Screening Room: Berlinale Film Festival

On February 23, 2023February 23, 2023 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

Back from this year’s Berlinale Film Festival, which was packed with celebrities, retrospectives (Spielberg), buzzy premieres (Sean Penn’s Ukraine documentary for Vice), and a very strong lineup.

I wrote up a few movies for Slant, each of which should (hopefully) be hitting a theater near you in the coming year.

BlackBerry: A semi-comic docudrama about the rise and fall of everyone’s onetime favorite smartphone.
Inside: Willem Dafoe’s master art thief is trapped inside a rich man’s penthouse.
Manodrome: Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody star in this unnerving dispatch from the frontlines of masculinity.
Teacher’s Lounge: An idealistic teacher’s best intentions go horribly awry.

Screening Room: ‘Donbass’

On March 30, 2022 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

My review of the new Ukraine-set black comedy Donbass, which opens next week, is at The Playlist:

Winner of the 2018 Un Certain Regard award for Best Director at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival but only getting released in the United States now, “Donbass” makes for eerie viewing coming just weeks after the Russo-Ukrainian war entered a new phase following the Russian invasion of late February 2022. Set at some unspecified time after Russian-backed separatists carved off the Donbass region of southeast Ukraine in early 2014, the film provides a glimpse of what life is like in (as the on-screen titles term it) “Occupied Territory in Eastern Ukraine.” From what we see here, day-to-day life appears to be some combination of Cossack ”Mad Max” cosplay, throwback Soviet-era corruption, smashmouth nationalism, and gangster’s paradise…

Here is the trailer: