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There’s a chill falling overCollider’s Exclusive Preview event today as we welcome Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower to the fold. For many of us, summer is still burning as strong as ever, but the French film that’s set for a theatrical debut on October 3 courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures is bringing a strong cold front in. We’re excited to share a first-look image with our readers that depicts Marion Cotillard’s (The Dark Knight Rises) cold-as-ice character, Cristina, in her role as The Snow Queen, as she looks down on her subjects. Also featuring the talents of Clara Pacini (Club Cauchemar) and celebrated filmmaker Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone) in an acting role, the movie will dive into a story of the magnetic connection between a movie star and a runaway teen.

The expression on Cotillard’s face in our exclusive preview shot of The Ice Tower...

Jonatan Etzler’s “Bad Apples,” and Stroma Cairns’ “The Son and the Sea” are two of the 13 titles selected for this year’s San Sebastián New Directors strand, the biggest sidebar outside the festival’s main competition, along with its Horizontes Latinos section, and a powerful platform.

Dedicated to first and second features, talent which has competed at New Directors takes in New Directors has helped to boost the discovery of filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jonathan Glazer, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Bong Joon-ho, Isabel Coixet and Kevin Smith.

Starring “Game of Thrones’” Jason Anderson and “Hanna’s” Saoirse Ronan and described as a primary school set biting satirical comedy with thriller elements, Bad Apples” reps the English-language debut of Swedish writer-director Etzler (“One More Time”). HanWay Films launched pre-sales at 2023’s American Film Market of the film, produced by the U.K.’s Pulse Films.

A BAFTA TV...

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s lyrical fantasy The Ice Tower swept Switzerland’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (Nifff) over the weekend, capturing the H.R. Giger “Narcisse” award for best feature and the production-design prize while cementing Marion Cotillard’s latest collaboration with the French auteur as the season’s genre headline.

The jury announced its verdict late Saturday, praising the film’s “mesmerising interplay of desire and control” as it led a prize list that also saw Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister claim the Silver Méliès. Nifff’s 24th edition drew 66 000 attendees—up on last year’s estimate—and premiered 127 titles from 42 countries, buoyed by a new open-air venue that sold out nightly. Festival director Pierre-Yves Walder said the awards underline “genre cinema’s ability to reinvent itself through daring perspectives,” while the Chf 10 000 top-feature purse positions Ice Tower for an expanded European roll-out this autumn.

Set in the 1970s,...

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s fractured fairy-tale “The Ice Tower” took top honors at this year’s Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival (Nifff), claiming the festival’s H.R. Giger “Narcisse” prize alongside the Imaging the Future prize for best production design.

Toplined by Marion Cotillard alongside colorful character turns from Gaspar Noé and August Diehl, the 1970s-set film follows a young orphan who falls into an hypnotic and soon reciprocated obsession with a film star shooting an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”

“All my films are fairy-tales,” Hadzihalilovic told Variety ahead of her film’s world premiere in Berlin. “I don’t care to situate my stories in an everyday reality or a contemporary timeframe; whereas the storybook form comes naturally, allowing for poetry and escape.”

‘U Are the Universe’ Courtesy of ForeFilms

This year’s international jury – made up of graphic novelist Emil Ferris, philosopher Hélène Frappat,...

The fine folks the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival wrapped up the twenty-fourth edition of their festival this weekend. With the conclusion of the festival comes the awards Lucile Hadžihalilović's dark fantasy, The Ice Queen, won the jury prize for best feature film, as well as the award for best production design. Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister took home the Silver Méliès award and will compete for the Best European fantastic film at Sitges soon. The youths and the festival audience really liked Pavlo Ostrikov's U Are The Universe, granting it awards from both groups. Short film award winners and all the honorifics are noted in the officlal announcement that follows. Nifff 2025: The Year Of Diversity, Audacity And Success The 24th edition of the...

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Tudor Giurgiu’s Libra Film has boarded “Oceane,” Romanian Eva Pervolovici’s fiction follow-up to 2013 Berlinale entry “Marussia.” Giurgiu will co-produce the film with Clémentine Mourão-Ferreira, whose Bordeaux-based label so-cle launched in 2020. The French-Portuguese producer, who has over two decades of experience in the industry, has worked with the likes of Manoel de Oliveira, Aida Begic, and André Téchiné.

“Oceane” has also lined up its lead in up-and-coming French actor Celeste Brunnquell (“Being Maria”), with renowned French director Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”) acting as a script consultant.

Pervolovici’s will follow Brunnquell’s titular Oceane, a hypersensitive, climate-anguished young woman who works as a technician on offshore wind turbines. When Oceane is sent to rural Romania for work, she meets two people who will change her life: anti-corruption activist Alex and Iulian, a non-verbal 7-year-old boy who shares the young woman’s hypersensitivity. These meetings take Oceane on a...

Exclusive: Festival regulars Joe Yanick, Hugues Barbier and Justin Timms of US specialty sales and distribution outfit Yellow Veil Pictures are in Cannes talking to international buyers about two new pickups: Australian genre titles A Grand Mockery and Salt Along The Tongue, which they will distribute in the US.

The New York- and Los Angeles-based company acquired worldwide rights, which enables the co-founders to coordinate international rollout with the US release, and share materials with their partners around the world.

“We’ve been doing more worldwide pick-ups [like this] from filmmakers so we can sell internationally and distribute ourselves in the US,...

A single frame—snowflakes drifting through half‑lit corridors—feels like a whispered invitation into a waking dream. In The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović deepens her exploration of how images can speak louder than dialogue, guiding us through a story that feels both timeless and unsettling.

Directed by Hadžihalilović and starring newcomer Clara Pacini alongside Marion Cotillard, this 2025 Berlinale entry unfolds in a remote 1970s Alpine foster home. Jeanne (Pacini), a teenager yearning for something beyond the graying walls and endless chores, seizes a moment of freedom at a nearby ice rink. There, she borrows another girl’s identity—“Bianca”—and tumbles onto the set of The Snow Queen, a frost‑tipped film whose lead, Cristina Van Der Berg (Cotillard), exerts an almost magnetic pull.

From its opening tableau to the gradual unspooling of Jeanne’s dual personas, the film‑within‑a‑film structure underlines Hadžihalilović’s fascination with the...

Somewhere in a cinematic landscape that includes Yorgos Lanthimos and Lucile Hadžihalilović lies Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak’s “Glorious Summer,” a sun-soaked allegory filled with dread in which the customs of a curiously cloistered culture begin to be questioned. The Polish filmmakers go out of their way not to specify where in the world they are as they tell of three young women under surveillance who start to develop their own judgment inside a dilapidated mansion that’s the only home they’ve ever known, but they’ve made a beguiling debut feature that looks to put them on the map in other respects.

Appealing primarily to dedicated cinephiles, “Glorious Summer” doesn’t have much in the way of a plot, nor too many other identifying details that could make it easier to describe when the three women at the center are never named. Yet Ganjalyan and Szpak do...

Official awards of the 75th Berlinale International Film Festival have been announced and “Dreams” directed by Dag Johan Haugerud won the Golden Bear Award.

According to the report of Mansour Jahani, an independent and international cinema journalist, The closing ceremony of the Berlinale International Film Festival was held at 18:00 on February 22, 2025, at the Berlinale Palast in the city of Berlin, Germany, and the winners of various competition, including; the Main Competition, Perspectives (Gwff Best First Feature Award), the Berlinale Documentary Award as well as the Berlinale Shorts prizes were introduced and the prestigious Golden Bear award for the best film and other awards of this film event were awarded to the winners.

The Prizes of the International Jury

The members of the 2025 International Jury, The members of the jury of the Main Competition of this prestigious and first-class world cinema event are: The US-American director, screenwriter and producer Todd Haynes,...

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...

Writer-director Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower invites comparison to a haunting passage from Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human. Dazai’s protagonist describes being miles away from home and vomiting blood, which forms “a big rising sun flag in the snow.” Then, as he weeps, the man hears from a distance a little girl saying, “Where does this little path go? Where does this little path go?” It’s one that may as well lead to Hadžihalilović’s film, which abounds in contrasts between blood and snow, among other sensualist pleasures.

Jeanne (Clara Pacini) seems to follow paths wherever they go, without wasting time to wonder where they will take her. She runs away from her foster home in a remote region of France, where her only solace was reading fairy tales to a younger child, Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain). It’s the 1970s and Jeanne can easily hitchhike...

The 2025 Berlin International Film Festival announced its award winners on Saturday, with Dreams (Sex Love) from filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud winning the prestigious Golden Bear. Acting honors went to lead performer Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and supporting performer Andrew Scott for Blue Moon.

This year’s 2025 Berlinale competition jury was led by filmmaker Todd Haynes (his narrative feature debut Poison was awarded the Teddy Prize for queer filmmaking in Berlin in 1991). Other jurors included Nabil Ayouch (Morocco/France), costume designer Bina Daigeler (Germany), actor Fan Bingbing (China), director Rodrigo Moreno (Argentina), Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson (U.S.), and filmmaker and actor Maria Schrader (Germany).

See the complete list of 2025 Berlin International Film Festival award winners below.

Golden Bear: Dreams (Sex Love) by Dag Johan Haugerud

Silver Bear Jury Prize: The Message by Iván Fund

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: The Blue Trail...

The 75th Berlin Film Festival has concluded after nine days of fearless cinema in Germany. IndieWire was on the ground this year and earlier this week took a closer look at the top contenders for the Berlinale Golden Bear, which will be announced today along with other prizes.

That Rose Byrne and director Mary Bronstein had returned to the Palast red carpet meant their film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (which bowed early on at Berlin after world premiering at Sundance in January) was bound to win something. Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance for her turn as a stressed-out mother in crisis in the A24 psychodrama. Hopefully, this award gives Byrne momentum for the 2025 awards season ahead; it’s one of the great screen performances and certainly the crown of her career.

Today’s ceremony marked the first under new artistic director Tricia Tuttle,...

Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s latest Dreams (Sex Love) has won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Scroll down for the full list of winners.

The film is the third entry in a trilogy from Haugerud. The other films in the trology are Sex and Love, both released in 2024.

Other stand out winners included Andrew Scott and Rose Byrne, who took acting honors during the closing ceremony. Scott picked up Best Supporting Performance for his role in Richard Linklater’s competition title Blue Moon while Byrne won Best Leading Performance for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Chinese filmmaker Huo Meng won Best Director for Living The Land and Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude won Best Screenplay for Kontinental ’25.

This year’s festival was Tricia Tuttle’s first at the helm. Events began on February 13 with a screening of Tom Tykwer’s latest The Light.

The 75th anniversary edition of the Berlin Film Festival — and the first under the leadership of its new chief, Tricia Tuttle — drew to a close Saturday night, as the jury awarded the Golden Bear to Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Dreams (Sex Love).”

There’s a special poetry in giving this film — the portrait of a teenage girl with a passionate imagination who pours her intense feelings toward a teacher into a transformative personal essay — the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The film represents the third installment in the Norwegian writer-director’s “Dream Sex Love” trilogy. The first, “Sex,” premiered a year earlier in the Panorama section of the 2024 Berlin Film Fest, while “Love” debuted in competition at Venice late last summer.

“The film is called ‘Drømmer’ — it’s Norwegian for ‘dreams’ — and this was beyond my wildest dreams really,” said Haugerud, in accepting the prize from jury president Todd Haynes.

Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud has won the 2025 Berlinale Golden Bear for Dreams, a queer love story that completes his verbally explicit, but visually chaste Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy.

The deceptively ambitious drama follows a teenage girl’s infatuation with her female teacher, told mostly in retrospect, as the teen recounts her memories through a novel she has written about the events. In his review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney called the film “tender, captivating and often very funny,” noting the fact that Haugerud has made “three thematically related but narratively distinct features in a year is remarkable enough; that they are all terrific, even more so.”

The Berlin jury, headed by Carol director Todd Haynes, picked Dreams from the 19 titles in competition at the 75th Berlinale.

Rose Byrne and Andrew Scott won top acting honors at this year’s Berlinale film festival, with Byrne winning...

At a snowy Berlinale, against a backdrop of political divisions, this year’s standouts include Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic of Lorenz Hart, and intensely sexual romance starring Jessica Chastain

Berlin can be a touch inhospitable in February; this year was no exception, with visitors to the film festival enduring heavy snow, treacherous pavements and a two-day, city-wide transport strike. But the Berlinale itself is contending with a frosty climate. Traditionally a hub for film-makers of forthright, oppositional persuasions, it must now attempt to flourish in the face of Europe’s swing to the right, with Germany’s elections imminent and the troubling rise of the extremist AfD party.

Every new festival head faces the challenge of reinventing the event they have inherited, and in the Berlinale’s 75th year, the bar was set especially high given the scrutiny the festival has received. Last...

We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]

The post Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]

The post Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival, under new artistic director Tricia Tuttle, moves closer toward popular tastes than arguably under the stead of Carlo Chatrian. He departed the festival last year while leaving behind a legacy of programming a more arthouse-minded slate. Italian cineaste Chatrian came from Locarno as well as more niche festivals throughout Europe; Tuttle is an American with a history of film journalism and programming in the States and at the BFI London.

Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” and the Berlin premiere of “A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures) brought stars like Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet (along with his girlfriend Kylie Jenner) to the festival for viral moments that have put an energizing, social-media-friendly spotlight on the European showcase here in the U.S. “Mickey 17” needs all the help it can get, as the sci-fi comedy has been re-dated several times and, in the David Zaslav...

Berlin’s European Film Market wraps up Wednesday with a handful of deals and a touch of optimism over the future of the international industry.

The biggest title of the market, the Lena Dunham-directed rom-com Good Sex, set to star Natalie Portman, kicked off a studio bidding war, with Amazon, Warner Bros., Netflix and Apple all vying for the project, which sees Portman play a 40-year-old relationship therapist who finds herself back on the market after the exit of her long-term partner. Worldwide offers are reportedly in the $45 million-plus range, but there’s no news yet of a final deal.

Most of the deals reported were smaller domestic pickups of international art house features, with Sony Pictures Classics taking North American and Latin American rights to Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language murder mystery Vie Privée, starring Jodie Foster as a psychiatrist investigating a patient’s death. Goodfellas has also sold the project across Europe,...

If there is a filmmaker whose work can be described as “elemental cinema,” that’s Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s easy to chronicle her 2015 film Evolution as fluvial for its many water (and underwater) scenes, but also how its rhythmic flow steers the mysteries of a post-humanist plot. One might say that Innocence is earthy with a soil that’s dry––there, the woods are where secrets are concealed––and the San Sebastian Special Jury Prize winner Earwig is as ethereal as it is enigmatic. The way Hadžihalilović borrows from elements serves to alchemize the images we see onscreen, lacing them with a thin veil of unknowability. Yet their meaning is never fully out of reach; these are coming-of-age stories at their core. Hadžihalilović’s newest film, The Ice Tower, was billed as her most accessible work yet, borrowing from a source more familiar than she has before: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Snow Queen.

Deadline announced this morning that our friends at Yellow Veil Pictures have acquired all North American rights for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s dark fairy tale The Ice Tower. Set in the 1970s, the picture follows runaway Jeanne) who falls under the spell of Cristina, the enigmatic star of The Snow Queen, a film being shot in the studio where she has taken refuge. The film is the second time Hadžihalilović has worked with the iconic French actress Marion Cotillard. They take the lead in pic along with Clara Pacini. They star with August Diehl, Marine Gesbert, and it will also feature a cameo performance from cult director Gaspar Noé. “For me, The Ice Tower solidified Lucile Hadžihalilović’s place amongst the most fascinating creators of...

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When even a close-up studying the masterfully minute gesticulations of Marion Cotillard cannot awaken a film from its sleepwalking state, there’s a problem. Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” rambles about a dreamlike environment seeking life and lacking a pulse for two hours. Simply turning the frame over to let one of the great contemporary performers cook should be a no-brainer to inject some vitality into this leaden endeavor, but even Cotillard’s talents can’t thaw this turgid turd of an adult fairy tale.

Continue reading ‘The Ice Tower’ Review: An Arthouse Adult Fairy Tale with Marion Cotillard That Moves Glacially [Berlin] at The Playlist.

Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail has taken the lead on Screen’s Berlin jury grid with a strong 3.4 while Ari, Dreams, The Ice Tower and Reflection In A Dead Diamond also land.

The Blue Trailreceived four four stars (excellent) and five three stars (good), already beating the score of last year’s joint winners My Favourite Cake and The Devil’s Bath with 3.1.Denise Weinberg stars in the dystopian fable as a 77-year-old who embarks on a journey through the Amazon.

Click on the image above for the most up-to-date version of the grid.

Close behind was Michel Franco’s...

Like a distant French cousin to the late David Lynch, but with a name significantly harder to pronounce, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic has been making bizarre, intricately crafted movies for over two decades now. A rarity in Gallic cinema, where talk-heavy dramas and comedies tend to be the norm, her quietly disturbing films, which include Innocence, Evolution and Earwig, often put children in hazardous situations where horror, sci-fi and fantasy come clashing together in highly artful ways.

Her latest feature, The Ice Tower (La Tour de glace), is no exception, weaving a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen and Mulholland Drive. Starring Marion Cotillard, who also headlined Innocence, it’s the kind of movie where it’s better not to know much before going in. Suffice it to say that if you’re looking for a Disney film or a horror flick, or perhaps both, The Ice Tower isn...

What is it with Lucile Hadzihalilovic and ice? In her last film, Earwig, her central character was a browbeaten little girl without teeth who had to submit to wearing ice dentures, suspended from a cruel metal frame, all day. Her new film turns up the freezing unit to 11 in a long riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, moving between the white peaks of the French Haute Savoie, an ice rink and a film set where a version of The Snow Queen is being filmed in what appears to be real snow. It certainly sounds real as Jeanne (Clara Pacini), the young girl Hadzihalilovic sends out into this endless cold, crunches it underfoot.

Like Andersen’s story, The Ice Tower centers on a girl on a quest, a framework that in the original can be read — as in many fairytales — as a mythologizing of the heroine’s growth into womanhood.

Cotillard plays a movie actor starring in a production of The Snow Queen in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s unwholesome story of yearning

An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state – and that’s the state that I’ve sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances – from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and a clamorous musical score.

Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actress called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen being filmed on a soundstage which is in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France; she is gorgeously costumed in a sparkling white form-fitting gown and crown,...

Hearts of Glass: Hadžihalilović Casts a Wintry Spell

A chilly scene of winter unfolds in La Tour de Glace (The Ice Tower) at a glacial pace, content with shattering itself into pieces for those desiring to get anywhere near it. The fourth feature from Lucile Hadžihalilović bears all the earmarks of her previous features, all pregnant with an ambiguous menace while its anxious characters use each other for reasons almost too obscure until it’s too late to avoid something terrible. Her latest venture is a reunion with Marion Cotillard, who headlined Hadžihalilović’s first feature, Innocence (2004), about an all girls’ school where the children are being groomed for a sinister purpose.…...

A film set is no place for little girls. In the fairy-tale-adjacent world of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s frigid dark fantasy “The Ice Tower,” an orphan runs away from her foster home and takes refuge in the basement of a movie studio, finding herself drawn to the production — and its star, played by Marion Cotillard — the way a child in a Hans Christian Andersen story might be lured into the clutches of a wicked enchantress. Aptly enough, the script they’re shooting is “The Snow Queen,” aspects of which echo through the ’70s-set movie’s many layers, all the way out to us, whom Hadžihalilović hopes to trap in her crystal prism.

Cotillard and Hadžihalilović collaborated once before, early in both their careers, on 2004’s “Innocence,” where the director first planted the unholy seeds she’s still harvesting all these years later: unsettling yet artful projects in which Hadžihalilović depicts the...

Gorgeous and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry 1970s fairy tale about a screen actress who casts a potentially dangerous spell. It’s anchored by an actress, Marion Cotillard, who has one of the great faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish beauty that pairs wonderfully with a creature cut out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, but wounded.

Shot gorgeously in France and Northern Italy by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg — this is truly the most visually astonishing movie so far to premiere at the 2025 Berlinale — “The Ice Tower” will prove an uneasy catch for commercially minded audiences looking for anything more than a mood in feature form. But those wanting to be hypnotized by cinema, as this film really does put you in a state of trance, will enjoy a unique experience from the director of “Innocence” and “Evolution,...

Starry sessions with Robert Pattinson and Jacob Elordi enlivened the Berlin Film Festival Saturday as the actors made waves with high-profile new titles “Mickey 17” and “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”

Saturday’s premiere of sci-fi adventure film “Mickey 17” was one of the biggest events of the Berlinale so far, as all eyes in the film biz have been on director Bong Joon Ho and his followup to the Oscar-winning 2019 drama “Parasite.” Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh and Elsa Keslassy captured the buzz in the room as Berlin fest director Tricia Tuttle had to cut the standing ovation short in order to bring the director and star on stage for a Q&a.

“Pattinson, who attended the premiere giving off Batman vibes (in an all-black ensemble that included a leather coat), arrived early in the night — signing autographs and taking many selfies on his way inside the theater.

Marion Cotillard shared that, while she plays the enigmatic Cristina in her film The Ice Tower (‘La Tour de Grace’), she found herself intimidated by her young co-star Clara Pacini as the pair prepared to work on the movie.

Cotillard, who won an Oscar in 2008 for her role of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, said at the Berlinale Film Festival:

“We met at my place and I realised I didn’t dare to look her straight in the eyes, I felt very uncomfortable. I felt intimidated by Clara, she is very charismatic. That was the start of our work together, [that connection] already existed between us.”

Discussing her preparation for the role of actress Cristina, she said: “I invented stories, rivalries with actors, failures and flops. I invented her decline, in a sense.”

She added: “Repeatedly, I play mysterious figures, so I want to see that mystery for myself. I...

Two decades after their last collaboration, Marion Cotillard reunites with filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic for “The Ice Tower,” a fractured fable that lifts as much from the work of Hans Christian Andersen as from Hadzihalilovic’s formative years.

Premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the 1970s-set film follows a young orphan who falls into an hypnotic — and soon reciprocated — obsession with a film star shooting an adaptation of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”

“All my films are fairy-tales,” says Hadzihalilovic. “I don’t care to situate my stories in an everyday reality or a contemporary timeframe; whereas the storybook form comes naturally, allowing for poetry and escape.”

Cotillard, of course, plays that regal film star — “a cold, cold woman,” per the director — who doubles as a vision of glamour and a taste of something altogether more acrid. And after working together on 2004’s “Innocence,” Hadzihalilovic now wanted to give...

Is there any star working today with a career as varied as Marion Cotillard? Anyone who has moved as effortlessly between Hollywood blockbusters — Inception, Dark Knight, Public Enemies — and indies (The Immigrant and Macbeth), from slapstick action comedy like the Taxi films — the French pre-Fast and the Furious car racing franchise that first made her a star — to auteur dramas like Rust and Bone, Annette, and Two Days, One Night?

“I just read scripts and, no matter the genre, if it’s a comedy or a drama, when I feel I can bring something to the movie, that’s when I choose to be part of it,” Cotillard says, speaking via Zoom from her home in Paris. “I don’t plan anything [but] I feel very lucky that I can go between totally different worlds.”

The world Cotillard enters in The Ice Tower, which has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Feb.

The 75th annual Berlin Film Festival begins today, and Jury president Todd Haynes has quite the crop of competition titles to choose from. New films by Richard Linklater, Radu Jade, Hong Sang-soo, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and the duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, among others, all vie for the Golden Bear this year. Will there be an early favorite for Berlinale’s top prize after its first weekend?

Continue reading ‘Mother’s Baby’ Clip: Johanna Moder’s Drama Premieres At The Berlin Film Festival Next Week [Exclusive] at The Playlist.

The Berlin Film Festival celebrates its 75th year with new leadership and fresh new cinema from around the world. New artistic director and former BFI London Film Festival leader Tricia Tuttle joins 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.

That’s begun to pay off already this year, with new films from Germany’s own Tom Tykwer (supernatural opening night family drama epic “The Light”), Ira Sachs (“Peter Hujar’s Day”), Michel Gondry, Michel Franco (“Dreams”), Radu Jude (“Kontinental ’25”), Richard Linklater (“Blue Moon”), Hong Sangsoo (“What Does That Nature Say to You”), Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”), and of course Bong Joon Ho (“Mickey 17”) sprinkled throughout the sections.

Meanwhile, Todd Haynes heads up the jury, which also includes filmmaker Nabil Ayouch, costume designer Bina Daigeler, actor Fan Bingbing,...

Exclusive: Goodfellas has unveiled one of its biggest European Film Market slates ever featuring upcoming films by Cristian Mungiu, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Saeed Roustaee, Claire Denis, Mario Martone and Raoul Peck.

The company is also handling a trio of Berlin Film Festival titles: Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Golden Bear contender The Ice Tower with Marion Cotillard; Burhan Qurbani’s No Beast. So Fierce. in Berlinale Special; and a fresh acquisition, Bálint Dániel Sós’ Growing Down.

The latter film, which premieres in the new competitive Perspectives section aimed at first films, revolves around a widowed father of two who is tested by fate when he becomes the only witness of a serious accident involving his stepdaughter caused by his youngest son.

Goodfellas will begin pre-sales on Romanian director Mungiu’s first English-language picture Fjord, with Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice) and Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World...

Chinese star Fan Bingbing (I Am Not Madame Bovary, The 355) and German actor/director Maria Schrader (I’m Your Man, She Said) will join jury president Todd Haynes to judge the competition films at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale announced Thursday.

Berlin unveiled its international jury for the 2025 event, which runs Feb. 13-23, which will see the Far from Heaven and Carol director heading up the four-woman, three-man jury that will pick this year’s Gold and Silver Bear winners.

Alongside Fan and Schrader, the 2025 Berlinale jury includes Moroccan-French director Nabil Ayouch (Much Loved, Horses of God), German costume designer Bina Daigeler (TÁR, Mulan), Argentine director Rodrigo Moreno (The Delinquents), and American critic and podcast host Amy Nicholson.

Haynes has a long history with the Berlinale. His debut feature Poison won the Teddy Award, for LGBTQ+ cinema, at Berlin in 1991.

The 75th Berlinale kicks off with...

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If you are a horror fan, then there is a big chance that you might have heard about the horror streaming service Shudder, and if you have its subscription, you might be wondering what’s in store for you in February 2025. Don’t worry. There is a host of new and old horror movies coming to the service in the upcoming month, and we have listed the 10 best movies coming to Shudder in February 2025.

Unfriended: Dark Web (February 1) Credit – Blumhouse Productions

Unfriended: Dark Web is a screenlife horror thriller film written and directed by Stephen Susco. The 2018 follows a teen who finds a laptop with hidden files. When he and his friends try to investigate, they discover that the previous owner of the laptop had access to the dark web and was watching over them. Unfriended: Dark Web stars Colin Woodell,...

Tricia Tuttle, the new head of the Berlin International Film Festival, could have hoped for an easier start.

Tuttle, who was head of the BFI London Film Festival from 2018 to 2023, takes over the Berlinale (the world’s largest public film festival) after an Annus horribilis.

Last year’s event ended in chaos, with a furious political debate about the war in Gaza overshadowing any discussion of the movies. To make matters worse, Berlin saw its budget slashed, with cuts in government funding and a loss of major corporate sponsors coming up against rising costs due to inflation. At the same time, the expectations have only grown, with film fans and market attendees eager to see the Berlinale return to its past glory when it was counted alongside Cannes and Venice as one of the world’s top three film festivals.

Asked to do more with less, Tuttle has, impressively, pulled it off.

The lineup for the 75th Berlin International Film Festival has been unveiled, with 19 films competing for the coveted Golden Bear. Outside of those, the festival will also host the world premiere of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, have a screening of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown and offer up Tom Tykwer’s latest, The Light, which will be opening the festival.

Here is the full competition lineup for this year’s Berlin International Film Festival:

Ari – Léonor Serraille

Blue Moon – Richard Linklater

La cache (The Safe House) – Lionel Baier

Dreams – Michel Franco

Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love)) – Dag Johan Haugerud

Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say to You) – Hong Sangsoo

Hot Milk – Rebecca Lenkiewicz

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – Mary Bronstein

Kontinental ’25 – Radu Jude

El mensaje (The Message) – Iván Fund

Mother’s Baby – Johanna Moder

O último azul (The Blue Trail) – Gabriel Mascaro

Reflet...

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.

Nineteen features in competition, Artistic Director Tricia Tuttle loaded up on some mainstay auteurs with the likes of Richard Linklater, Michel Franco, Hong Sangsoo, Radu Jude, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Golden Bear winner Vivian Qu measuring up against Léonor Serraille (Cannes Camera d’Or winning Montparnasse Bienvenue), Gabriel Mascaro (Venice Special Jury Prize winning Boi Neon), Mary Bronstein (who will premiere her sophomore feature in Sundance this week) and first-time filmmaker / Ida scribe Rebecca Lenkiewicz. The 75th edition of the Berlin Film Festival beings of February 13th.

Of the selections, here are titles we’ve been keeping close tabs on.…...

Jessica Chastain, Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton and Marion Cotillard were among a first wave of star guests confirmed for the 75th edition of the Berlinale at its line-up press conference on Tuesday.

Chastain will hit the festival as the co-star of Michel Franco’s Golden Bear Contender Dreams, while Whishaw and Hall will attend with Ira Sach’s Peter Hujar’s Day, which plays in the competitive Panorama sidebar. Sevigny is the star of another Panorama title, Magic Farm by Amalia Ulman.

Cotillard tops the cast of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Golden Lion Contender The Ice Tower in the role of the enigmatic star of a production of The Snow Queen, who bewitches a young runaway.

Other confirmed guests include Archie Madekwe, who co-stars in Berlinale Special Gala title Lurker; Rose Byrne, who tops the cast of Golden Bear contender If I Had Links I’d Kick You and Lars Eidinger,...

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...

New films from Richard Linklater, Michel Franco and Hong Sang-soo are among the competition highlights for the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, the world’s largest public film festival, which unveiled it full lineup today.

Linklater’s Blue Moon, a period drama about the final days of Lorenz Hart, half of the Rodgers & Hart songwriting team, will have its world premiere at the Berlinale, marking Linklater’s fourth time in Berlin competition. At his last go-around, with Boyhood in 2014, he walked away with the Silver Bear for best director. The feature, starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott, will be released worldwide by Sony Pictures Classics.

Berlinale regular, and four-time Silver Bear winner Hong Sang-soo returns with his latest intimate drama, What Does That Nature Say to You?; and Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose feature Sex was an audience favorite at Berlin last year, is back with Dreams,...