On the night of November 9, 1989, the ground-breaking gay film Coming Out was set to premiere to an East German repressed, homosexual audience, but fatefully, another ground-breaking event occurred that night: the Berlin Wall came down. As co-director Ringo Rösener narrates in his and Markus Stein’s Panorama documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der Ddr (Among Men — Gay In East Germany), the gay GDR community was robbed that [...]

The Mike Leigh method of filmmaking is a bit like the bible: collaboratively constructed, religiously studied and often woefully, disastrously misconstrued. Thankfully, however, Leigh still walks among us, and at this year‘s Berlinale Talent Campus, the British director imparted his candid wisdom to a packed audience of filmmaking apostles eager to learn about his distinctive approach to creating cinematic worlds.

“The distinction between writing and directing doesn’t exist,” began Leigh in [...]

Outspoken Danish director Lars von Trier could do with the editing finesse of Molly Marlene Stensgaard during his run-ins with the press, not just his films. The gracious and soft-spoken Stensgaard has edited Trier’s most highly regarded works, including Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Melancholia. After appearing on a panel at this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus discussing the collaborative process between editors, directors and screenwriters, Stensgaard took time aside [...]

In a Filipino slum, a desperate mother fights back tears as she chaperones her daughter to the doorstep of an elderly Caucasian man, ready to make a transaction that she’ll forever regret. This sequence, preceded by a child publicly defecating in the street, is the very definition of poverty porn, almost to the point where you expect to see UNICEF listed in the production credits.

Redeemably, however, the above sequence invites [...]

Pink Floyd called it: there’s something on the dark side of the moon, and it’s not Michael Bay’s Transformers. No, we’re talking Moon Nazis; Astral Aryans who have spent the last few decades developing a final solution they hope to be, well, much more final than their last one.

That’s the zany conceit fuelling Timo Vuorensola’s sci-fi sendup Iron Sky; a Finnish, German and Australian co-production that strips Star Wars of [...]

Man on a Ledge is a fairly apt title for what is, undeniably, a movie about a man on a ledge. But given that it stars action drone Sam Worthington, you’ll be wishing they called it Man off a Ledge before long.

Here I thought Hollywood was well aware of the limited range of Worthington, having restricted him in the past to roles that don’t require much emoting, such as playing [...]