Fjord review - Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan

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Cannes film festival: The Palme laureate here makes a misstep with an odd, disquieting film that leaves too many issues unresolved Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at international film festivals with admirers from all over the world – and losing focus. Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu’s signature, certainly, with enigmatic long shots and avoidance of closeups, and one very distinctive crowding of faces in a dinner-scene tableau. But the ostensible pain and trauma of its story is conveyed without the rewarding complexity that we have...
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Berlin film festival 2023 roundup – prestige, politics and ethical starpower

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This year’s Berlinale continued the tradition of combining earnestness with red-carpet glamour – featuring Kristen Stewart, Bono and Steven Spielberg, and this time some real crowd pleasers

Berlin may not be as glitzy as the other big European festivals, Cannes and Venice, but it knows how to make the most of what you might call “ethical starpower”. Hence Steven Spielberg, present this year to accept the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, who made an eloquent and imposing speech about longevity, healing and – as befits the locale – the weight of history. And hence serious-minded Hollywood actor Kristen Stewart heading a jury including Iranian-French star Golshifteh Farahani and previous Berlinale-winning directors Carla Simón and Radu Jude – a lineup that seems highly likely to make some daring awards choices.

But there’s also that long-standing Berlinale tradition of combining red-carpet prestige with a certain earnestness that doesn’t always flourish on the screen. A prime example this year was Golda, a solemn, sluggish drama about Israeli premier Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, with Helen Mirren giving a solid, thoughtful performance, only to be upstaged by her uncanny prosthetic makeup. And then there was Sean Penn’s documentary about Ukraine, Superpower, co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, in which an understandably starstruck encomium to Volodymyr Zelenskiy was overshadowed by much narcissistic hyperventilating about what an amazing thing it was to be Sean Penn caught up in the Whirlwind of History. It was a phenomenally gauche, ill-advised piece; by contrast, Eastern Front, from Ukraine itself, was the real deal, a sober, urgent, profoundly troubling documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, based substantially on the latter’s footage, shot on duty with a volunteer medical crew.

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