Features

Picture book: this year’s festival kicked off with a swirl of controversy and a dud opening night film, before finding its footing with films like Catherine Corsini’s Homecoming, Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, and others

Time fades away: on the occasion of Shinji Somai’s ongoing retrospective at the Japan Society, critic Emerson Goo offers a primer on the director’s audacious, and enduring, filmography

Back to life: Evil Dead Rise, more than other reboots of the franchise, gets closer to squeezing real feelings out of the scenario without ever going soft on the gory trappings

Child’s play: Ari Aster’s latest living nightmare, Beau Is Afraid, stars Joaquin Phoenix as a stunted, paranoid mama’s boy, caught up in a roller coaster of horrors—and is not quite as interesting as one would hope

Resource extraction: the incendiary new Brazilian film Dry Ground Burning is the latest entry in a small canon of lo-fi insurrectionary speculative fables

Sculpting time: Kelly Reichardt’s latest, Showing Up, layers questions of time and space, care and concern, in its portrait of art-making

Blurred lines: Mark Jenkin’s mind-bending slice of purgatorial folk horror vividly depicts the psychological dissolution of a woman living in isolation on the windswept moors of a tiny Cornish isle

Get religion: Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary, In viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis is the latest entry in the canon of the cinema du pope

Binary systems: two Berlinale standouts, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography grapple productively with the boundaries between subjective and objective experience

Reversal stock: even after a rash of changes, this year's edition still retains the fest’s long-standing commitment to adventurous international art cinema