Berlinale 2025: A Look Back

Final thoughts on the 75th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival.

I usually write these shortly after the end of the festival in question, but this year, as I’ve previously mentioned, the Berlinale essentially beat me up thanks to a cold that put my writing on the back burner for a few weeks. As it turns out, that may have been beneficial for this look back on the 2025 edition of the festival, for reasons that connect to something I was already thinking during the event and became even clearer in the weeks since.

First things first, I thought that in terms of the straightforward quality of the selection, it was a good, not great, edition: plenty of stuff to like, but very few things that truly blew me away (for more details, in addition to my previous posts about the Berlinale, you can watch this livestream I did with my friend Ewan Graf for the Quiet on Set podcast). Tricia Tuttle and her team were perhaps encumbered by a few external factors (the festival’s dates have always had an impact on the more mainstream American titles that can screen out of competition, for example), and also had to deal with the fact they’re still finding their groove in the context of the existing festival structure. It was a decent start for what will hopefully be another good era for the Berlinale.