Berlin: Fire at Sea

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.

Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro GRA a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.

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Deadpool lands on huge pile of money. Makes crude jokes about paper cuts, probably.

Breaking News: Superhero fatigue has NOT set in after all, goddamnit. The extreme negativity that greeted the arrival of Fantastic Four 3ish and Avengers 2 last summer suggested that we were on the brink but along comes Deadpool proving everyone still wants the spandex supers... even B list supers from Fox (!). Warner Bros and Marvel are probably breathing sighs of relief given that Clark vs Bruce and Steve vs Tony are opening soon and have budgets so gargantuan they'll need the continued fervor to sustain them. But more on those later. The crowd I saw Deadpool with seemed really into it but more on that later. More. Later. More. Later. God, it's like a movie trailer in here tonight --- "COMING SOON!"

WIDE BOX OFFICE
01 Deadpool $135 new
02 Kung Fu Panda 3 $19.6 (cum. $93.9) 
03 How To Be Single $18.7 new
04 Zoolander 2 $15.6 new 
05 The Revenant $6.9 (cum. $159.1) Costumes, Cinematography, Production Design 

LIMITED RELEASE
excluding previously wide
01 Where to Invade Next  $1 new 308 screens Review & 2nd Opinion
02 The Lady in The Van  $.5 (cum. $1.9) 130 screens Review
03 45 Years $.4 (cum $2.7) 237 screens Podcast
04 Carol $.1 (cum. $12.1) 141 screens Top Ten List 
05 The Danish Girl $.08 (cum. $10.7) 88 screens Interview Alicia

I took in both How to be Single and Deadpool and also emptied my DVR (hey, it was freezing in NYC) so I'm caught up w/ Younger, Teachers, The Fosters, The Flash, and I also sampled SyFy's The Magicians and liked it... and not just because Arjun Gupta is the prettiest.

You? 

Valentine's - Beyond the Lights

The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Daniel...

Rarely does a film show the restorative power of love like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s alive and swoony Beyond the Lights. While the film has much more on its mind than hooking up – from reconciling depression to machinating local politics – its undeniable electricity sparks from the mindmeld that allows each of its two leads to be seen for the first time and fly in whichever direction they choose.

Prefabricated pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, flawless) literally lives in chains, bound between the blinding glare of paparazzi flashbulbs and a suffocating armada of handlers that exploit her image in the name of the game. Kaz (Sundance darling Nate Parker) is a cop on her detail living under the blue-and-red burden of prefixed expectations. He grabs her hand after she jumps off a hotel balcony. There’s no meet cute here; it’s a spiritual lifting.

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BAFTA Winners Announced

Since BAFTA never televises live we learn the winners before we've seen any excerpts from the show. This kills the normal suspense (however non-suspenseful) of "and the winner is..." but if you're trying to preserve that we'll hide the winners until after the jump. We'll deal with the details later once we've seen clips!

THE WINNERS ARE...

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Red Carpet: BAFTA PreParty, Sci-Tech, and WGA

Eight beauties for you this afternoon as we get closer and closer to Oscar and more and more awards are handed out. We'll know the BAFTA winners in a few hours (though they still don't televise it live making it hard to take seriously in this day and age) but here are four women from the pre-party.

Sandy Powell (just interviewed!), Dakota Johnson, Cate Blanchett, and Bel Powley. Was the dress code black and white? 

Olivia Munn co-hosted the Academy's Sci-Tech Awards. Meanwhile at the WGA Awards, Adepero Oduye (gorgeous in yellow!) showed up to support The Big Short, Gina Gershon, and Diane Lane were also out on the red carpet. Olivia's busy but these other three deserve bigger roles than they've been getting -- they've got the talent and the charisma for them. Hopefully the guild members, all writers after all, will be inspired by their presence to create richer roles for them or actresses like them. 

WGA WINNERS
Original SPOTLIGHT
Adapted THE BIG SHORT
Documentary GOING CLEAR
Television FARGO

We've every reason to expect that Original and Adapted will tilt the same way at the Oscars on the 28th but what do you think is running second in both races? We're guessing Inside Out (Original)  in distant second and Room (Adapted) a closer second.