The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 74th edition February 15 with the opening-night world premiere screening of Small Things Like These, the Irish drama starring Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy. It started 10 days of debuts including for movies starring Rooney Mara, Isabelle Huppert, Gael García Bernal, Kristen Stewart and more.
This year’s Competition lineup features films from a swath of international filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Hong Sangsoo, Bruno Dumont and Abderrahmane Sissako.
The Berlinale runs through February 25.
Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.
Another End ‘Another End’
Section: Competition
Director: Piero Messina
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo, Olivia Williams, Pal Aron
Deadline’s takeaway: The script, while ambitious, is laden with philosophical musings that often feel detached from the emotional core of the story. Another End...
This year’s Competition lineup features films from a swath of international filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Hong Sangsoo, Bruno Dumont and Abderrahmane Sissako.
The Berlinale runs through February 25.
Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.
Another End ‘Another End’
Section: Competition
Director: Piero Messina
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo, Olivia Williams, Pal Aron
Deadline’s takeaway: The script, while ambitious, is laden with philosophical musings that often feel detached from the emotional core of the story. Another End...
- 2/24/2024
- by Stephanie Bunbury, Damon Wise, Pete Hammond and Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
Olivier Assayas, the celebrated French director of “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Irma Vep,” is making his Berlinale competition debut this year with “Suspended Time,” his most personal film to date.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the movie’s premiere at the Berlinale, Assayas says the film retells his experience during the lockdown and is based on his personal diary.
“When I was writing this diary, I felt that despite my anxieties and doubts or fears, it was an idyllic period, to be confined in the countryside,” he says. “It was a time where we believed in a form of utopia and as soon as society got back in action, it dissolved.”
Narrated by Assayas and woven with archival material, the comedy stars Vincent Macaigne as the director’s alter-ego, Paul, a well-known filmmaker who is confined with his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) and their girlfriends Morgane (Nine d’Urso...
Speaking to Variety ahead of the movie’s premiere at the Berlinale, Assayas says the film retells his experience during the lockdown and is based on his personal diary.
“When I was writing this diary, I felt that despite my anxieties and doubts or fears, it was an idyllic period, to be confined in the countryside,” he says. “It was a time where we believed in a form of utopia and as soon as society got back in action, it dissolved.”
Narrated by Assayas and woven with archival material, the comedy stars Vincent Macaigne as the director’s alter-ego, Paul, a well-known filmmaker who is confined with his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) and their girlfriends Morgane (Nine d’Urso...
- 2/18/2024
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Playtime has locked down key deals on Olivier Assayas’ Competition title Suspended Time.
The Covid-era comedy drama has sold to Adso Films in Spain, I Wonder in Italy, Triart in Sweden, Leopardo Filmes in Portugal, Hooray in Taiwan and Vertigo Media in Hungary. Ad Vitam will release the film at home in France.
Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nora Hamzawi and Nine d’Urso star in the film which portrays a quartet who spend the lockdown together as a sense of disturbing strangeness invades their lives.
Producers are Curiosa Films and Vortex Sutra.
Is the Berlinale eyeing a move from Potsdamer Platz?...
The Covid-era comedy drama has sold to Adso Films in Spain, I Wonder in Italy, Triart in Sweden, Leopardo Filmes in Portugal, Hooray in Taiwan and Vertigo Media in Hungary. Ad Vitam will release the film at home in France.
Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nora Hamzawi and Nine d’Urso star in the film which portrays a quartet who spend the lockdown together as a sense of disturbing strangeness invades their lives.
Producers are Curiosa Films and Vortex Sutra.
Is the Berlinale eyeing a move from Potsdamer Platz?...
- 2/18/2024
- ScreenDaily
There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.
That character was called Rene, but he was not a million miles from Paul, the character Macaigne plays in this account of two brothers confined with their partners for the duration of the Covid lockdown. They have returned to the house where they lived as boys and where they have rarely returned since: a vine-covered cottage in a picturesque hamlet. It is a glorious summer, just like the remembered summers of childhood.
That character was called Rene, but he was not a million miles from Paul, the character Macaigne plays in this account of two brothers confined with their partners for the duration of the Covid lockdown. They have returned to the house where they lived as boys and where they have rarely returned since: a vine-covered cottage in a picturesque hamlet. It is a glorious summer, just like the remembered summers of childhood.
- 2/18/2024
- by Stephanie Bunbury
- Deadline Film + TV
The memes won’t let you forget, but 2019 was half a decade ago. That was also the year Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network––an odd return to the realm of his TV series Carlos, and subsequently picked up by Narcos-era Netflix––premiered at the Venice Film Festival. That was Assayas’ last feature, making the intervening period (Irma Vep for HBO aside) the longest dry patch of his 38-year career. The dexterous director returns this week to the Berlinale with the aptly titled Suspended Time, a personal essay wrapped up in an effortless comedy that shows no signs whatsoever of long gestation.
Naturally, it’s all the better for it. Appearing as both leading man and (not for the first time) director surrogate, Vincent Macaigne stars as Paul, a filmmaker surviving the summer of 2020 with his music-journalist brother Ettienne (Micha Lescot) and their new partners, Morgane and Carole, in the agreeable surrounds of their childhood home.
Naturally, it’s all the better for it. Appearing as both leading man and (not for the first time) director surrogate, Vincent Macaigne stars as Paul, a filmmaker surviving the summer of 2020 with his music-journalist brother Ettienne (Micha Lescot) and their new partners, Morgane and Carole, in the agreeable surrounds of their childhood home.
- 2/17/2024
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Olivier Assayas’ thinly disguised autobiographical study of a film-maker’s Edenic experience during Covid isolation is a civilised pleasure
Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.
Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne, who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going...
Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.
Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne, who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going...
- 2/17/2024
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
By virtue of the shared experiences it speaks to, Suspended Time may be writer-director Olivier Assayas’s most universally relatable film to date. Sure, few people own homes in charming villages in rural France, but almost everyone on the planet went through some version of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. People variably learned recipes, thought up new projects, sought out online therapy, went on long, unusually silent walks, contemplated their pasts, grandstanded about the dangers of a virus, treated said grandstanding as excessive hysteria, and got frustrated with the people they were in insolation with.
Those are the events of Suspended Time in a nutshell—a window into the strange life we all lived, the memory of which we largely seem to have discarded like a spoiled sourdough starter. Missing from the above description, though, is the way Assayas augments the ethereal quality of life in isolation with a sophisticated...
Those are the events of Suspended Time in a nutshell—a window into the strange life we all lived, the memory of which we largely seem to have discarded like a spoiled sourdough starter. Missing from the above description, though, is the way Assayas augments the ethereal quality of life in isolation with a sophisticated...
- 2/17/2024
- by Pat Brown
- Slant Magazine
Between Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion,” the terrible quarantine “Purge” ripoff “Songbird,” and Doug Liman’s inert Covid heist movie “Locked Down”, movies have tried — and usually failed — in depicting the everyday horrors and quirks of the pandemic. Admittedly, turning the absence of interaction and drama into good cinema is an unenviable challenge. Olivier Assayas is the latest to try and, unfortunately, the latest to largely fail.
Set in April 2020, “Suspended Time” follows Paul (Vincent Macaigne) a frustrated filmmaker confined to his late parents’ picturesque country house with his wife Morgane (Nine d’Urso), his short-tempered brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), and Etienne’s wife Carole (Nora Hamzawi). In the very first scene, Paul receives an Amazon package like it’s radioactive material — it’s just a pair of socks — as a confounded Etienne asks why it all need be such a choreography. Paul explains that the virus can...
Set in April 2020, “Suspended Time” follows Paul (Vincent Macaigne) a frustrated filmmaker confined to his late parents’ picturesque country house with his wife Morgane (Nine d’Urso), his short-tempered brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), and Etienne’s wife Carole (Nora Hamzawi). In the very first scene, Paul receives an Amazon package like it’s radioactive material — it’s just a pair of socks — as a confounded Etienne asks why it all need be such a choreography. Paul explains that the virus can...
- 2/17/2024
- by Adam Solomons
- Indiewire
No two words can strike fear into the heart of a critic quite like “Covid movie,” and yet with a director as accomplished as Olivier Assayas it seemed reasonable to hold out hope of something more than the low-key cringe humor of a neurotic germaphobe obsessing about masks and social distancing and possible grocery contamination. Sadly, that’s a big part of what you get in the tedious Suspended Time (Hors du Temps). Most of us would never think our experience in the early, anxious days of pandemic lockdown was of much interest to anyone outside our social pod, but filmmakers keep making that mistake. They need to stop.
Perhaps Assayas was so caught up in the meta film industry satire of his spry reimagining of Irma Vep for HBO that he couldn’t resist casting Vincent Macaigne again as another version of himself. Macaigne is mildly amusing as a film director named Paul,...
Perhaps Assayas was so caught up in the meta film industry satire of his spry reimagining of Irma Vep for HBO that he couldn’t resist casting Vincent Macaigne again as another version of himself. Macaigne is mildly amusing as a film director named Paul,...
- 2/17/2024
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Berlin Film Festival on Monday unveiled the titles selected for its official competition and its sidebar Encounters competitive section.
A total of 20 films have been selected for the international competition, with highlights including La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios and starring Rooney Mara. The pic is described as a “kinetic and cinematic love story” set over a single day in a Times Square kitchen. French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop returns with Dahomey, a 60-minute doc about art repatriation and Hong Sangsoo plays in competition with A Traveler’s Needs, starring Isabelle Huppert. Scroll down for the full lineup.
The Berlin Film Festival takes place February 15-25.
Organizers have already announced more than 100 titles across sidebars spanning Panorama, Forum, and Berlinale Special. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a feature documentary about influential British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon...
A total of 20 films have been selected for the international competition, with highlights including La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios and starring Rooney Mara. The pic is described as a “kinetic and cinematic love story” set over a single day in a Times Square kitchen. French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop returns with Dahomey, a 60-minute doc about art repatriation and Hong Sangsoo plays in competition with A Traveler’s Needs, starring Isabelle Huppert. Scroll down for the full lineup.
The Berlin Film Festival takes place February 15-25.
Organizers have already announced more than 100 titles across sidebars spanning Panorama, Forum, and Berlinale Special. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a feature documentary about influential British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon...
- 1/22/2024
- by Zac Ntim
- Deadline Film + TV
Playtime has boarded Olivier Assayas’ “Suspended Time,” a Covid-era comedy about two couples spending lockdown together. Produced by Olivier Delbosc of Curiosa Films, and by Assayas’ own Vortex Sutra, the pandemic farce is hotly tipped to compete at the Berlin Film Festival next month.
Recent Assayas stalwart Vincent Macaigne leads the cast as Etienne, a filmmaker – and once again director stand-in – locked down with his music journalist brother, Paul, and locked in the family home with respective spouses, Morgane and Carole.
“Every room, every object, reminds them of their childhood, and the memories of [those] absent,” reads the synopsis. “This compels them to measure the distance that separates them from each other and the roots they share, those of their ground zero. As the world around them is becoming increasingly unsettling, unreality, and even a disturbing strangeness, invades their daily gestures and actions.”
The project furthers the director’s ongoing partnership with Macaigne and Hamzawi,...
Recent Assayas stalwart Vincent Macaigne leads the cast as Etienne, a filmmaker – and once again director stand-in – locked down with his music journalist brother, Paul, and locked in the family home with respective spouses, Morgane and Carole.
“Every room, every object, reminds them of their childhood, and the memories of [those] absent,” reads the synopsis. “This compels them to measure the distance that separates them from each other and the roots they share, those of their ground zero. As the world around them is becoming increasingly unsettling, unreality, and even a disturbing strangeness, invades their daily gestures and actions.”
The project furthers the director’s ongoing partnership with Macaigne and Hamzawi,...
- 1/15/2024
- by Elsa Keslassy and Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
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