Berlinale 2026: London, Everything Else is Noise, If Pigeons Turned to Gold, Ghost in the Cell, AnyMart

Over the past few years the same thing kept happening at Berlinale. I’d see an early screening of something stunning in the Panorama section and it would set a high bar that the rest of the festival would struggle to clear. In 2023, it was Passages and Hello Dankness. In 2024, it was Janet Planet (for my money still one of the best movies of the 2020s). In 2025, it was Peter Hujar’s Day. This year, it was Sebastian Brameshuber’s London that came closest to keeping the streak alive.

Berlinale’s Panorama section is more or less a grab bag of accomplished international movies that, in other European festivals, might fall into the main competition lineup. This year, there’s a loose theme called “Desire Lines,” which the program defines as “…the filmmakers lead us into open emotional landscapes and raise pressing questions: Which spaces are we assigned? Which must we passionately conquer, which must we fiercely defend?” I’m not sure if any of that typical Berlinale-speak directly applies to London, which offers a fascinating mix of narrative and documentary filmmaking as the film is almost entirely made up of conversations in a car as a man, Bobby (Bobby Sommer), drives to and from Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, picking up ride share passengers along the way in order to help pay for gas.

Only one of the passengers Bobby picks up is a professional actor (another happens to be the writer-director Ted Fendt, who also happens to have a movie, Foreign Travel, playing in at this year’s fest), and though the movie is, in the strict sense, scripted, it never feels like it. Everyone who steps in the car is meeting Bobby for the first time and the conversation unfolds in a completely natural and often revelatory way. Passenger by passenger we learn more about Bobby, and through his story and the story of others we see the past and the present intersecting like two highways. Bobby was born just after WWII, and here he is, picking up off-duty soldiers and refugees as another war looms just over the border.

London is a quiet film, but it’s one that builds to create a very moving experience. You’re not only left with a beautiful, singular portrait of Bobby the driver, but through the connection he makes a broader picture of modern-day Europe emerges that is both heartwarming and distressingly fragile. It’s a fantastic movie, and Brameshuber proves he’s a filmmaker worth keeping tabs on.

As good as London is, this year the high water marks were set by a couple films in the Forum section, which is usually a place where you’ll find more esoteric and high-minded comedies and dramas, challenging documentaries, and quite a few movies that will verge on the experimental. Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise is a fine representation of a Forum movie. It takes place mostly in one apartment and yet offers a thorough and keenly observed takedown of the artworld patriarchy. It presents three generations of women in Mexico who all compose music and who, each in their own way, find that their artistic value must always pass through the judgement of men in order to be deemed worthwhile. While the two older women are either willing to play along or at least pretend to, the younger of the three is already fed up with these rules of the game. It’s funny, meaningful, and an exciting move from Pereda, whose previous films have tended to be more on the inscrutable side. This is easy to get into and it culminates in a final confrontation that is surprisingly cathartic. I’m a sucker for movies about unpretentious artists and their process, so this is currently sitting at the number three spot in my 2026 Berlinale best-of list.

The number one spot belongs to another Forum movie, If Pigeons Turned to Gold, by Pepa Lubojacki. I’ll just say, while this movie had me sobbing at the end, and it deals with the difficult subject of alcoholism and addiction, it is anything but a chore to sit through. It’s a vibrant, mischievous film that feels handmade by Lubojacki in the best way possible. No one else in the world could make this movie – not only because it serves as a profile of Pepa’s brother and two cousins, all of whom are addicts who are either living on the streets or in an unstable housing situation. This is a movie that also captures Lubojacki’s mordant sense of humor, as she fills the screen with old photographs brought to eerie life with the help of AI, serving to narrate this tragic tale with unsettlingly funny narration and left-field digressions.

If Pigeons Turned to Gold is a true “there but for the grace of God” film, made by someone who isn’t so much struggling to understand why her family ended up the way it did, but rather what can she do? It’s extremely gut wrenching at times because you’re also watching the filmmaker practically pulling out her hair in trying to get through to her brother. And if you’ve ever tried to reason with an addict, you’ll recognize the feelings of frustration and hopelessness all too well. Trigger warning, indeed. Lubojacki also addresses the concerns of exploitation that can also sit at the center of documentaries like these, but she’s succeeded in making a bold and unique film that is all the more impactful for the awareness, intelligence, humor, and personality she’s added. Above all though, it’s the love she has for her brother that really shines through (and utterly destroyed me).

But there was something odd going on in this year’s Forum because it’s not usually the kind of place you’d find full-on genre pictures, like Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell, and (to a lesser extent) Yusuke Iwasaki’s AnyMart. As I mentioned in my perhaps-too-generous review of Havoc, I have a fondness for Indonesian action and horror films, so I was curious about how a Joko Anwar movie would end up in the Forum section. After watching it, I’m still wondering. It is exactly what you might expect: an over-the-top, gory, often goofy, action-horror film that does what it advertises: puts a homicidal ghost in a prison and lets the carnage ensue. It was all too broad and corny for me. Though if you’re in the mood for a comedic horror film, you could certainly do worse. Anwar knows how to stage a good set piece.

For the novelty of seeing a horror movie in the Forum section, AnyMart proved more rewarding. What starts off like a riff on Clerks set in modern, urban Japan, with bored convenience store workers trying to get through their soul-sucking shifts, slowly turns more sinister until blood is flowing in the aisles. There are some inspired moments, and it certainly has its message about the deadening effects of capitalism, and how convenience stores may be the most existentially despairing rung of that ladder, but it takes more than a generous helping of deadpan violence and gore to make that message feel fresh.

That’s it for this round. Next up we’ll dive back into the Competition program with a look at Anders Danielsen Lie in Everybody Digs Bill Evans plus a few more titles.