Berlin film festival 2015: 17 key films to look out for – in pictures
The Berlin film festival opens for business on Thursday with a sparkling line-up, including new films from Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes, and some obscure, little-known film about a student journalist who interviews a rich businessman
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Dane DeHaan plays James Dean and Robert Pattinson photographer Dennis Stock in the Anton Corbijn-directed Life, an account of the pair’s friendship
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Terrence Malick’s latest, Knight of Cups, a study of LA disillusion and decadence with Christian Bale and Natalie Portman.
Photograph: /Melinda Sue Gordon
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Breathe Umphefumlo, from U-Carmen eKhayelitsha director Mark Dornford-May, a reworking of Puccini’s opera La Bohème relocated to a South African township
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Ian McKellen plays Sherlock as a bee-keeping retiree in his 90s looking back over his career in Mr Holmes. Bill ‘God and Monsters’ Condon directs.
Photograph: Ed Miller
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Wim Wenders hooks up with the ubiquitous James Franco for the German director’s first fiction feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting. Every Thing Will Be Fine is a study of a man (Franco) who knocks down a child in his car
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Kenneth Branagh’s live-action Cinderella – starring Lily James as Cinders and Cate Blanchett as the Wicked Stepmother – gets its worldwide release in March, but is showing out of competition here
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German director Oliver Hirschbiegel bounces back from the Diana disaster with Elser (AKA 13 Minutes), an account of Georg Elser, who tried to kill Hitler in 1939
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The latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has managed to complete three features despite being banned from film-making by Iran’s authorities. Taxi has Panahi himself driving a cab around Tehran, talking to the people he picks up
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The big hope of China’s commercial domestic film industry, Gone with the Bullets is the sequel to action comedy smash Let the Bullets Fly, directed by and starring Jiang Wen as gangster in the 1920s
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Maverick British director Peter Greenaway examines Soviet master film-maker Sergei Eistenstein’s abortive trip to Mexico in the 1930s in Eisenstein in Guanajuato
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Having made his name with the low-budget Weekend, British director Andrew Haigh scales up with 45 Years, a study of a long-married couple with explosive secrets. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling star
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Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds star in Woman in Gold, a based-on-truth study of a Holocaust survivor and her lawyer who are fighting to reclaim a Klimt painting after it was stolen by the Nazis. Simon Curtis directs
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Veteran German auteur Margarethe von Trotta returns with The Misplaced World, a fable of a man obsessed with a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his dead wife
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A quick European jaunt for Sebastian Silva’s Nasty Baby, fresh from its Sundance premiere. Kristen Wiig is a surrogate mother for a gay couple, played by Tunde Adebimpe and Silva
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Léa Seydoux stars in a faithful adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s turn of the century novel Diary of a Chambermaid, previously reworked by Buñuel and Renoir among others. Benoît Jacquot takes the reins this time
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The hugely anticipated adaptation of EL James S&M novel Fifty Shades of Grey gets its world premiere in Berlin – sensibly, though, it is being screened out of competition
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Werner Herzog has rounded up a strong cast – James Franco, Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, Damian Lewis – for Queen of the Desert, a biopic of traveller/diplomat Gertrude Bell, who was instrumental in the creation of Iraq in the 1920s
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