From Sundance to Berlin

In her first year as the director of the Berlinale, Tricia Tuttle has switched out the Encounters program for Perspectives, a showcase for debut features. For the new competitive strand, Tuttle and her team have selected two films from Sundance’s NEXT program. Looking back on her virtual experience of Sundance 2025—both in her piece for Film Comment and in her conversation with Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw—Amy Taubin emphasizes that Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was “by far the most exciting selection that I saw, in terms of both form and content.”

BLKNWS began as a video installation first presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and as Taubin points out, its evolution is the result of “a collaboration between Joseph and his artist, filmmaker, and intellectual peers, among them Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, the late curator Okwui Enwezor, Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and Joseph’s late brother, the lyrical figurative painter Noah Davis—for me the greatest painter of the early twenty-first century.” We should mention that the retrospective exhibition Noah Davis is currently on view at the Barbican in London through May 11. “Honesty and heartfelt sincerity are not uppermost traits of most twenty-first-century painting,” writes the Observer’s Laura Cumming, “but they characterize all of Davis’s work.”

At Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov writes that “Joseph claims the entirety of Black experience as his remit, stitching together a gargantuan amount of archival sources with a near-continuous soundtrack that leans electronic (Flying Lotus, Robert Hood), while Leviathan, The Green Ray and Garrett Bradley’s Time are among the many works put into a blender.” And Scott Macaulay notes that in his Q&A, Joseph said that BLKNWS is “a film meant to be talked through, seen in groups, and that he hoped for the day it’d be freely available on YouTube, where it could, presumably, be watched in fragments with viewers digging deeper into its references in a second browser tab. Intoxicating in its allusive connections, thrilling in its capacious qualities, it’s a film that I probably need to watch five more times, [which] I actually look forward to doing.”

Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), winningly embedded in the Dominican American community in the Bronx, won a NEXT Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. In one of several scenes crackling with tension before exploding into shouting matches ricocheting between Spanish and English, nineteen-year-old Rico (Juan Collado) announces that he has impregnated his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), to his mother (Yohanna Florentino), who cannot believe her ears, and his sister (Nathaly Navarro), who bursts out laughing.

Hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer, Rico plans to grow his business (he hawks sugary but potent cocktails known as “nutcrackers” on the beach), support Destiny, and raise his kid with the love and care he never received from his absent father. It’s impossible not to root for him, despite the quixotic hopelessness of his schemes, never mind his habit of slipping into periodic drinking binges. Vargas composes his mostly static shots so that his impressively fleshed-out characters often appear in the lower third of the frame, leaving empty spaces yawning overhead.

Lurker is the directorial debut of Alex Russell, a writer on Beef and The Bear, and as the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney observes, he “clearly knows the Los Angeles music scene, with its aspirational strivers and anointed supernovas, its hangers-on, its calculating opportunists and, yes, its lowly fans for whom an all-access backstage pass is the holy grail.”

Matthew, “played by Théodore Pellerin with an evil innocence from which you can’t look away,” is a clerk at a Melrose boutique who worms his way into the entourage guarding Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a British emo singer heading for stardom. The Los Angeles Times’s Amy Nicholson calls Lurker “a bleak and funny nail-biter,” and for the Washington Post’s Jada Yuan, it’s “a film that feels as cool and obsession-worthy as the celebrity culture it’s skewering—an All About Eve for the boys, and that’s meant as the highest compliment.”

In Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers, Benedict Cumberbatch plays a comic book artist mourning his late wife while raising two sons and grappling with visions of a giant talking crow. “On the page, and stage, Max Porter’s novella Grief Is the Thing With Feathers was for many, a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, but the film is “surprisingly, sometimes boringly, conventional.”

For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, “the idea of grief as an inescapable terrorscape certainly makes emotional and intellectual sense. But watching The Thing with Feathers, we get the distinct sense that it doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.” Worse, “it comes dangerously close to wasting one of Benedict Cumberbatch’s greatest performances.”

Just last week, we took a first look at Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, one of four films from Sundance slated for the Panorama program. Magic Farm, another Panorama selection, is Amalia Ulman’s follow-up to her well-received 2021 debut, El Planeta. Early word on Magic Farm is a bit more mixed.

Edna (Chloë Sevigny) heads up an American film crew looking to shoot a story for a Vice-like media outlet on a Latin American musician with the potential to go viral. But they’ve landed in the wrong country. For Carlos Aguilar in Variety, Magic Farm is “a formally radical, biting satire about odious, privileged Americans adrift in a remote Argentine rural town.”

The Guardian’s Adrian Horton finds that the film “certainly tries to stir the pot, throwing its characters together into a hodgepodge of strange and lightly surreal situations. But for all its digressive meetups and self-assured one-liners—‘maybe you should stop taking so much ketamine,’ etc.—it can’t land the joke.”

“There is only one Cinderella,” Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough. “The rest of us are the ugly stepsister, struggling to fit into the shoe.” Lea Myren plays Elvira, who will do whatever it takes to ensure that she—and not her ridiculously beautiful stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess)—wins over the handsome prince (Isac Calmroth).

The Ugly Stepsister is a horror movie that “disguises itself as largely a black comedy of manners, a fanciful combination of the absurdist aesthetics of Yorgos Lanthimos with the enraged feminism and class commentary of Emerald Fennell,” writes Jim Vorel for Paste. “Its anachronistic soundtrack, blending synths and keys with traditional instrumentation, unmoors it from any concrete time and space, placing it into some kind of dreamy and surreal place between reality and a fairy tale realm. But oh, once the truly horrific imagery arrives, you’d better believe it makes its presence felt.”

In 2022, British writer and director Phil Cox teamed up with four Sudanese filmmakers—Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, and Timeea Ahmed—to document the everyday lives and dreams of five residents of Khartoum. When war broke out the following year, the team was forced to flee the country. Regathering in Kenya with their subjects, the filmmakers utilized green-screen effects to reconstruct five tales of escape and survival.

“The green screens also allow the participants to live out their dreams, which include everything from riding on the back of a lion to flying over the starry night sky of their city on the back of a giant pigeon,” writes Marya E. Gates at RogerEbert.com. “Perhaps more than telling the story of a city devastated by war, Khartoum emphasizes the diversity of the city’s population,” writes Murtada Elfadl for Variety. “The camera lingers in close-up on faces of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities, together showing the harmony of cohabitation that different governments, racist traditions, and customs tried to end.”