Berlin International Film Festival — A–Z of films

There's a mood of eerie melancholy as Milk lays out the reasons why he might become a target for someone who is "insecure, terrified, afraid" - a concept that has lost none of its resonance with campaigners in many fields of equal rights in the years that have passed since.

The observational style means the film stops short of being truly illuminating.

This is the sort of cast of characters that deserves its own TV series.

The sense is not of romantic hardship, but of endurance shaped into a local language.

Heldman’s sharpest instinct is to show how a society polices intimacy by pretending it cannot see it.

Lelio makes no bones about how he wants us to feel, to the point where it sometimes feels as though he is stating the obvious is six-foot neon letters.

Goiginger once again proves that he is a keen student of human nature, behaviour, interactions with society and the eternal pursuit of living one’s life in one's own way.

Arsalan really does have something special.

Deberton keeps the camera close and attentive to micro-gestures

What follows is not a simple coming-out narrative and not a whodunit either, but an internal struggle constantly externalised through ritual and space.

Iván & Hadoum announces de la Rosa as a filmmaker with uncommon emotional precision.

The documentary is attentive to contradiction without flattening its subjects into symbols.

De Araújo is particularly good at evoking the emotional turmoil Jo feels.

Cage and Shue transform [their characters] into believable people you feel you could talk with - transcending the usual boundaries of the screen and your heart.

While the film has political and sociological themes, it ultimately succeeds because it’s about the true spirit of the people.

Lali brings a breath of fresh air by flipping the tired “monster-in-law” trope on its head

The film keeps hinting at elsewhere, then shows how sealed his present is from it.

The Moment’s biggest misstep is making Charli’s defining feature indecisive flightiness.

What makes Narciso striking is the way it acquires a contemporary charge without insisting on it.

Told entirely without dialogue but with an upbeat, summery score from Talita Del Collado, it has an eco-conscious vibe.

Lance Hammer’s drama confronts its subject unsentimentally head on with no holds barred.

Theo Lozada’s cinematography is crucial to the drama’s effect.

The River Train lets language do what plot will not always do, it gives a child’s abstract longings a body.

Apart from setting the tone and maintaining it, the strongest point of Schleinzer’s filmmaking is casting and directing the actors' interactions between one another and the environment.

Gaup Beaska is an accomplished yoiker, so perfectly cast as Maia, the primal pull of this often ululating music matched by lyrics that speak of her character's connection to her Sámi culture.

Works both on a technical level and as sheer entertainment.

Sciamma's capturing of children at play is disarmingly accurate, perfectly showing the freewheeling nature of prepubescence in all its glory.

What gives Stänicke’s film the edge is the clever way he shifts the focus so that the narrative becomes less about the community than Hein himself.

This film is well aware of its own limitations: knows it can only pose the questions here, while answers will take time and belong, perhaps, to later generations.

Where To? keeps mistaking centrist posture for moral courage.

What the narrative wants to test is the cost of principled resistance when you have a child to protect