Ich bin ein Berlinaler

Having a great time at the sprawling Berlin International Film Festival. Wish you were here. But since you're not, here are the films you should know about.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Reuters/Johannes Eisele

Martin Scorsese, center, with the Rolling Stones as they arrive for the screening of "Shine a Light" at the 58th Berlinale International Film Festival.

Feb. 14, 2008 | BERLIN -- The Berlinale is the crocus of the big international film festivals: Midwinter in Berlin may not be as warm or as sunny as spring in Cannes, but there's something optimistic about the way the Berlinale -- now 58 years old -- flourishes in the cold (or, in these days of global warming, semi-cold) for some 10 days each February.

With more than 200 films being screened, including some 20 pictures in competition, this is a fairly sprawling festival, and yet it still manages to come off as intimate and friendly. The surroundings aren't necessarily the big draw: Most of the screenings and events take place in a complex of reasonably attractive but unmemorable buildings around the Potsdamer Platz, some of which have been built expressly to accommodate the festival. The Berlinale Palast is the most gallant structure in the complex, and the one where most of the big red-carpet events take place. Even though those events are never my thing, standing on those steps one afternoon I did happen to catch a few moments of a press conference with Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan (here with his '70s-Bollywood spoof "Om Shanti Om") televised on a giant screen: While I would have loved to see Khan in person, his goofy expressiveness is no less charming even when his face is broken into a bunch of little dots.

Then there's the Sony Center, a circular arrangement of buildings that, viewed from the courtyard inside (which is covered by a dome resembling an Origami flower), looks both sleepy and forward-looking, as if it had decided to nap until the future arrives. (A Berlin acquaintance tells me that most of the office space facing this courtyard languishes unoccupied, since most professionals would much rather overlook the greenery of Tiergarten, the park nearby, than be locked in an anonymous-looking futuristic nest.) But the Center does house a film school, several theaters, and a film museum with an excellent shop, stocked with an intriguing assortment of film books (most of which are, unfortunately for me, in German) and postcards. There I saw a hot-water bottle with an image of the German poster for "Streetcar Named Desire" printed on it. It's nearly 20 euros, but I'm afraid that if I leave Berlin without it, I'll someday think I only dreamed it.

Near the Berlinale Palast is an undistinguished shopping mall, not much different from the type you might see in any U.S. city: This is where the locals queue up to buy their festival tickets, since one of the purposes of festivals like these -- lest we critics should forget -- is to bring movies to real, live moviegoers. But of course, most of the people I see wandering around during the day aren't real, live moviegoers at all, but festival schmoes like me, wandering around with our various assortments of passes dangling from our necks. As efficient as the festival complex is, it has a not-quite-real quality -- it's a kind of Eurodisney for film geeks. Still, this is an extremely well-organized and welcoming festival, as I learned when I got shut out of the only press screening of the Madonna movie, "Filth and Wisdom," on Wednesday: I waited among a group of about 100 who hadn't gotten into the theater, as a festival person tried to see if another screening could be arranged. It couldn't, but at least someone bothered to make it appear as if she'd made an effort to accommodate us. (When this sort of thing happens in Toronto, the general response of festival staff is "Tough luck.")

Because we are here, after all, to see movies. I've been in Berlin for a week, not strictly to cover the festival, but to participate in the Berlinale Talent Campus, a program of lectures, workshops and panels for filmmakers, composers, screenwriters and even critics: The Berlinale has brought me here as a mentor in the Talent Press program, in which eight young critics from around the world -- most from countries in which English is not the primary language -- are invited to attend the festival and, under the guidance of four "older" mentors (this is where I come in) file one review or article per day. The participants come from countries including Peru, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey (you can read their work here), and in six days of talking with them and reading their pieces, I've learned more from them than they probably even know.

So for that reason alone, the 2008 Berlinale has meant more to me than just the usual assortment of festival movies. The consensus among my colleagues -- both those that I've spoken with and those whose reports I've read in the press -- is that this Berlinale hasn't been particularly impressive. One of the movies in competition is Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," and despite the fact that most American critics love it (note my foxy use of the word "most"), it's old news to those of us who wrote about it in December. But you can't walk away from a festival of this size without having seen something that excites you, or at least intrigues you. Following are a few highlights -- and some lowlights.

Next page: Scorsese shines his light on a leaping Mick Jagger