Kristen Stewart in lesbian crime flick Love Lies Bleeding, trans tale I Saw the TV Glow, and Min Bahadur Bham’s Himalayan film Shambhala all feature in our picks of the best movies at Berlin 2024.

The Roundup: Punishment, which premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, sees Korean hard man Ma Dong-seok return as a no-nonsense cop who punches his way through a gang of internet scammers.

Above the Dust follows a 10-year-old boy in China who dreams of owning a water pistol, and who goes on a journey through his grandfather’s memories of the 1950s and his terrible misdeeds at the time.

Shambala, the first Nepalese film selected for the Berlin Film Festival’s main competition, is an unhurried masterpiece about a Nepalese woman searching for her husband in the Himalayas.

Starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano, Netflix sci-fi Spaceman – which premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival – has its moments, but director Johan Renck struggles to sustain interest.

Debuting at Berlin 2024, Black Tea, the first film about Africans in China made by an African filmmaker, exhibits a tone-deaf understanding of what the diaspora’s experience is like in the country.

Ray Yeung’s film All Shall Be Well, about the struggles of a gay woman after her partner dies, is based on ‘shocking’ true events. The Hong Kong director talks about rights for same-sex couples.

Korean director Hong Sang-soo returns to the Berlin International Film Festival with another typically opaque drama – in A Traveler’s Needs, Isabelle Huppert plays a mystery woman teaching French in Korea.

Director Qiu Yang’s Some Rain Must Fall centres on a well-off woman whose family fragments after an accident, in a critique on damaging dysfunctions present in the lives of China’s middle class.

Gael Garcia Bernal plays a widower whose wife is reanimated in the body of another woman (Renate Reinsve). Piero Messina’s film is hackneyed and gets bogged down in jargon, but is visually appealing.

Brief History of a Family made a splash at Sundance and is about to screen at the Berlin film festival. Its Chinese director, Lin Jianjie, reflects on its subject – China’s middle class – and dreamlike ending.

Zhang Yimou has directed wuxia epics (Hero, Shadow), comedies (One Second, Keep Cool) and films about 20th-century China (Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum). Here is our pick of his top 10 films.

Lam Ka-tung and Mirror’s Lokman Yeung try to exert their free will and change their destiny in director Soi Cheang’s Hong Kong-set genre thrill ride with a dash of fantasy thrown in.

Jeon Do-yeon, the star of Netflix Korean thriller about an assassin with a wayward daughter, talked at the Berlin International Film Festival about her first time playing a killer and what it means to be a good parent.

Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, at the Berlin International Film Festival with her new film Green Night, opens up about how tough it was not acting for five years, and what she learned from it.

From Past Lives, a beautifully bittersweet romance that may go on to win multiple awards, to true-life drama Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney, our pick of 10 of the best movies at this year’s Berlin film festival.

From Anne Hathaway’s see-through gown and Mia Goth’s monochromatic look to Nanoka Hara’s elegant white dress, here are the boldest red carpet outfits at this year’s Berlinale

The film, about adults suffering from mental disorders, was directed by Nicolas Philibert. The film festival was kicked off, via video link, by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Have A Nice Day director Liu Jian returns with an ensemble story, set in the 1990s, whose protagonists are caught between traditional values and modernism. His animation is stunning.

Fan Bingbing makes an audacious comeback after nearly five years out of the limelight for tax evasion in Green Night. Thelma & Louise meets Blue is the Warmest Colour in a flashy but flawed film.

In competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, Suzume is an extraordinary achievement. Smart, sassy and weaving fantasy elements into a contemporary story, it is inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

Hong Sang-soo wrote, produced, directed, edited and composed the score for this story about filmmaking. His decision to shoot many scenes out of focus makes the 61-minute film a chore to watch.

Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu says his new film The Shadowless Tower, with its spirited and independent female lead, maybe ‘reflects reality’ in how gender roles are changing in China.

Celine Song’s gentle romance stars Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as childhood friends in Korea who reconnect online after 12 years apart, and eventually meet again in New York.

In Chinese director Zhang Lu’s gentle, slow-moving tale, a middle-aged divorcee who is in a relationship with a younger woman has to decide whether he wants to reunite with his estranged father.

There are shades of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick in Jeon’s character, Gil Boksoon, an assassin who decides to retire. The action is visceral, the body count astronomical, but it’s all a bit cold.

A woman makes a sex tape with her husband and it goes viral online, in Romanian director Radu Jude’s bold and chaotic satire, with nods to Monty Python and cult US director John Waters.

China’s northwest, the setting for rural melodrama premiered at the Berlin film festival, is where its director, Li Ruijun, grew up. He talks about encroaching urbanisation in China, and the importance of nature in film.

International film festivals in Berlin and Rotterdam are the latest to move screenings partly or fully online; it’s not all bad, but there’s no substitute for film fans and professionals meeting at in-person events, organisers say.