In these ghoulish American times, it’s heartening that “The Shape of Water,” a film that unified so many of us around its themes, that of cinema, the other (and the unknown), earnest love, a fairytale world full of possibilities, should win the world’s most prestigious film award. And for British actress Sally Hawkins, she of “Happy-go-lucky” fame—in the film she plays Elisa—to be feted in Hollywood, could one possibly ask for anything more?

After nearly four hundred films screening over ten days to 21,000 accredited guests and a third of a million ticket buyers, the Berlin International Film Festival drew to a close this past Sunday. The 68th installment of Europe’s largest film festival was a robust edition, with an unusually-high number of worthy films spread over the Berlinale’s dozen sections. As he did in once already in 2014 with “The Grand Budapest,” Wes Anderson

Intimacy and sex are essential elements to finding happiness in life, a theme found in this year's winning film. "Touch Me Not,” by Adina Pintilie, has won the Golden Bear prize at this year's Berlinale. The festival opened on February 15th and closed today and included around 400 films. Of those, nineteen were competing for the top Golden Bear prize. Romanian director Adina Pintilie said she had not expected to win the award for her film

In “Darkest hour,” what Gary Oldman’s Churchill has to contend with in a time of war reminded me of what a newspaper editor does: tense negotiations, the reworking of sentences, an overarching need to get the message out, loudly and clearly. The real context of the story, the history, is, evidently, a very different one from this. In the early forties European countries were falling like dominoes as Hitler’s panzer division closed in

Growing up, one remembers longing for our cinema to become more realistic, or at the very least a little less ridiculous. At one stage, virtually every film made was a lost-and-found potboiler that featured more or less the same dialogues. We have got our wish to a certain extent. The films of today try harder to tell a single story, populate them with characters that go beyond Kishan and Bishan, two friends who became enemies for a while until one

By now, film adaptations based on the oeuvre of the two most prolific British writers of crime fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, form a respectable body. Of the latter, probably the best-known work remains “Murder on the Orient Express.” Today comes a new version by the, himself now almost venerable, Brit actor, Kenneth Branagh. From the get-go in this iteration, the actor/director makes no attempt to shake the

Do sleeping dogs lie forever? The question can be asked about Peter Landesman’s biopic of Mark Felt, the FBI agent who leaked drop after drop of damning information regarding the Watergate burglary to Bod Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, until they turned into a flood that drowned Nixon and acolytes in 1974. If one relies on the story as it is told here the dogs will indeed not wake. Mark Felt