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The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 75th anniversary edition February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged film that takes stock of German society in the first quarter of the 21st century. It starts 11 days of debuts including for movies starring Jessica Chastain, Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Rupert Friend, Marion Cotillard, Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Emma Mackey and more.

The 2025 Berlinale runs through February 23.

Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

Blue Moon

Section: Competition

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott

Deadline’s takeaway: Richard Linklater’s Broadway chamber piece looks back to a lost time and mourns a lost soul in Lorenz Hart as the booze is about to consume him. In a bravura theatrical performance, Ethan Hawke...

Romanian hell-raiser Radu Jude won the 2021 Golden Bear in Berlin with the anarchic Covid-era call to arms Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, in which a teacher is persecuted by her school’s community when a sex video her husband made somehow leaks on the internet. Now, after his even more explosive Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World and a brace of more experimental documentaries screened in the Locarno Film Festival — he is nothing if not prolific — he returns in what counts for him as a contemplative mood.

Kontinental ’25 bundles up his usual firecracker concerns: the rise of cowboy capitalism in Romania, the enduring racism in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of social bonds and what that means for the poor. It also has the highest count of mechanical models in any film since Toy Story, popping up at apparent random, and some rampantly inappropriate inter-generational sex in a park.

There are any number of unique and memorable lines in Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s characteristically stinging “Kontinental ’25,” but the most trenchant of them all is borrowed secondhand from Bertolt Brecht: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.” Cynically referring to the Trotskyists accused in the show trials that Stalin staged in Moscow as part of the Great Purge, Brecht’s comment is still debated in part because its degree of sincerity is so hard to parse.

Jude’s own provocations (including “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”) tend to wear their heart on their sleeve more than most public figures could at the height of the Soviet Union, but their side-eyed profiles of today’s social ills are similarly caustic and cagey all at once. Jude’s sympathies are as generous as his arguments are damning,...

The highly prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has, in the past year alone, directed two fictional features, co-directed a feature-length documentary, and released a one-hour experimental film made entirely of webcam footage shot at Andy Warhol’s grave.

Unlike his more famous fellow countryman, the Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, whose intricately crafted dramas come out every four or five years, Jude likes to make movies quick and dirty, as if his productions had a hard time keeping up with all the ideas racing through his head. His last two features — Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — were both ripped-from-the-headlines satires that felt fast, fresh and utterly contemporary, like they were shot on the fly.

The same could be said for his latest morality tale, Kontinental ’25, which has more of a universal bent yet makes references...

“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park,...

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." An early festival trailer has debuted for the new film from acclaimed, eccentric, provocative Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude which is titled Kontinental '25. The film is premiering tomorrow at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival (aka Berlinale) as part of the Main Competition section. The poster (also seen below) is a riff on the original poster for a film titled Europe '51 (aka Europa '51) directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman. Kontinental '25 is described as a "twisted take on Rosellini's Europe '51" - which was about a wealthy woman who becomes obsessed with humanitarianism when her young son dies from suicide. In Radu Jude's new take, Eszter Tompa stars as Orsolya, who is a a bailiff in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she must evict a homeless man who lives in the basement of a building.

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for the 2025 edition, running February 13-23. It’s the first official lineup overseen by new artistic director and former BFI London Film Festival leader Tricia Tuttle, who succeeds Carlo Chatrian and brings her background as an American journalist and curator to the annual German showcase. She’s also working with co-directors of programming, Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, to help reposition the Berlinale’s profile among the great global film festivals and lure bigger-name filmmakers in the process.

This year’s lineup, announced Tuesday, January 21, features new films from Richard Linklater, Michel Franco, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Hong Sangsoo (“What Does That Nature Say to You”), Radu Jude (“Kontinental ’25”), and Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”). Already confirmed in the mix are “Mickey 17” from Bong Joon Ho and Ira Sachs’ Sundance premiere “Peter Hujar’s Day,” plus Tom Tykwer’s “The Light” opening the festival.

Following last week’s lineup announcement, the Berlinale 2025 has now fleshed out its slate with the Competition, Special, and Perspectives sections. Highlights include the world premieres of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott; Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25; Hong Sangsoo’s What Does that Nature Say to You; Michel Franco’s Dreams starring Jessica Chastain; Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower starring Marion Cotillard; and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk with Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, and Vicky Krieps.

The festival will also include international premieres from Julia Loktev, Mary Bronstein, Kahlil Joseph, and more. In terms of omissions for films that potentially could have been a strong fit: there’s no Steven Soderberg’s Black Bag, Wes Anderson’s German production The Phoenician Scheme, nor Berlinale regular Christian Petzold, who wrapped Miroirs No. 3 only a few months ago.

Check out the lineup...

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival (February 13-23) has unveiled the 19 titles set to play in its official Competition and films selected for its new competitive Perspectives strand.

Scroll down for full list

New films from Richard Linklater, Hong Sangsoo, Michel Franco and Radu Jude are among those selected for the main competition, with stars including Margaret Qualley, Ethan Hawke, Jessica Chastain, Claes Bang and Marion Cotillard.

It marks the first Competition lineup from new festival director Tricia Tuttle, who announced the titles alongside co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz in Berlin today (January 21).

All Competition titles...

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival (February 13-23) has unveiled the 19 titles set to play in its official Competition and films selected for its new competitive Perspectives strand.

Scroll down for full list

New films from Richard Linklater, Hong Sangsoo, Michel Franco and Radu Jude are among those selected for the main competition, with stars including Margaret Qualley, Ethan Hawke, Jessica Chastain, Claes Bang and Marion Cotillard.

It marks the first Competition lineup from new festival director Tricia Tuttle, who announced the titles alongside co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz in Berlin today (January 21).

All Competition titles...

The Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the full list of titles set for its official competition alongside perspective and specials sidebars.

A total of 19 films have been selected for the international competition. It’s a buzzy selection with multiple titles that have been anticipated and boast high-profile names. Highlights include Richard Linklater’s latest feature Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott. Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco launches his latest title Dreams in competition. The film stars Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández and Rupert Friend. Franco last worked with Chastain on the Venice competition title Memory.

Elsewhere, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude lands in competition with Kontinental ’25. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk starring Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps also secures a spot alongside Hong Sangsoo’s latest What Does that Nature Say to You, and Mumblecore veteran Mary Bronstein returns as a director with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You...

After a major 2024 with the wider release of his blistering satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (which nabbed a spot in our top 10) and the premiere of a pair of smaller-scale, experimental films, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is gearing up for another big year. His forthcoming Dracula film earned much anticipation on our 2025 preview and now he has revealed he’s finished another surprise feature as well.

His new feature Continental ’25 was “filmed independently, low-budget, in Cluj and Florești,” Jude tells Films in Frame. Described as “a moral dilemma post festum,” the filmmaker adds it’s “a modest attempt at dialogue with some themes from Rossellini’s Europa ’51.” The cast features Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Annamária Biluska, Marius Damian, and Ilinca Manolache. See the first look below.

When it comes to his vampire feature, it was originally going by Dracula Park,...

Gerard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel will be heading to Romania to play in an adaptation of Titus Popovici novel Moartea lui Ip (The Ip's Death) - the feature will be known as So I Say. In the director's chair we find Bogdan Dumitrescu Dreyer, whose previous work includes Never Enough (2004), The Last Station (1998) and also Thalassa, Thalassa (1993) – the Tiger Award winner at Rotterdam Film Festival. The French actor plays the lead character in the project which will be filmed at Sighişoara, Romania, starting with August 22nd. Apart from Keitel, the film will feature Romanian actors Dorel Vişan, Alexandru Bindea, Gabriel Spahiu, Bogdan Iancu, Adina Cartianu and Mihai Constantin. A previous adaptation of Popovici novel was made by Sergiu Nicolaescu, back in 1972, which was known as Then I Sentenced Them All To Death. Written by Piero de Bernardi (co-writer of Sergio Leone's 1984 film, Once Upon a Time in America) and...