You can only marvel at the family intrigues that virtually closed down the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in the years following his death in 1969. "Destroy, destruct, separate, divide,” was the emphatic double-phrased imperative with which one of his granddaughters described the “family legacy” in The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, the BBC Four documentary that’s itself the work of another descendant, grandson Remy Blumenfeld, who wrote and produced this film by Nick Watson.It’s astonishing that it’s the first such screen tribute to a figure of Blumenfeld’s stature: the efforts of Read more ...

Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.Shakhnazarov's first venture into locally popular World War II territory, White Tiger is Read more ...

Who’d have guessed a full house for the third of The Rest is Noise festival’s Berlin nights? This time there were no obvious superstars, unless you follow singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and you know the impeccable track-record so far of young conductor André de Ridder. The programme of three very different composing voices from the Berlin of the early 1930s was not a crowd-puller either; yet the audience of mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings even stayed and cheered for Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, perhaps enticed by the promise of an after-interval encore Read more ...

Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together. But a concert performance that tries to be true to the 1928 premiere’s mixture of balladeers and fairly hefty opera singers to fill out the updated, jazz-meets-Bach riff on John Gay’s thieves-den Beggar’s Opera will be very lucky to Read more ...

It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb torchsong for which she is most famous, “Maybe This Time”, belongs very decidedly to the 1960s (it was written for Kaye Ballard, not for the 1972 movie).  Well, we heard that, and how - a number in itself worth the top ticket price of £100. We also had Liza singing Cole Porter and a starry-eyed Read more ...

While Liza Minnelli belted out hits from the 1972 film Cabaret next door at the Festival Hall, we in the Queen Elizabeth Hall were meant to be getting the real deal - echt 1920s Berliner Kabarett performed by Germans in German. German actors had been flown in. As had members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Awaiting us was an enticing line-up of Weill, Eisler, Hollaender, Heymann, Hindemith and Schoenberg. The raw, rambunctious Berliner night life beckoned. It was not to be.For some curious reason, the Southbank Centre thought that stuffing a programme full of dull monologues Read more ...

The 2013 Golden Bear in Berlin has gone to Poziţia Copilului (Child's Pose), by Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother, Cornelia, drumming up support for her son Barbu, arraigned for killing a little boy in a speeding offence, the Berlinale winner is a much-favoured mix of - in this festival - a film combining steely contemporaneity and political fearlessness. Its documentary-like texture and compelling theme, along with Gheorghiu's hugely imposing performance, make it a popular winner.A Silver Bear goes (as happily predicted by theartsdesk) to Paulina Read more ...

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.If he’s really putting himself out to grass, this slick thriller is an impressive last testament. Jude Law plays psychiatrist Jonathan Banks, who's drawn into murky money and labyrinthine deception as he tries to deal with a patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who seems to “forget” Read more ...

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.Location: Greece. They’re together: unsurprising fact. They have twin girls. They’re on holiday in the Peloponnese, guests of an elderly writer called Patrick, played by Walter Lassally (a cinematographer who lives in Crete and, as it happens, won an Oscar for Zorba Read more ...

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.Don John’s Addiction might on the surface seem a deeply tasteless excuse to cash in on raw sex and Johansson’s nakedness (kept, in fact, to a suggestive minimum), yet it’s much cleverer and wittier than it sounds. Read more ...

Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas.In a failing Pennsylvania small town Butler runs up against ancestral devotion to farming and an incomprehensible aversion to instant fortune, and into (of course) a pretty schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie De Witt). In her inherited home she’s Read more ...

In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, who at only 19 had won her first Tony in Kander and Ebb’s first show, Flora the Red Menace, and for whom they would go on to write “New York, New York”. “Liza was our girl, and we cared very deeply about her. We sat there afterwards and didn’t know what to say to these people whom we liked so much. Because we just hated it.”It’s not impossible to see why. When it eventually came in 2002, the movie adaptation Read more ...