Good Sisters, Bad Mothers, Angry Lovers
Women at the Berlinale
Feminine familial bonds abound at the Berlinale so far, taking us through moral dilemmas, middling dramas and deep and personal character portraits. And as is almost always the way, the mid nonsense plays in Competition while the genuinely good stuff is in the margins. Where buzzy British title Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz, 2025, above) floundered, the small German and Korean films The Good Sister (Sara Miro Fischer, 2025) and Spring Night (Kang Mi-ja, 2024) quietly succeeded, offering fascinating portraits of sisterhood and motherhood respectively. I have reviews for all three movies as well as the big Chinese movie in competition and Ira Sachs’ latest con job, alongside a variety of great reviews from trusted contributor Jared Abbott. Let’s take a look!
Night Stage Creates a New Landscape for the Gay Erotic Thriller
By Jared Abbott
I’m in a film group chat where we recently debated what qualifies as an erotic thriller. Many struggle to define the genre, often lumping in films that don’t quite fit. For example, some argue that Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024) qualifies, but its heavy comedy and lack of real danger or murder set it apart from classics like Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) or Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994).
An erotic thriller demands a protagonist whose desires consume them, putting them in real danger or leading them toward ruin. The story must link sex and murder, or show the protagonist facing ruin — or extreme punishment — due to their desires.
Night Stage (2025), co-written and directed by Marcio Reolon and Felipe Matzenbacher, clearly qualifies, delivering on all fronts.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Sirens Call. Mermaids and All.
By Jared Abbott
One of the dolls was visiting for the weekend, so I showed her the trailer for Sirens Call (2025), Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s mesmerising new film about a siren returning to Earth. Before long, we were deep in conversation about all the mermaid media we’ve loved over the years.
From corny classics like Splash (Ron Howard, 1984) to Dennis Hopper’s haunting debut in Night Tide (Curtis Harrington, 1961) to the gloriously violent revenge thriller Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984) — not to mention Cher’s unforgettable New Year’s costume in Mermaids (Richard Benjamin, 1990) — we found ourselves fully immersed in an aquatic reverie.
Read the rest of the review over at Journey Into Cinema!
Home Sweet Home. Giving Care.
By Jared Abbott
A careful character study about getting lost in your work, Home Sweet Home (Frelle Petersen, 2025) follows Sofie as she pursues a new career in doing home caregiving visits for the elderly. Her initial enthusiasm quickly fades and the toll becomes visible — not just in her demeanor but in her appearance. Her skin grows pale, dark circles form under her eyes, and before long, she looks like someone who could use a caregiver herself. Recently divorced, she also begins pushing her daughter away, to the point where the girl prefers staying with her father and his new partner.
This film marks the fourth collaboration with actress Jette Søndergård and much like their 2019 film, Uncle, it focusses on the quiet sacrifices a woman makes in her devotion to caring for others.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Spring Night. A Sobering Experience.
By Redmond Bacon
Heavy body, awakening from drink: oh, springtime
“A Springtime Evening,” by Kim Su-young (1957)
Movies about alcoholism often suffer from the same problem Truffaut attributed to anti-war movies. Whether it’s Trees Lounge (Steve Buscemi, 1996), Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) or, more recently, The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt, 2024), alcoholism may corrode the soul and debase the body, but oftentimes, popular actors look kinda cool while doing it. Even when things do get very bad, there can be a tragic glamour in alcoholism, wasting away to the bottom of the bottle, showing off your enormous appetite for endless rounds of drinks.
Well, the extraordinarily brutal and powerful Spring Night (Kang Mi-ja, 2024) — adapted from the novel of the same name by Kwon Yeo-sun — doesn’t suffer from this issue. The 40-something Yeong-gyeong’s (Han Ye-ri) penchant for downing bottle after bottle of soju looks utterly devastating. Alcohol is not fun here. Not at all. This is a woman completely frozen in the grip of an unceasing mental disease. Han’s astonishing performance is a perfectly pitched portrait of misery ever-so-slightly tinged with a tragic slice of hope.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
The Good Sister. A Great Movie.
By Redmond Bacon
The bonds of familial trust are stretched to their breaking point in The Good Sister (2025), an exceptional debut by Sara Miro Fischer with an equally nuanced, here-I-am performance by relative newcomer Marie Bloching. A heavy drama about bearing witness to horror and the moral quagmire of truly loving your sibling, its difficult subject matter is matched by its quiet confidence in execution.
Bloching plays Rose Berger as an aimless yet likeable young soul, one of many Berliners — matter-of-fact, queer, artsy — drifting from one relationship to the other and one apartment to the next. After breaking up with her ex-girlfriend for reasons unknown, she moves in with her brother Sami (Anton Weil), where he generously gives her the couch. Similar in age, they are remarkably close and intimate; they swim in the lake together, she cuts his hair and he doesn’t hesitate to let her stay as long as she needs in the wake of her toxic break-up.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Living The Land. Weddings and Funerals.
By Redmond Bacon
Living the Land (Huo Meng, 2025) is set in 1991, but bar a brief mention to contemporary events like the Gulf War and the appearance of a colour TV, it could be set in 1971 — perhaps even 1951. Taking place in a remote village in the Chinese hinterlands, it’s an intimate epic deeply steeped in long-standing traditions sprinkled with the horrors of state control. For Huo, capturing the preservation of local customs as the country was on the cusp of monumental technological advancement, these traditions are not so much worth cherishing as not-too-distant relics of an unenlightened past.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Rosenkrantz and the Real Slow Burn
By Redmond Bacon
Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025) isn’t much of a movie. It’s a transcript with images attached. A slight and meandering thing. A little bit of ephemera. A curio. To quote Indiana Jones: “It belongs in a museum.”
But, to be fair, it’s not really trying to be a big movie in the first place. Reuniting Sachs with Passages (2023) star Ben Whishaw, this 75-minute one-location experiment is quite literally just a reconstruction of a once-lost 1974 conversation between journalist Linda Rosencratz (Rebecca Hall) and the legendary photographer Peter Hujar. Letting Hujar drone on and on as he recounts the day before in excruciatingly banal detail — including the exact receptacle he uses to water his plants — it’s a celebration of the little things that make up a single day. After all, “Days are where we live.”
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz, 2025) is yet more proof that you shouldn’t freely enter into relationships with polyamorous Berliners. Especially if you are an emotionally repressed daughter of an Irish woman suffering from a mysterious concatenation of chronic ailments. And most certainly if you haven’t resolved your abandonment issues from your flakey Greek father. Broken people need boring lovers — not more chaos.
Splitting the difference between a tempestuous summer lesbian drama and a moody mother-daughter tale, screenwriter-turned-director Lenkiewicz’s first turn behind the camera is an intermittently interesting sun-soaked adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel that dwells on trauma, awkward relationships and facing a new future in light of a difficult past.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!