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IONCINEMA.com’s Chief Film Critic Nicholas Bell reviewed the entire competition and more. Here is a comprehensive guide to all the feature film reviews from our site of the films featured at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.

Main Competition
At the Sea / Kornél Mundruczó [Review]
Dao / Alain Gomis [Review]
Dust / Anke Blondé [Review]
Everybody Digs Bill Evans / Grant Gee [Review]
Home Stories / Eva Trobisch [Review]
In a Whisper / Leyla Bouzid [Review]
Josephine / Beth de Araújo [Review]
The Loneliest Man in Town / Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel [Review]
Flies / Fernando Eimbcke [Review]
My Wife Cries / Angela Schanelec [Review]
A New Dawn / Yoshitoshi Shinomiya [Review]
Nightborn / Hanna Bergholm [Review]
Nina Roza / Geneviève Dulude-De Celles [Review]
Queen at Sea / Lance Hammer [Review]
Rose / Markus Schleinzer [Review]
Rosebush Pruning / Karim Aïnouz [Review]
Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars / Mahamat-Saleh Haroun [Review]
Salvation / Emin Alper [Review]
Yellow Letters / İlker Çatak [Review]
We Are All Strangers / Anthony Chen [Review]
Wolfram / Warwick Thornton [Review]
Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird) / Anna Fitch and Banker White [Review]

Opening Film
No Good Men / Shahrbanoo Sadat [Review]

Berlinale Special — Out of Competition
The Blood Countess / Ulrike Ottinger [Review]

Perspectives
17 / Kosara Mitić [Review]
Light Pillar / Zao Xu [Review]
Trial of Hein / Kai Stänicke [Review]
Truly Naked / Muriel d’Ansembourg [Review]

Panorama
I Understand Your Displeasure / Kilian Armando Friedrich [Review]
Iván & Hadoum / Ian de la Rosa [Review]
Lali / Sarmad Khoosat [Review]
Roya / Mahnaz Mohammadi [Review]

Generation 14plus
Don’t Come Out / Victoria Linares Villegas [Review]… Read the rest

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Magnificent Obsession: Franco Finds Love is a Hopeless Place

Michel Franco lassos Jessica Chastain into his continued class conflict examinations in Dreams, an intimate portrait of a doomed love affair ruined by power hierarchies. Reuniting with Chastain after 2023’s Memory (read review), Franco fashions his headliner as an elitist who chooses to remain oblivious about her exploitative tendencies, even while seemingly head-over-heels in love with a younger, Mexican dancer. Ironically, they share similar versions of the same dream, and clearly neither are being realistic about what the end goal is supposed to look like. Toxic tendencies from both parties generate shifting balances of control, with which Franco spins his wheels on until he’s ready to deliver the venom and violence underlining nearly all his films.… Read the rest

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Free Bird: Fitch & White Unveil Inventive, Personal Homage

Watching something like Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) reifies the exceptional and unique nature of human connection and friendship, a tribute from directors Anna Fitch and Banker White for their deceased friend, Yolonda Shea. At the same time, it is a multi-layered documentary exercise so personally specific, it really only justifies itself as an exercise in catharsis for those who made it. Certainly, there’s a time and place for audiences to seek out and enjoy discovering remnants of this outspoken woman who lived life by her own rules, but ultimately, there’s something a bit too personal, a bit too detached, like we’re eavesdropping on a stranger’s home videos during an unexpected stretch of free time in a captive vacuum.… Read the rest

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Celestial Orgy: Haroun Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

Nestled deep down inside the core of Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars is a compelling narrative worthy of the pristine cinematography of DP Mathieu Giombini and the striking beauty of actor Maïmouna Miawama, making her debut. But the latest title from Chadian auteur Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is unfortunately a misfire as a glacially paced ghost story which can never quite unify the ersatz supernatural visions of its protagonist with the claustrophobic politics of the stifling village somewhere in the Ennedi Desert. A lusciously photographed narrative slog, it’s a surprising misfire from the director following 2021’s Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, especially as he once again returns to a mystical, femme-centered fable.… Read the rest

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Grave of the Fireworks: Shinomiya Finds All the Colors in the Dark

For his debut film, A New Dawn, animator Yoshitoshi Shinomiya marries bureaucratic takeovers, environmental issues, and broken family ties into a narrative which feels like a beautifully illustrated template for a schizophrenic dreamscape. An almost breathlessly paced running time oddly juggles dramatic catalysts and zany characterizations as it hurtles towards its predictable explosion of a mythical firework’s illegal debut as a desperate attempt to showcase how a frivolous pastime might indeed be the artistic display reminding us all of an innate interconnectedness with the universe.

The Obinata Firework Factory has been scheduled to be shut down and demolished thanks to an impending road destined to be built over it.… Read the rest

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Ghosts of Past & Present: Sultan Khoosat Hones His Visual Flair But Latest Devolves Into Silliness

A universal thematic thread of the past haunting its central characters in conflicting ways is tackled in the Pakistani production Lali. Director Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s fourth feature is an at times confusing but vividly authentic vision of the types of matriarchal, patriarchal and domineering forces that consume traditional South Asian relationships and values. An admirably bloated effort that could have used a bit more nuance that we found in Khoosat’s recently produced Joyland (2022) by Saim Sadiq.

We open on a bustling Pakistani wedding, a colorful and glorious ceremony with dancing, music and traditional practices resembling a carnival.… Read the rest

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I Confess: Mohammadi’s Myriad of Memory Celebrates Women of Iran Who Don’t Stand Idly By

While we understand imprisonment as punishment par excellence, what Iranian filmmaker and activist Mahnaz Mohammadi explores in her searing sophomore feature Roya is how confinement methodically disorients logic, splintering the boundaries between past and present. Drawing from her own experience of incarceration, Mohammadi crafts a two-tiered psychological descent that is at once visually austere and aurally assaultive — jarring, off-putting and formally risky in ways that both immerse and unsettle the viewer. Who knew that there were not one, but two hells.

One of the film’s earliest images — the pressing of an elevator button descending to basement level minus three — becomes a distilled omen of the world of societal pain that awaits.… Read the rest

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Here are the winners! As we predicted, Yellow Letters was a formidable film in the competition of twenty-two films.

Golden Bear: Yellow Letters
Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: Salvation
Silver Bear Jury Prize: Queen at Sea
Silver Bear for Best Director: Grant Gee – Everyone Digs Bill Evans
Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance: Sandra Hüller for Rose
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance: (Tie) Anna Calder-Marshall & Tom Courtenay for Queen at Sea
Silver Bear for Best Screenplay: Geneviève Dulude-de Celles for Nina Roza
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution: Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) by Anna Fitch and Banker White (U.S.)… Read the rest

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Strategy of Tragedy: Chen Overdoses on Drama in Sprawling Family Portrait

The most succinct aspect of Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s latest feature, We Are All Strangers, which focuses on a modern day working class family in a country usually only defined by its opulence, is the title. Despite the prolonged running time, clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours, which allows for what feels like an endless parade of unfortunate events, the pressure cooker approach superficially bonds us to its characters’ woes, but we really don’t know too much about them at all. They are indeed strangers. If Edward Yang is who Chen aims to emulate, this falls perilously short by comparison (and, in fact, feels more spiritually aligned with something like Father of the Bride Part II, 1995).… Read the rest

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It Doesn’t Follow: Linares Villegas’ Queer Horror Forgets the Fright Factor

Horror has long been a safe space to explore queer stories; from cult classics Jennifer’s Body and Ginger Snaps to horror villains found in The Babadook and the androgynous gender fluid figure Pinhead from Hellraiser. Dominican filmmaker Victoria Linares Villegas ambitiously threads themes of closeted homosexuality into a horror framework in her debut feature Don’t Come Out (No Salgas). Invoking a homophobic killer as both threat and metaphor, despite its conceptual promise, the film struggles to generate genuine scares, fully realized characters, or a narrative pulse strong enough to sustain tension.… Read the rest

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