Best & Worst Films at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival
One of international cinema's most prestigious annual events, the 67th Berlin International Film Festival (commonly known as the Berlinale) wrapped up this weekend, with Hungarian drama On Body and Soul earning the top award from a jury led by director Paul Verhoeven.
Below, we sample the reactions from film critics to that and other notable films premiering at this year's festival (including the upcoming X-Men film Logan, new features from Oren Moverman, Sally Potter, and Agnieszka Holland, and more).
Hong Sang-soo’s follow-up to Right Now, Wrong Then proved to be another critical darling for the writer-director. While not as formally daring as that previous film, Hong does get more personal with a story starring actress Kim Min-hee (winner of the festival’s Best Actress prize) as a famous actress coming to terms with the end of an affair with a married film director (something rumored to have occurred between Hong and Kim in real life). Indiewire’s Eric Kohn writes, “On the Beach at Night Alone is a fascinating sublimation of autobiography into Hong’s precise creative terms, a bittersweet character study as poignant, witty and deceptively slight as much of his work that also refurbishes it with a unique personal dimension.”