Pure Cinema?
The Berlinale is getting better, thank God
We have reached the point of the festival where a mixture of prewritten content and up-to-date reviews starts to pile up in a feverish frenzy. So rather than copy and pasting countless reviews for your reading pleasure, let’s dial down on what’s actually good. Read below to learn about: our hope for the Golden Bear spy pastiche (and PURE CINEMA) Reflection in a Dead Diamond, trans classic Dressed in Blue, Aussie comedy Fwends, fun true story Köln 75, Italian drama Where the Night Stands Still, and Marion Cotillard serving us true movie star looks in The Ice Tower.
One For The Pure Cinema Heads
By Redmond Bacon
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, 2025) is easily the most stylish and formally exciting film playing in the Berlinale competition so far; a riot of visuals, moods, aesthetics and pastiches that pushes and pulls cinematic language with absolute joy and ease. A deeply European and moody take on 60s and 70s spy clichés with a touch of Giallo and a splash of Godard, its depiction of the eternal cyclical struggle between a special agent and a mysterious assassin is a loving, entertaining homage to graphic novels, Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963) and OSS 117 that is a little hard to follow but certainly easy to love.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Dressed in Blue. Trans Lives in Full View.
By Redmond Bacon
If you want to make a good documentary about someone’s inner life — how they think, how they feel, how they dream — it’s best to simply let them talk for themselves. That’s precisely what Antonio Giménez Rico does in the 1983 trans classic Dressed In Blue, following the hopes and dreams of several transgender women as they navigate post-Franco Spain.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Köln 75. Iconic Chaos.
By Jared Abbott
Concert promotion is the antithesis of jazz.
Organising a successful show or tour demands meticulous planning and precision — there’s little room for improvisation. Venues need to be secured and musicians must be ready to perform. Yet somehow, a teenager named Vera Brandes pulled off one of the most iconic live performances in jazz history — and one of its bestselling albums — by orchestrating Keith Jarrett’s legendary concert at the Cologne Philharmonic.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Where the Night Stands Still: Between Light, Absence and Loss
By Massimo Iannetti
Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where The Night Stands Still (2025) is a haunting meditation on displacement, inheritance and the unspoken tensions that fracture familial bonds.
The film follows Lilia, a Filipino domestic worker in Italy who inherits the villa of her late employer, Madam Patrizia. Her siblings, also domestic workers, visit her and the three reunite after years apart. Their reconnection is anything but celebratory. As the day unfolds, the air thickens with a suffocating silence, broken only by small talk steeped in passive aggression and old wounds that refuse to heal. The house, with its grand yet empty spaces, becomes a silent witness to their estrangement.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Real Fwends. How Many of Us?
By Jared Abbott
“Seasons change, mad things rearrange
But it all stays the same like the love doctor Strange”
“How Many Mics,” The Fugees, 1996
We’ve all been there: you reconnect with someone who once felt like your ride-or-die in your early 20s, only to find that life, distance and the relentless march of adulthood have quietly wedged themselves between you. That’s the story at the heart of Fwends (2025), the delightful mumblecore debut from Australian director Sophie Somerville. Funny, raw and consistently sharp, this film takes its cues from conversation-heavy gems like My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981), the Before trilogy (Richard Linklater, 1995-2013) and the slightly underrated box office bomb Scenes from a Mall (Paul Mazursky, 1991) while firmly rooting itself in the rhythms and language of Gen Z culture. An immensely likable and relatable film, FWENDS is one of the breakouts in the Forum section.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Snowgirls
By Redmond Bacon
Marion Cotillard is one of the last few movie stars. Her imperious presence lends The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025) a sense of forbidding majesty before ever-so-slowly thawing into a deeply human and tragic depiction of power, privilege and abuse.
She is the Snow Queen. Or rather, she is playing the Snow Queen in an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale in a remote, sad and snowy French town sometime in the 1970s. She stars opposite newcomer Clara Pacini, playing the equally mysterious Jeanne, channeling Sandrine Bonnaire in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985) while looking a little bit like a young Natalie Portman as she runs away from a difficult home situation and stumbles upon an enigmatic movie set.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!