The film world a political injustice loveth (but it also loveth good cinema). And in a perfect storm of urgent, inspired filmmaking and jurisdictional accuracy the Golden Bear, the top award at the Berlinale, went to Jafar Panahi for his film "Taxi," a day after the FIPRESCI prize was given to him. Many of the other awards given out last night went to the underdogs, directors making cinema on a small but vital scale.

As usual, lots of mesmerizingly-good cinema to see and report on at the ongoing Berlinale. I'm a die-hard Cannester (it sounds weird, I know) but somehow Berlin being held in February just seems to work out better timing-wise for a lot of the more vital and less-established filmmakers. The wild, young things are here in Berlin and the older, more reliable filmmakers wait until May to make an appearance. Some, like Terrence Malick

The last of the snow around Potsdamer Platz has melted in time for the 63rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. This year’s opening film, from festival jury president Wong Kar-Wai (pictured at left), was the big-budget Kung Fu epic "The Grandmaster," shown here in its world premiere a month after opening in China. Expectations ran high for the arthouse auteur’s first martial arts outing, not to mention

Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, a meditative fable about love, memory and loneliness that jumps deftly between contemporary Lisbon, colonial Africa and the landscape of dreams has been gathering steam on the festival circuit, notably in Berlin this month. The film takes both its title and structure from F.W. Murnau’s final cinematic statement, a collaboration with Robert Flaherty. Shot in grainy black and white, the film begins with a brief

Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car is the director’s return to the big screen since 1999’s All the Pretty Horses, adapted from the Cormack McCarthy novel. Thornton said he was delighted to be back to directing his own material. He has chosen a quirky tragi-comedy set in the American south in the 1960s that is a double portrait of two families, one American, the other British. It has been twenty years since Naomi Caldwell left her

Viva Italia! Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) has become the first Italian film in over two decades to carry the Golden Bear, top prize of the Berlin Film Festival. In last night’s award ceremony, the eight-member international jury, headed by British-director Mike Leigh and featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, awarded the Taviani’s docudrama the statuette. The last Italian film

The latest pictorial from Berlin (Javier Bardem, Madds Mikkelsen and [...]