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.
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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 makes the lyricist’s genius truly pathetic. — SB
The Blue Trail
Section: Competition
Directors-screenwriters: Gabriel Mascaro, Tibério Azul
Cast: Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, Miriam Socarrás, Adanilo, Clarissa Pinheiro
Deadline’s takeaway: Set aglow by the earthy force of Denise Weinberg as Tereza, The Blue Trail posits a river trip as a path to freedom, and its unpreachy warmth — despite occasional lags in momentum — offers refreshing rewards. — JW
Dreams
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Michel Franco
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell
Deadline’s takeaway: Michel Franco’s skewqering of woke hypocracy is thuddingly obvious, both at the level of metaphor — as a fable of North-South exploitation, which is one of Michel Franco’s stated purposes — and as a drama of thwarted love. — SB
Girls on Wire
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Vivian Qu
Cast: Liu Haocun, Wen Qi, Zhang Youhao, Zhou You, Peng Jing
Deadline’s takeaway: Surprisingly gritty study of people left behind or living in the margins fuses gangster realism with social drama and leavens both with a dash of unexpected humor. The subtext of Girls on Wire is more powerful than what passes as the plot. — DW
Hot Milk
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran
Deadline’s takeaway: The complex dependencies and jealousies between mothers and daughters are not exactly virgin territory, but the book’s author Deborah Levy and Lenkiewicz have a tough take on the way the mother’s sins are visited on her child that is frank and fresh enough to make us gasp. — SB
The Ice Tower
Section: Competition
Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noé, Marine Gesbert
Deadline’s takeaway: The Ice Tower is full of brilliantly conceived and rendered pathways that end in cul-de-sacs; it is beguiling, but hardly satisfying. While it is always a pleasure to watch Marion Cotillard piece together a character, and it’s pleasure just to look at her, it’s not enough. — SB
Islands
Section: Special Gala
Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Cast: Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, Dylan Torrell
Deadline’s takeaway: Despite the subtropical trappings, the main character Tom’s stasis has a fundamental ordinariness, and that turns his trouble in paradise into a more universal call to stop sleepwalking through life. — NR
Kontinental ’25
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Radu Jude
Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Șerban Pavlu
Deadline’s takeaway: Radu Jude’s assault on gentrification in Romania finds him in a surprisingly contemplative mood as he bundles up his usual firecracker concerns. The filmmaker is on, if not his best behavior, at least the kind of behavior that won’t get him thrown out of a diplomatic reception — SB
Late Shift
Section: Special Gala
Director:-screenwriter: Nadia Fall
Cast: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler, Margherita Schoch, Jürg Plüss
Deadline’s takeaway: Petra Volpe’s busy, urgent cancer-ward procedural moves like a thriller and is exactly what it says it is: a shift in the life of a nurse, a pile of incidents encountered at speed. And through it all, there is a sense of imminent danger. — SB
The Light
Section: Out of Competition (Opening Night)
Director-screenwriter: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, Tala Al-Deen, Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause
Deadline’s takeaway: Beware novel psychological therapies from Austria: You never know where they may lead. Tom Tykwer tests Germany’s white liberal guilt, but why it has to be so long is as much of a puzzle as the workings of the light therapy. It is surprisingly watchable, though. — SB
Living the Land
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Huo Meng
Cast: Wang Shang, Zhang Yanrong, Zhang Chuwen, Zhang Caixia
Deadline’s takeaway: Rather than a static tribute to the countryside, Huo’s lovely roving eye for composition and gentle hand with drama trace the challenges and enduring bonds among several hard-working generations of Chinese farmers, set during the 1990s in a country on the cusp of vast change. — NR
Mickey 17
Section: Out of Competition
Director-screenwriter: Bong Joon Ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun
Deadline’s takeaway: Mickey is part of constant experiments to help researchers see what causes death and disease, so he is killed again and again, always being reprinted to continue the process. The thought-provoking satire is a not-that-absurd look at where we just might be headed as a society. — PH
Mother’s Baby
Section: Competition
Director: Johanna Moder
Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, Claes Bang, Julia Franz Richter
Deadline’s takeaway: Johanna Moder’s latest rivals David Lynch’s Eraserhead as a visceral evocation of new parenthood. This film is a bit like screaming your lungs out on a carnival ride, as the leads do early on: petrifying, but you’re glad you did it.— SB
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Section: Special Gala
Director: Justin Kurzel
Cast: Jacob Elordi, Ciaran Hinds, Odessa Young, Olivia DeJonge, Simon Baker
Deadline’s takeaway: Despite this being a series, Justin Kurzel pays little to no attention to the conventional episodic arc. How well its moody atmosphere and slowly unfolding story will play in a loungeroom is open to question. In the cinema, it is utterly immersive. — SB
Olmo
Section: Panorama
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Cast: Aivan Uttapa, Gustavo Sanchez Parra, Andrea Suarez Paz, Rosa Armendariz, Diego Olmedo, Melanie Frometa
Deadline’s takeaway: At its heart, Olmo is a simple story about immigrants, coming of age, growing up, taking responsibility, love, friendship, a stereo, a barbecue, roller skates and above all family. — PH
What Marielle Knows
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Frédéric Hambalek
Cast: Julia Jentsch, Felix Kramer, Laeni Geiseler, Mehmet Aleşçi, Moritz Treuenfels
Deadline’s takeaway: It turns out Marielle knows a whole lot after suddenly developing telepathic abilities. It’s a good premise, and Hambalek plays it well by keeping it as natural as possible, minimizing the paranormal element and homing in on classic male/female behavior. But that’s the problem: It’s all rather too predictable. — JW
Yunan
Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Ameer Fakher Eldin
Cast: George Khabbaz, Hanna Schygulla, Ali Suliman, Sibel Kekilli, Tom Wlaschiha, Nidal Al Achkar
Deadline’s takeaway: Ameer Fakher Eldin’s atmospheric sophomore feature keeps the audience at a certain remove, refusing clear-cut explanations or simple emotional catharses. — JW