Noticias

"You have no idea who you're dealing with." Netflix has unveiled an official trailer for an intriguing new dystopian thriller from Turkey titled Hot Skull, which will be out to watch on Netflix starting in December. Adapted from a Turkish novel of the same name, this sort of apocalyptic story involves a cool sci-fi concept where talking can spread a disease by connecting pathways in one person's mind. In a dystopian world, as an epidemic spreads through verbal communication, a tyrannical institution pursues a linguist immune to the disease. This seems like clever contemporary commentary where fascist ideas are turned into a physical disease, hence the epidemic, and some people wear headphones all day to stop themselves from catching it. The main character is a linguist, played by Osman Sonant, who is hunted by the ruthless Anti-Epidemic Institution. The cast also includes Şevket Çoruh, Hazal Subaşı, Tilbe Saran, Kubilay Tunçer,...

In a small village in the mountains of northeastern Turkey, three peasant sisters uneasily reunite under their father’s rustic roof in Emin Alper’s opaque, oddly theatrical “A Tale of Three Sisters.” Stunningly lensed in widescreen amidst the rocky peaks, the film struggles to excite admiration outside the visuals, forcing the viewer to vainly search for what exactly it was Alper wished to achieve. Bearing no evident connection to Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” apart perhaps from the girls’ desire, like Irina Sergeyevna, to live in town, this ultimately uninteresting drama is undermined by characters of little discernible intelligence whose plight will leave many viewers apathetic, partly due to the way dialogue seems to be artificially recited rather than naturally delivered. Outside a few festivals and Turkish showcases, it’s hard to imagine who’ll buy this “Tale.”

Unlike Alper’s previous feature “Frenzy,” with its clear parallels to the political situation today,...

Nine titles announced for Berlinale, which runs Feb 7-17.

The first films have been announced for the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival Competition and Berlinale Special sections.

The Competition line-up includes new films by Fatih Akin (The Golden Glove), François Ozon (By the Grace of God) and Denis Côté (Ghost Town Anthology).

The other three films in the strand are Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet, Angela Schanelec’s I Was at Home, but and Emin Alper’s A Tale of Three Sisters. All are world premieres except By the Grace Of God which is an international premiere.

The...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed the first wave of titles for its competition lineup, including new films from François Ozon, Marie Kreutzer, Denis Côté and Fatih Akin. Charles Ferguson’s Watergate documentary is among the Berlinale Special titles.

The first nine Competition and Berlinale Special films were revealed today, alongside the previously announced opening film, The Kindness of Strangers by Lone Scherfig.

Festival favourites Akin (In The Fade) and Ozon (In The House) return with German-language thriller The Golden Glove and French-language drama By The Grace Of God, respectively. The former follows a serial killer who strikes fear in the hearts of residents of Hamburg during the early 1970s. The latter looks at a real-life case of sexual abuses allegedly committed by a French priest in the late 1980s. Oscar-winner Ferguson (Inside Job) will present anticipated 260-minute feature doc Watergate, which is sure to draw plenty of contemporary parallels.

With “Winter Sleep,” Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan signaled a shift in style, increasing the importance of extended dialogues to the visually rich chamber pieces he plays out on grand stages. “The Wild Pear Tree” goes a step further, building elaborate rhetorical set pieces of such density that digesting them in all their intricacies at one sitting is practically impossible. Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue. For his fans, the three hours won’t feel like an indulgence, but those less sympathetic to the shared primacy of verbiage and imagery will likely feel tested. The achievement is masterful, though its diffusion will be limited.

Thematically “The Wild Pear Tree” fits perfectly into the director’s melancholy expanse of male disaffection, though his main character is younger than many of his protagonists,...