How far back in the Berlin Film Festival’s 75-year history do you have to go to find an edition as strong as this one? About a quarter-century, I reckon, to 2002, when “Bloody Sunday” and “Spirited Away” tied for the festival’s top prize.

As long as I can remember, Berlin held the distant-third spot in the so-called “Big Three” festivals, far behind Cannes and Venice in both prestige and its power to attract the caliber of movies that shape the conversation. It may never surpass its two older cousins (Cannes was established five years earlier, while Venice dates back to 1932), but for the first time in forever, under the direction of incoming festival chief Tricia Tuttle and her team, I felt a frisson of excitement bubbling up through the slippery ice and sub-zero temperatures.

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Berlin has always felt like a slog, between the climate and the scandalously low hit-to-miss ratio in a sprawling lineup of nearly 200 films. Still, I hadn’t attended since 2020, the year Carlo Chatrian took over — the last major film gathering before the world went into lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic — and I was eager to see how the festival might had evolved under the leadership of Tuttle, who’d brought a populist sensibility to her years at BFI London Film Festival. I’m glad I was here to witness her inaugural edition (for which she’d tapped Jacqueline Lyanga and Variety’s own Jessica Kiang), as several improvements were immediately apparent.

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The festival is still centered in Potsdamer Platz, an eerie dead zone in the center of Berlin. In 2020, it had felt like a ghost town: The fest lost access to the cavernous Sony Center megaplex, and the three-story Arkaden shopping center was under renovation. Five years later, many of those screens still sit empty, but life has returned to the area. The fest’s main CinemaxX venue still feels state-of-the-art — a genuine movie theater, unlike the makeshift venues used by so many........

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