You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain in Joan Jett-like form as an imperilled hipster, the movie goes heavy on portentous sound effects and creepy-crawlies. What it lacks pretty much entirely is common sense.
Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.
Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Song for Marion is to tend towards the cheerful and the redemptive. Age is a bugger, they all accept, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings – or in the case of Song for Marion, till Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp have given their leathery larynxes a public work-out.
The great German-born director Max Ophüls admired Goethe, Stendhal, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and the four films he made in France, following his unfulfilling post-war sojourn in Hollywood, are characterised by supreme literary elegance and wit. Their prime subject is the transient nature of love and the particular sorrow of women. His elaborate tracking shots and bravura pans are brilliantly harnessed to mirror the inexorability with which emotions alter over time.
Big hitters have graced Berlin, with the festival now reaching its close - Damon, Huppert and Binoche have been and gone, Deneuve is yet to come - but one of the more anticipated visits this week was Steven Soderbergh’s. He has said that Side Effects will be his last feature as he “retires” at 50.
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five.
The shock of no longer being young and carefree – that’s the message in director Judd Apatow’s funny and poignant fourth feature, a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up. In the long tradition of Fellini and Woody Allen - where a lead actor is the director's alter ego - Judd Apatow's onscreen self is Paul Rudd. As Pete married to Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real life wife), he plays a father and husband confronting the scariest mundane thing in life: the idea that he's no longer young.
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet.
They’re in trouble. They had to be. Otherwise there’d be no drama. And if you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) skip the next two paragraphs to avoid knowing where, physically, temporally, Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have arrived since the poetic ending of the 2004 film.
Great fun on day three in Berlin: Scarlett Johansson co-stars in a porn movie. Well, a movie about a young man’s love of porn sites, in which she flashes her famous curves - and starts sleeping with Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But Jon, a swanky, body-building Roman Catholic, is soon dumped; Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman sees no future in being jilted by a laptop and tissues.