This article appeared in the February 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Berlin has always been considered one of the most political of film festivals, with programming tending to reflect key social debates over the decades. Last year’s Berlinale ended with the position and purpose of the event becoming even more politically charged than usual, because of some German politicians’ hostile responses to closing-night statements by the Palestinian and Israeli directors of No Other Land, the (now-Oscar-nominated) documentary about Israel’s violent expulsions of Palestinian villagers from the West Bank. This year, the festival opened with a flurry of statements of position—coming shortly before J.D. Vance managed to outrage Europe with his statements during his German visit. In an opening press conference, incoming Festival Director Tricia Tuttle declared that the festival represented “a rejection and an act of resistance to all of the perverse ideas that many far-right parties across Europe and the whole world are spreading”; Jury President Todd Haynes expressed shock at the new Trump regime; while on stage, Tilda Swinton, recipient of a lifetime achievement award, decried “state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder.”

The program itself began with what could hardly have been a clearer political intervention, nor a clunkier one: the opening film The Light, a bloated folie de grandeur from Tom Tykwer. Set in contemporary Berlin (some of it filmed right around the corner from the Berlinale Palast), this is a self-important “We Are the World” statement about ethical responsibility, the crisis of the European left, the ordeal of immigrants, you name it—with hideous musical sequences added. The political commentary was no less awkward in Bong Joon Ho’s jokey space epic Mickey 17, with Robert Pattinson on a snow planet as the ultimate alienated laborer: a man repeatedly killed and resuscitated (or “reprinted”) in the name of human progress. Fun but cluttered, this is a Bong film closer to his lightweight Okja (2017) than to Parasite (2019), and it’s enjoyable if overstretched. But if the next few years expose us to Trump caricatures as heavy-handed as Mark Ruffalo’s cartoonish space billionaire in Mickey 17, then filmmakers should consider laying off the preposterous POTUS for a while, and turning their satirical focus on Vance or Pete Hegseth instead.

The competition has so far offered one notably intense and timely political statement, but disguised as a story of amour fou: Michel Franco’s Dreams, the Mexican director’s second collaboration with Jessica Chastain (after 2023’s Memory). She is cast opposite ballet star Isaac Hernández, making a strikingly charismatic appearance as Fernando, a young Mexican dancer who risks his life to reenter the U.S. and be reunited with Chastain’s Jennifer, a very wealthy socialite with whom he has started an intense sexual affair. It cannot possibly end well, and it doesn’t: the payoff is hardly unpredictable but still very shocking. Dreams is all the more forceful for being executed with Franco’s trademark uninflected detachment, and with a glamorous, knowingly artificial polish—both in the design and in the performance from Chastain, whose own glassy star image is played on astutely.

Oddly rhyming with Dreams was another film about the dangers of following desire to cross a forbidding divide. The Ice Tower is the latest from Lucile Hadžihalilović, France’s sui generis specialist in the neo-surrealist imaginary. A 1970s-set reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, it’s about a naïve teenager (newcomer Clara Pacini) who leaves her family, wanders onto a film set, and falls under the spell of an appropriately chilly, distant actress, played by Marion Cotillard. Snow, ice, mountains, and winds weave their way through the imagery to bewitching effect; the film is magically photographed by Jonathan Ricquebourg (a brilliant collaborator of Albert Serra, Trần Anh Hùng, and others), and Hadžihalilović very adeptly handles the film-within-a-fairy-tale-within-a-film slippages. The movie has a gorgeous aesthetic perfection and is utterly entrancing, like the loveliest, most expensive, most perfectly sealed snow globe you ever saw.

Another unalloyed pleasure was Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. This is an alternative riff on the backstage drama, in which tragically fated lyricist Lorenz Hart (here played by Ethan Hawke) goes to Sardi’s to sit out the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma! after Oscar Hammerstein II replaces him as Richard Rodgers’s collaborator. There, he wrestles with his alcoholism, his fading career, and his unrequited love for a 20-year-old student (Margaret Qualley). The script is by Robert Kaplow, whose 2003 book Me and Orson Welles Linklater previously adapted, and it is crisp, witty, and wonderfully poignant—right down to Hart’s brief, crushing encounter with an unimpressed young fan of musicals (no prizes for guessing who young “Stevie” might grow up to be). As for Hawke, his Hart is a heady, camp-edged cocktail of delusion, abjection, desire, and (almost) uncrushable grandeur. Blue Moon may be his finest hour, for Linklater or for any director.

Jonathan Romney is a critic based in London. He writes for The Observer, Sight and Sound, Screen Daily, The Financial Times, and other publications, and teaches at the U.K.’s National Film and Television School.