IT WAS ON THE EIGHTH DAY that I knew I’d caught it—when, at the noon press screening of Hong Sang-soo’s What Does That Nature Say to You (2025), I found myself contributing to the chorus of coughs: the dreaded Berlinale cold. Given the ongoing brutality of daily headlines, alongside the subzero winter chill, each time we made our way out of the cavernous dark of the cinema into the sickly light of day, it was as though the encroaching fascism of the world were eating its way into our bodies. The only solace for this sickness was the artificial warmth radiating from the screen.
For his part, Hong found a nice balance between cold and hot in this tale of a young poet visiting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. While the director’s prolificacy—he sometimes makes up to three features a year—yields a certain formulaicness (strangers awkwardly meet, behave with excessive politeness to one another until they get drunk, at which point they explode), Nature still serves as an ironic commentary on enduring neo-Confucian social rigidities in Korean life and the human vulnerability that undergirds them. You either love or hate Hong’s films; I’m firmly in the former camp.
You’ll find a far harsher gaze at national interior issues from Radu Jude, whose hilarious, intellectual, and richly poetic excavations of his native Romania have positioned him as a festival favorite (his Badluck Banging or Loony Porn won the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlinale). This year’s Kontinental ’25, which won the award for Best Screenplay, was another epic in miniature that deployed weaponized humor, deep empathy, grueling pathos, and sharp social critique in a manner so singular that it can only be described as Judeian. Set in Cluj-Napoca—the capital of Transylvania, a region that once belonged to Hungary—it follows Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), an ethnic-Hungarian bailiff tasked with evicting a homeless man from the basement of a building that has been acquired for redevelopment by a luxury-hotel chain. The man kills himself, spurring a crisis of conscience that trails Orsolya throughout the course of the story. Shot on an iPhone over ten days on a presumably nonexistent budget, Kontinental ’25 demonstrates how little is needed, resource-wise, when genius is at play.
The much maligned (by me, at least) genre of the biopic sought to redeem itself at this year’s festival, to varying degrees of success. While I opted to miss out on the spectacle of Timothée Chalamet turn as Mister Tambourine Twink—the trailer was enough to induce the ol’ dry heaves in all those afflicted with a sense of taste—the overwhelming trend seems to be to isolate and deep-dive into a key moment from a historical personage’s life rather than erecting an overarching chronological sweep. For Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon (2025)—a character study of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart—that moment is the opening night of Oklahoma! in 1943 at Manhattan’s Saint James Theatre, which marks the beginning of his former collaborator Richard Rodgers’s new partnership with librettist Oscar Hammerstein. Confining the near entirety of the film to a single setting—the bar at legendary New York theater hangout Sardi’s—and minimizing much of the witty and well-written script to Ethan Hawke’s monologuing as Hart, Linklater demonstrates one path through which the biopic might redeem itself.
Leibniz—Chronicle of a Painting (2025) pursues a similar compressed-moment approach, in this case involving the namesake thinker-polymath-inventor, who sits for a portrait commissioned by his patron, the ailing Queen Charlotte of Prussia. Much of the narrative is built around Leibniz’s dialogue with the fictional female artist depicting him, who leads the philosopher to understand how painting, as both object and act, can serve to unite past, present, and future into an instant of temporal unity. OK, so it’s probably not everyone’s cup of swill, but for all my fellow monad oglers, you know where to meet me.
It should be noted that not all attempts to fuse biopic with chamber piece were equally successful. I really wanted to come out of Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) liking it. The movie’s dialogue is taken from a recording made between writer Linda Rosenkrantz and her titular subject, in which she asks Hujar to describe, in detail, everything he did the day previous. What we get is seventy-six painfully long minutes of Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall parroting, apparently verbatim, that conversation. By the end of it, the audience is left asking the one question director Ira Sachs apparently never bothered to ask himself: Why did this need to be a movie?
Inevitably, there were other disappointments, given the sheer abundance of films scheduled. For the opener, hometown hero Tom Tykwer returned to the Berlinale with the worst movie of his career, Das Licht (The Light, 2025), which attempted, rather dodgily, to tackle the hot-button issue of immigration through the story of a left-leaning and well-intentioned middle-class German family and their Syrian housekeeper, who’s endowed with mystical powers. Rather than bothering to come up with his own style, Tykwer is content to imitate Magnolia-era Paul Thomas Anderson, complete with hokey cartoon surrealism and cringy musical numbers (e.g., the cast dancing to and singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the streets). Pretentious, overblown, and ultimately boring, Das Licht should have been mercilessly switched off.
Countering such disappointments were tantalizing offerings highlighting what film as a medium could be. The festival’s Forum section has traditionally been home to more daring and bold visions, and the work of James Benning has historically been a mainstay. Conceived as a companion piece to 1984’s American Dreams (Lost and Found) was little boy (2025). In between shots of architectural toy models being hand-painted, folk and popsongs are interspersed with seminal speeches from figures such as Dwight Eisenhower, Hillary Clinton, Harry Truman, and Stokely Carmichael, constructing a patchwork history of violence and turbulence in the United States that takes us up to the present day. Yet another movie made on a smartphone is the strangely affecting 2024 (2023) (2025) by Stefan Hayn, which documents paintings he made over the course of the titular years: portraits of family and cityscapes of Berlin during various seasons, executed in watercolor and oil. His sweeping, elegant gestures tie him to the German Expressionism of Frank Auerbach and Rainer Fetting. Hayn’s project can be seen as a contribution to the tiny painting-film canon, alongside such works as the 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting.
With the coming German elections—scheduled for the final day of the Berlinale, adding an additional layer of ulcer-inducing anxiety to this moment of global societal collapse—the doctor ordered a total departure from the present. Thankfully, there was the Berlinale Classics section, which premieres digital restorations of endangered flicks of years long past. Among the golden nuggets were two proto-feminist masterpieces from East Asia rarely seen in the West. Yasuzô Masumura’s The Wife of Seisaku (1965) is set in Meiji-era Japan. A poor girl, sold off by her parents to marry a wealthy old merchant, inherits his fortune upon his death. She moves to a village where she is ostracized for all the reasons a beautiful widowwould be in this time and locale, but then she meets the local hero, a young soldier. The two fall in love at first sight and marry, becoming outcasts as a result. In the end, she makes a fateful decision to save his life through an act of irreparable harm, proving in a quite literal sense that love is blind. With its critique of feudalism and the impoverished role of women in society, The Wife of Seisaku was in many ways ahead of its time. But not more so than The Goddess, a Chinese silent film from 1934. The deity of the title is both mother and whore: the former by day, lovingly doting on her young son before plying her trade on the streets of Shanghai in the evening to pay for his schooling. Starring the exquisite Ruan Lingyu, whose own tragic story (shortly after the picture was made, she killed herself at the age of twenty-four, having been hounded relentlessly by the tabloids) was made into a movie by Stanley Kwan (1991’s Center Stage), The Goddess is as riveting as one of Sean Baker’s contemporary tragedies on the plight of the twenty-first-century sex worker. That it’s also more daring a work than one that would be granted official approval by the Chinese censors today is a note for sober reflection.
A Chinese film that went back to the more recent past is Huo Meng’s Living the Land (2025), set in a small farming village during the early 1990s where Chuang, a ten-year-old boy, is being raised by his extended family after his parents join the great migration to Shenzhen for work. The movie has its moments, especially in scenes where tradition clashes with the late onset of modernity—it was enough to garner Huo the prize for Best Director. But for Chinese cinema, this is well-trodden territory, and at this historical juncture, borders on propaganda. Such films cannot even begin to compare with the work of Wang Bing, who deliberately opts to create outside of the state censorship system.
Still, I’m grateful to this and all the other films—good and bad and in between—for temporarily removing me from the grim cold of the world outside. My physical health may have suffered for it, but cinema’s ultimate medicinal function—aesthetic Valium—was graciously affirmed.
