Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon (2025)
Looking ahead to some of this year’s most-anticipated films a couple of weeks ago, we noted that Richard Linklater has two films in the can. We can probably safely assume that because Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), it will likely be headed to Cannes. But like Before Sunset did in 2004, Blue Moon will see its world premiere in Berlin.
One of nineteen features selected to compete at the Berlinale for the Golden Bear to be presented by a jury presided over by Todd Haynes,Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who teamed up with composer Richard Rodgers to create such immortal songs as “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and “My Funny Valentine.” In the spring of 1943, Hart is having a lousy evening as Rodgers celebrates the Broadway opening of Oklahoma!, his first musical written with his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein II (Andrew Scott).
Blue Moon also features Bobby Cannavale and Margaret Qualley, a dedicated fan of Linklater’s Boyhood (2014). Like Ellar Coltrane, who grew up playing Mason in Boyhood from 2002 to 2013, Qualley was born in 1994, “so it was super crazy because everything that was happening in the world and his life happened in the world in my life at the same time,” she recently told IndieWire. “I was in the same grade as him when Obama was elected, and I was the same age as him when my parents got divorced. It was so wild for me to watch that movie. It just left such an impression.” And Blue Moon “was incredibly surreal for me. To be in the flesh with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke and be able to not only witness their process but be a part of it was life-changing.”
More Contenders
Radu Jude, who won the Golden Bear in 2021 for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, will bring the first of the two films he’s making this year to the competition. He’s still in postproduction on Dracula, but Kontinental ’25, whose title is inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 (1952), is ready to roll. Eszter Tompa (The Duke of Burgundy) plays a Transylvanian bailiff wracked with guilt when a homeless man she’s been charged with evicting kills himself. Announcing its acquisition, Luxbox calls Kontinental ’25 “both timely and timeless, skillfully exploring human morality through an incisively funny social satire, with just the right touch of absurdity.”
Playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who has cowritten screenplays with Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida) and Sebastián Lelio (Disobedience), makes her directorial debut with Hot Milk, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel and the single first feature in the competition. Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey star as Rose and Sofia, a mother and daughter seeking out an enigmatic healer in Spain, where Sofia becomes charmed by a traveler, Ingrid (Vicky Krieps).
In Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, Marion Cotillard plays Cristina, an actress starring in an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Cristina spots a runaway teen hiding out on the set, and the two women, the star and the orphan, develop a mutual fascination. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer) are back with Reflection in a Dead Diamond, in which a retired spy in his seventies fears that his old foes have returned for a final showdown.
Vivian Qu produced Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, the winner of the Golden Bear in 2014, and she was named Best Director at the Golden Horse Awards for her second feature, Angels Wear White (2017). In Girls on Wire, a single mother kills a drug dealer, earning herself some dangerous enemies, and the only person she can turn to for help is her cousin. Another woman in trouble is Linda (Rose Byrne) in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which will arrive straight from its premiere at Sundance.
Jessica Chastain stars in Michel Franco’s Dreams as a socialite and philanthropist whose lover (Isaac Hernández), a young ballet dancer from Mexico, risks everything to begin a new life with her in the U.S. And few will be surprised to see that Hong Sangsoo, who won a Silver Bear for Best Director in 2020 for The Woman Who Ran, another for Best Screenplay in 2021 for Introduction, and two Grand Jury Prizes—for The Novelist’s Film (2022) and A Traveler’s Needs (2024)—is back in competition, this year with What Does That Nature Say to You, in which a poet meets his girlfriend’s family.
Berlinale Specials
Berlinale 2025 will open on February 13 with Tom Tykwer’s The Light, starring Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, and as the housekeeper who upends a family’s dynamic, Tala Al-Deen. Both the film and the opening gala featuring the presentation of an Honorary Golden Bear to Tilda Swinton will be beamed live from Berlin to seven cities across Germany. The Light is one of twenty-one films in the noncompetitive Berlinale Special program of gala screenings.
One that’s sure to draw a crowd will be the international premiere of Bong Joon Ho’s long-awaited follow-up to Parasite (2019). Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” employee on a mission through space to an ice planet. Each time Mickey dies, he’s “reprinted,” and things get comically complicated when the crew accidentally creates two living Mickeys. At a press conference in Seoul on Monday, Pattinson said that Bong is “probably one of four or five directors in the world working now at the level he’s working at, who has that kind of appeal to every single actor in the world—everybody wants to work with him.”
Marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as well as the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claude Lanzmann, the festival will present the landmark nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) in full. A related world premiere will be Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, an homage to Shoah incorporating Lanzmann’s own words drawn from his memoirs as well as unreleased, never-before-seen footage.
Other highlights of the program include Ancestral Visions of the Future, a nonfiction film by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection); Justin Kurzel’s limited series The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize–winning novel starring Jacob Elordi; Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow, which premiered at the New York Film Festival last fall; and a recent restoration of Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), starring Tilda Swinton.
Perspectives and More
In her first year as the festival’s director, Tricia Tuttle is replacing the Encounters program with Perspectives, a competitive strand for fiction feature debuts. Perspectives will offer “some of the most original, untethered-by-expectation filmmakers,” Tuttle tells Deadline’s Melanie Goodfellow. “What you’ll see in our fourteen films is really the genuine breadth and diversity of cinema, from very quiet, personal, intimate films, to wild, imaginative, crazy, bold films with this aesthetic that you haven’t seen elsewhere.”
One of the debuts, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, was slated to premiere in the Next program at Sundance but has since been pulled from the lineup by its financial backer, Participant Media. Directed by Kahlil Joseph, who worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, BLKNWS is described as “an ongoing art project that blurs the lines between art, journalism, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique, appropriating the newsreel format as an opportunity to reimagine the contemporary cinematic experience.” Participant—which shut down last April—claims that Joseph has been screening a new cut “in secret,” and Sundance is “deeply disappointed” to learn that the dispute between the director and his backers has led to the work being pulled. As of this writing, it’s unclear whether BLKNWS will be pulled from the Berlinale lineup as well.
Previewing this year’s Forum program, the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough notes that around half of the lineup is made up of nonfiction films, “with highlights including Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s The Memory of Butterflies, a reconstruction of Indigenous slavery and colonial crimes; Lee Anne Schmitt’s Evidence, which explores dark money and neoconservative ideology in the U.S.; and Nayibe Tavares-Abel’s Colossal, a dissection of the political history of the Dominican Republic.”
The thirty-four films selected for Panorama reflect programmer Michael Stütz’s interest in genre—the section will open with Andreas Prochaska’s psychological horror story Welcome Home Baby—and an emphasis on queer cinema, with Isaac Julien presenting Looking for Langston (1989) along with its sequel, Statues Never Die. The Generation section programmed for younger viewers will feature Maya, Give Me a Title, an animated film that director Michel Gondry calls “a stop-motion love letter” to his daughter.
Berlinale Classics will offer seven world premieres and one international premiere of new restorations. The program will showcase Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), and perhaps most enticingly, Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (1934), starring Ruan Lingyu—a screen legend probably best known outside of China for having been portrayed by Maggie Cheung in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991)—and Yasuzo Masumura’s The Wife of Seisaku (1965), starring Ayako Wakao. As Jessica Kiang wrote for the Notebook in 2023, Masumura should be “mentioned in the same breath as his more internationally famous compatriots: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Oshima, Imamura, and Suzuki.”
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