The 10 Most Exciting Films In The 2017 Berlin Lineup - Page 3 of 3

A Fantastic Woman“A Fantastic Woman”
Also at this early stage a front-runner for some sort of Berlinale award, strangely enough, “A Fantastic Woman” could also have been the title of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio‘s tremendous last film, “Gloria.” But maybe the callback is intentional as “Gloria” was also a Berlin premiere, and went on to become one of the most buzzed films of the festival and to pick up a thoroughly merited Best Actress Silver Bear for lead Paulina García. Lelio’s follow-up film appears to be in a similar vein of humanist portraiture, this time starring newcomer Daniela Vega as a waitress and nightclub singer whose life is upended when her older lover dies suddenly. It also stars Francisco Reyes and Luis Gnecco, who were recently seen together in Pablo Larraín‘s “Neruda,” and the two films share even more in common than cast: Like fellow countryman Larraín did with “Jackie,” Lelio will, immediately following this Spanish-language film, make his English-language debut with the currently filming “Disobedience,” starring two Rachels, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams.

POKOT/Spoor“Spoor”
Polish director Agnieszka Holland has gone from the heights of Oscar-nominated success (for wrenching Holocaust drama “Europa Europa“) to the heights of peak TV, directing key episodes of everything from “The Wire” to “The Affair” to “The Killing” to “House Of Cards,” but her long and prolific career has been marked by its fare share of middling-to-disappointing films too. However, her last feature, “In Darkness,” saw her revitalized, and her prestige TV work suggests that she’s at her best when the material has a little bite, which can keep the tendency for earnestness at bay. And that’s good news for “Spoor,” which by the sound of it has a spikily macabre tone, being an adaptation of a serial-killer novel in which an older woman becomes a suspect in a series of murders that cause a local sensation which highlights the claustrophobia of small-town Poland.

Terminator 2 Judgment Day 3DHonorable Mentions

“Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D”
While we couldn’t really justify putting a 26-year-old all-time blockbuster on the main list of anticipated Berlin titles, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t actively anticipating revisiting James Cameron‘s masterpiece (I am not even a little bit joking with that description) in the cinema, with the added kicker of 3D conversion. Crass though post-converting to 3D sounds, one bets against Cameron at one’s peril where 3D is concerned, and not only will this provide a new look at an old favorite, and a chance to open up the megabucks China market to a film that has actually never been released there, if it seems a winning formula, it may well be the shape of things to come. Cameron has plenty of films in his back catalogue that are ripe for adding a further dimension to, and since we can’t beat him, we’re going to join him and start looking forward to the reissue of “Aliens” in which the snapping alien head comes out of the screen at us, and of “Titanic 4D.”

SS-GBBerlin also has a record of debuting interesting TV projects — we were hoping for a repeat of a couple of years ago when Jane Campion‘s “Top Of The Lake” played in full, but there is sadly no sign of that show’s second season. Instead, our picks of the TV selection are new Amazon show “Patriot,” which stars Michael Dorman, Kurtwood Smith, Michael Chernus, Kathleen Munroe, and Terry O’Quinn, and follows an aspiring folk singer who’s also an undercover agent as he gets trapped in high-level diplomatic espionage while becoming increasingly disillusioned about his job. And secondly, there’s the intriguing and timely-sounding BBC show “SS-GB” with Sam Riley, Kate Bosworth, Lars Eidinger, James Cosmo, and Jason Flemyng, which is a detective story set in an alternate-period dystopia in which the Nazis have occupied England.

Other titles that have caught our eye from across the selection include: “Freak Show,” directed by Trudie Styler, with Abigail Breslin, Anna Sophia-Robb, Bette Midler and Laverne Cox; “The Young Karl Marx” by Raoul Peck, director of recent documentary “I Am Not Your Negro“; “The Misandrists” from provocateur Bruce LaBruce; “Barrage ” by Laura Schroeder, which stars Isabelle Huppert alongside her daughter Lolita Chammah; “Discreet” from indie experimentalist Travis Mathews, director of James Franco doodle “Interior. Leather Bar.“; “Viceroy’s House” from Indian director Gurinder Chadha starring Gillian Anderson and Michael Gambon; documentary “For Akheem“; Spanish director Fernando Trueba‘s “The Queen Of Spain“; and mental-illness love story “Ana, Mon Amour” from “Child’s Pose” director Cãlin Peter Netzer. And that’s not even getting into the many films that have debuted at Sundance and elsewhere that we’re anxious to check out, such as “The Lost City of Z,” “T2 Trainspotting,” “Berlin Syndrome,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “Dayveon,” “Golden Exits,” “Menashe,” “God’s Own Country,” and animation “My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea.”

The Berlin Film Festival starts next Thursday, February 9 and runs till Feb 19. See you at the currywurst stand.