The carpets roll up tonight in Potsdamer Platz after what has been an exhausting but rewarding festival. Previews began on January 8^th and since then this knackered writer has seen 66 films from this enormous program. Some good, some bad and some butt ugly. These were the best bits.

Best press Conference: Nymphomaniac: Part I (Uncut)

Few can elicit such press salivation as Lars Von Trier. The grade-A messer was dubbed Persona Non Grata at Cannes for slightly sympathising with Adolf Hitler in the Meloncholia press junket. He hasn’t given one since but showed up in Berlin in a t-shirt emblazoned with the French festival's logo. Still he did not sit for the conference but a fellow headline grabber did. Shia LaBeouf stole the show from the great Dane by sitting in silence, chewing gum in a baseball hat, till the first banal question came his way. His response was to quote Eric Cantona’s Sardines/trawler quip and leave the room.

The director stayed silent but the Von Trier circus was most certainly in town.

Best Line:

“It’s just posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts”

-          A Belfast republican gives his glowing review of the British armed forces in surprise favourite 71’.

Top 5 films:

5. The Little House

Yoji Yamada

A wonderfully traditional portrait of romance in wartime Japan delivered with the assured delicate touch of its old pro director. It was the last competition film to screen and we welcomed it with open arms.

4. 71’

Yann Demange

From the eyes of a young British soldier, 71’ not only captured the incredible complexity of what was going on in Belfast in the lead up to Bloody Sunday, but also managed to do so without taking sides. We entered the screening with extreme prejudice but soon gave in. A remarkable achievement from first time director Yann Demange and, let’s hope, a springboard lead role for the inexplicably overlooked Jack O’Connell.

3. Nymphomaniac

Lars Von Trier

If Lars Von Trier was put on this earth for the sole purpose of annoying everybody, this could very well be his magnum opus. The feeling of anticipation at the packed house press screening is something only Von Trier could muster. He shows us we’re nothing more than a bunch of degenerates, and we love it.

2. Jack

Edward Berger

There is more than a hint of the Dardenne brothers to Edward Berger’s Jack, but the German director has taken their story out of the council estates and plopped it smack in the narcissistic middle class. The results were fresh and defiantly powerful.

1. The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq

Guillaume Nicloux

Michel Houllebecq played himself with nihilistic swagger for this fly on the wall Stockholm syndrome gem. Guillaume Nicloux's film was like a bucket of paint stripper to all the festival's showbiz and nonsense.

It was also very very funny. Simply unmissable. 

Time plays an important role in the films of Richard Linklater. His debut feature Slacker was built from brief conversations over the course of an Austin Texas day; a tapestry of quick glances which expressed the whole lazy scene. It was fresh, 90's and so very generation X. This format would come to serve Linklater well over the course of his career; Dazed and Confused used it; Waking Life sort of did it too; perhaps his greatest achievement so far took, for now, three such days in three different countries only Linklater let 14 years go by between them.  The results were incredibly moving. The second part of that series, Before Sunrise, hadn't even come out when Linklater began shooting this remarkable film. It’s called Boyhood and shows us through a fictional piece of film, shot roughly one week per year since 2003, the growth of a young boy called Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the age of 6 to 18.

Gathering Coltrane, his daughter Lorelei and stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as their separated parents, Linklater has crafted an entirely unique real-time story of what growing up in Texas must be like. We follow Mason and his sister Samantha as they go to school, their relationship with both parents, Mason’s first girlfriend and job, his mates and interests and everything else, before ultimately leaving for college.

Linklater pulls off an incredible trick in keeping such continuity of tone over such an enormous breath of production. The cuts are subtle and steady, facial hair, fashion and broken voice providing the clues. 

It’s all so impressive and yet somehow so tragically unmoving. When Linklater shoots outside his age bracket, he has a tendency to induce cringe. He made Slacker at 21 and Before Midnight at 52 and both of them worked a treat. Sadly seeing him depict free spirited youths comes off, well, like someone of a certain age depicting free spirited youths. But that only comes when Mason hits his teens, really what disappoints is how the director has failed to get to the guts of the human condition and with all that time and effort that is truly this film's tragedy. Still, Boyhood remains a wonderful, charming piece of work and an astonishingly impressive cinematic achievement. It really has never been done before. It might never be done again.

Well, for another 12 years at least...

Following on from her 2009 Golden Bear success for Milk of Sorrow, Claudia Llosa returns to the Berlinale with Aloft; a dense earthy film about a renowned natural healer and the son she left behind.

The film plays out on two different timeframes focusing on the son, Ivan, first as a boy (Zen McGrath), then a grown man (Cillian Murphy). As a young man his family move to northern Canada in the hope of healing Ivan’s brother via the hands of an enigmatic natural healer known only as The Architect. Back in the present, Ivan is now a reclusive falcon trainer. A documentary maker (Melanie Laurent) arrives on the scene wishing to make a film about Ivan’s mother and despite his immediate reservations, Ivan decides to go along for the ride.

It’s an incredibly organic piece of work; a story of lost souls seeking warmth in a freezing cold emotional wasteland. The woodlands and ice flats seem to be characters in themselves- and along with Ivan‘s falcons- represent the elemental forces at work here. It’s cold and moody no doubt but very natural and ethereal too and much like the films of Jane Campion, it flows with a wonderful sense of nurturing femininity.

“That’s a whole lotta art” says a number of people on separate occasions in George Clooney’s slightly delayed Monuments Men. His film is about a group of men of a certain age who band together to save Europe’s endangered art. It’s like Wild Hogs except that they’ve apparently ended up at the tail end of the Second World War.

The film concerns a true life plot, which was hatched in 1943, to send a crack team of Art experts to Europe in the hope of tracking down and “liberating” the Nazi’s cultural loot before it was either burnt to ash or fell in the hands of those pesky Russians. George Clooney plays a wily professor who rounds up a team of his art scene buddies to get the job done. It’s a crazy plan but it just might work. Yada yada yada. U-S-A...

The film is almost offensive in its light heartedness; with the sort of gags and score that you’d expect to find on a propaganda film of the 1950s. You get the feeling that if Total Recall truly did exist that The Monuments Men would be some sort of retirement special. Cate Blanchet's performance is graceful as ever but it’s lost amongst her colleagues' whims; stuck on autopilot; nothing more than grown men, having a laugh. But hey, good for them.

A journalist suffered a minor heart attack half way through the press screening.

You can make of that what you will.

Kumiko the Treasure Hunter- the charming new film from brothers David and Nathan Zellner-  hails from a particular strain of American comedy which takes in not only the film's producer, Alexander Payne, but also the Auteur directors that inspire our hero’s search.

We meet Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi); a melancholic girl in an oversized hoody. Her boss is a prick; her job’s a drag; her colleagues are scarcely better. Kumiko seeks adventure and promptly finds it when she inexplicably unearths a VHS of the Coen brother’s Fargo from a beachside cave and, duped by their opening passage, embroiders a map, nabs the company card and heads to Minnesota to claim the loot.

It’s a sensual film of crispness and sound with Kumiko as a wide eyed Red Riding Hood in a world of her own. We've come to know these things as cautionary tales, but Zellner treats it like a fantasy. At one point she takes a blanket to keep warm; it should be a symbol that things are looking bad, but the director shoots it, instead, like a superhero's cape. 

Much like Bruce Dern's Woody from Payne's recent Nebraska, we know our hero's search is in vain, but these are tragic heroes so we root for them all the same. Both seem desperate for adventure in their lives and share an understanding that making a break from the mundane is never without meaning, even if it is on the back of an empty dream.

Wes Anderson returns to our screens for another bout of neat dialogue, diorama settings and exquisite detail. The usual suspects have been rounded up again with some welcome new faces on board for his raucous, rose tinted Grand Budapest Hotel- his first to be set, and shot, on European soil and truly, his best effort in years.

It’s a story within a story within a story within a story. A young girl opens an Authors book; we cut to that Author (Tom Wilkinson) as he reads from his own memoir. We cut again to him at a younger age (Jude Law) on his first visit to the titular hotel. The place has seen better days and he finds the establishment's owner, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), in a sombre mood. The man agrees to sit down and tell his tale so we cut back once more. It’s the tale of how he, as a younger man (Tony Revolori), came to own the establishment and of Gustav M. (Ralph Fiennes); It’s loyal concierge. Moustafa takes a job as a bellboy but soon becomes Gustav’s protégé. Gustav is known to pander to the wealthy older clients-one Madame D. (Tilda Swinton under a mountain of prosthetics) in particular. Mrs. D. abruptly passes on and our heroes rush to her funeral. The will is read out to find that Gustav’s been left a prized painting, The Boy with the Apple from the renowned Van Hyutel. The relatives are in uproar so Gustav quickly makes his escape with painting in tow but on arrival in Hungary he’s arrested. This time not for the larceny, but for the old Frau’s murder. Tony must hatch a plan to break his mentor out of the ghastly Checkpoint 19 before any more heads begin to role.

Anderson’s films have never struggled with aesthetics but it must be said, in recent years they’ve had a tendency to go flat. Thankfully, here that just ain’t the case. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a full blown romp, racing along like an old school caper on Alexandre Desplat's jazz percussion fuelled score. Perfectly framing the action in Hollywood’s old 4:3 Academy ratio; Anderson references a host of old tricks. The physical humour of old silent films blends perfectly with his lovingly crafted sets and ornate dialogue. There are shades of Lubitsh and even a wink to Hitchcock but this is, as ever, a totally unique, hand crafted gem. 

The cast, as per usual, is staggering, with Fiennes and newcomer Revolori, next to the director’s usual stalwarts, fitting effortlessly into the Anderson mould. Delightfully though, one of the film’s brightest lights hails from our own fair isle. Like the best school production you’ve ever seen, Anderson’s performers have always taken a wonderfully hammy tone and this film is no different. Not a single actor even attempts to shed their colloquial tones and this particular setup allows Saoirse Ronan to show, for the very first time on film (yes really), her own fine Irish lilt. Although a relatively small part in terms of screen time, she’s an incredibly grounding and natural presence, freckles and all, which seems to give an edge to this film that has been lacking in recent outings.  

So break out the bunting; crack open the kegs; the young lady really does look a star.