's biopic of disabled cartoonist John Callahan, “Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot” with Joaquin Phoenix's already acclaimed performance, is in competition, as is the Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska-starring slowpaced feminist Western “Damsel.”
Willem Dafoe, an Anderson veteran and current best supporting actor Oscar nominee for “The Florida Project,” gets a career retrospective and honorary Golden Bear.
Three musical documentaries will celebrate global superstar Ed Sheeran with “Songwriter,” Japan's influential actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (a member of Tykwer's jury) and Sri Lanka-born British rapper M.I.A.
French icon Isabelle Huppert world-premieres “Eva,” playing a possible femme fatale. Ireland's Great Famine of 1847 is the subject of the thriller “Black 47,” with Hugo Weaving and Jim Broadbent. Germany's Christian Petzold (“Phoenix”) premieres “Transit,” a Nazi-era drama about a refugee who assumes a false identity.
This Berlinale offers politically themed sidebars with panels on #MeToo and gender disparity — and even anonymous counseling for those who have experienced discrimination.