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Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail arrives as a feverish fable set amid the winding waterways of Brazil’s Amazonas, where shifting currents carry more than just river barges. It sketches a near-future society that venerates its elderly with gilded laurels even as it corrals them into a “Colony” at the age of seventy-seven—a compulsory exile disguised as honor. Here, propaganda planes streak the sky, broadcasting cheery slogans even as wrinkled citizens await the arrival of “Wrinkle Wagons,” open-caged vans that collect the unwilling and the defiant.

Into this paradox steps Tereza, a factory worker whose life of steady labor has skirted every daydream—until she learns her forced retirement is imminent. Denied permission by her own daughter to board a commercial flight, she sets out on a river-bound odyssey, guided by smuggler Cadu and buoyed by the promise of an ultralight adventure. The encounter with a bioluminescent snail,...

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...

“Our country is going toward the future,” booms a disembodied voice of authority as The Blue Trail begins. In this cinematic vision of Brazil imagined by screenwriter Tibério Azul and vividly realized by director Gabriel Mascaro, it’s no country for old women. An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.

The Blue Trail is a slightly off-kilter refraction of the world as it exists. Perhaps as a result, it’s all the harder to shake. In the Brazil of Mascaro’s film, the government designates its older citizens as “living heritage” and begins legal protocols to sideline them within society. Their patronization under the guise of protection includes forcing retirement, transferring custodianship to younger relatives, and the eventual scuttling off to an old age colony.

This setup amounts...

One of the many peculiarities of recent U.S. cultural trends is the “over-55 community,” gated havens for well-off retirees who embrace the idea of mono-generational living as an all-comforts interlude before Thanatos comes knocking. In Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail, a gentle blend of delayed self-realization fantasy and dystopian portent, the cutoff age is 77, which in a way is progress (think of Logan’s Run) and the move is involuntary, but resistance is not futile. Mascaro’s fourth feature can be considered a pair with his previous Divine Love, which also imagined a near-future controlled by a repressive state disguised as a caring Big Brother, but his latest is less deliciously elliptical than earlier films, privileging sensorial rewards that come from the natural world rather than the human body.

Set aglow by the earthy force of Denise Weinberg as Tereza, a woman determined not to be put away, The Blue Trail...

Movies about dystopian near futures are a dime a dozen, but it’s hard to recall one that sweeps you up in the defiant joy of liberation like The Blue Trail (O Último Azul). Gabriel Mascaro’s imaginative fable is a slap in the face of age discrimination, with hallucinogenic gastropods, dueling tropical fish and “wrinkle wagons” — trucks with caged flatbeds in which non-compliant oldsters are hauled off while kids snap cellphone photos. The subversive spirit gradually awakened in the 77-year-old central character is echoed in the cheeky pleasures of the plotting in a film both fantastical and grounded in earthy reality.

Mascaro had his international breakthrough in 2015 with the intoxicating Neon Bull, a ripely sensual contemplation of the thin line separating man and beast, which upended conventional notions of machismo through its observation of a makeshift family of animal handlers working the rodeo circuit in Northern Brazil. The cowboy...

Pitched somewhere between science-fiction and fable, director Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail” finds a beacon of optimism within its own dystopian view of the future. Set in the director’s native Brazil — and showcasing the astonishing natural beauty (side by side with decay) of the Amazon in every high-definition frame — the film centers a 77-year-old woman, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), in a society that has deemed anyone above the age of 75 an impediment to its economic success. Mascaro sees her differently, and so will we by the end of what unexpectedly turns out to be the greatest South American houseboat movie since “Fitzcarraldo.”

The “Neon Bull” director has always had an incredible visual sense, though his plots tend to lack focus. Not this one. Judging by its concept alone, “The Blue Trail” could technically be classified alongside “Children of Men” on video store shelves. And yet, in both genre and tone,...