This year, the Hollywood-crazy Berlin media groused about the absence of stars. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Gus Van Sant and Emma Thompson didn’t come, but Steven Soderbergh, Mike Nichols, Monica Bellucci (who appeared on the front page of the Berliner Kurier wearing nothing but caviar), Philip Kaufman, Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Breillat, Anthony Hopkins (at the Reichstag’s cupola restaurant, he ordered a vegetarian meal), John Boorman, John le Carré, Spike Lee, Patrice Leconte, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Patrice Chéreau, Marianne Faithful, Kirk Douglas (getting the lifetime-achievement Golden Bear), and Sean Connery (his press conference was SRO) all did. Maybe the Berliners had their hearts set on Michael and Catherine. And once again the festival’s opener failed to impress — the tabloids were more excited about Berlin amateur football club FC Union’s success in reaching the final of the German Cup than they were about Annaud’s re-creation of Hitler’s assault on Stalingrad. I didn’t see Enemy at the Gates, or Lucrecia Martel’s well-received Argentine entry La ciénaga, but otherwise I caught 29 films in 10 days (taking 165 pages of notes), plus 20 press conferences, two museum shows (the new Film Museum is an experience of Caligari-like proportions, but I passed on “Körperwelten,” where people achieve immortality by bequeathing their flayed corpses to be put on display), one concert, one recital, and one football match. Jenny Holzer had a show at the New National Gallery, just across the street from Potsdamer Platz, but I never made it over there.

America was represented in force — nine of the 29 films in the competition program had already screened here — but though Traffic was a hit with the critics (five of the six represented in the Tagesspiegel’s poll gave it their top rating), the international jury headed by former Fox studio chief William Mechanic tipped it only for Best Actor (Benicio Del Toro). Hannibal (only the third most horrifying spectacle in town, after Körperwelten and football team Hertha Berlin’s non-aggression pact against Wolfsburg) and the opening of Quills, and Thirteen Days screened out of competition and aside from the appearance of Anthony Hopkins didn’t make much of a splash; Bamboozled, Finding Forrester, Malèna, and Chocolat got middling to poor reviews. The good news is that some of the foreign films screened at this year’s Berlinale will make it to America. That list will surely include Patrice Chéreau’s Golden Bear winner, Intimacy, which is based on semi-autobiographical stories by Hanif Kureishi. Set in London, this story of a married woman who has sex with the same virtual stranger (they never talk) every Wednesday boasts powerful performances from Kerry Fox (who won the Best Actress Bear), Mark Rylance, Timothy Spall, and Marianne Faithfull, but I thought Chéreau dodged the issue by not having his lovers start talking till the end — the film, which is nowhere near as tough as Liv Ullmann’s similarly themed Faithless (see our review on page 3), concludes where it should have started. Still, I look forward to seeing it again stateside.

We can also expect to welcome Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle and Lone Scherfig’s Dogme 95 film Italian for Beginners, since they’ve been bought by Sony and Miramax, respectively. Beijing Bicycle, which won the jury’s Silver Bear, is an imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery salute to Vittorio de Sica’s 1949 classic The Bicycle Thief. A young man from the provinces arrives in Beijing and gets a job as a bicycle delivery boy, but then his bike is stolen and winds up in the hands of a student. Wang adduces vivid testimony as to the economic and social importance of a bicycle in Beijing, but the back-and-forth goings of the vehicle grow tiresome, the two main characters never talk to each other, and the city is depicted with easy cynicism.

Italian for Beginners, on the other hand, is sure to find favor wherever it goes — it charmed even the FIPRESCI jury of international film critics, who gave it their top award. Dubbed “Dogme-lite” by some, Lone Scherfig’s film follows the fortunes of some eight people in a small Danish town — including a minister, a hairdresser, a retired football star, a hotel employee, and the counter girl at a bakery — who are attending an adult-education Italian class; we see how they gradually open up to one another and find love even as they discover Italy. It’s not exactly realistic, and you can argue over whether Scherfig has bent some of the Dogme rules, but there’s a modicum of grit (including three deaths) and a lot of subtle touches (after the irascible footballer is fired from his job at the stadium restaurant, he ditches his Danish national-team jersey in favor of an Italian one). For me, the important thing — maybe the most important thing to come out of this year’s Berlinale — was the price tag: Scherfig made Italian for Beginners for about $1 million. Her relatively unknown actors are excellent; Sara Indrio Jensen’s radiant Italian waitress has it all over Monica Bellucci’s Malèna walk-through.

I was also taken by Wojciech Marczewski’s Weiser, where a middle-aged man who’s returned to Poland tries to retrace an episode from when he was 12 in which a Jewish outsider disappeared without a trace while a group of kids were blowing up a bridge. Based on a novel by Pave<t-33>l<t$z4.5b-1.75>/<z$b$t$> Huelle, the film is somewhat derivative of Günter Grass’s novella Cat and Mouse (both Grass and Huelle grew up in Danzig), and in the end at least one character withholds information not only from the main character but from the audience. Still, this meditation on the unknowability of others deserves a trip to America. Like Italian for Beginners, it was made on a shoestring (about $1.2 million), and the 12-year-old actors are all superb.

I can’t imagine that most of the other foreign-language entries will travel well. Lin Cheng-sheng somehow garnered the Best Director Bear for his Taipei-set Betelnut Beauty, just one more tale of kids from the sticks trying to make it in the big, unfeeling city. Will American audiences be shocked to learn that underage girls actually dress in sexy outfits to sell betelnuts to passing motorists? Or that when a young man with no appreciable skills gets involved in gang wars, he comes to a bad end? (Then there are the illiterate subtitles: standing in the rain and screaming, we’re told, is “supper.”) Park Chan-Wook’s Joint Security Area reminds us just how bad relations between North and South Korea still are; the investigation into two unexplained deaths in the DMZ “truce village” of Panmunjeom engages for a while, but you can figure out what must have happened long before the truth is revealed, and in the end we learn that, yes, war is bad. Ferzan Ozpetek’s Rome-set Le fate ignoranti has an unusual set-up — a widow discovers that her husband was having an affair with another man — but dithers about before settling for a feel-good resolution. Go Riju’s Chloe is a Japanese Love Story with an original concept — Chloe has waterlilies growing in her lungs, and for a time the presence of other flowers inhibits this growth — but here too metaphor turns into melodrama. The strangest film in the competition was Masato Harada’s Oedipus tale Inugami, where, even after the truth comes out, the Oedipus figure and his mother maintain their relationship, and only then does he kill his father. It’s mesmerizing, but the addition of brother-sister incest and ghosts to Sophocles seems a bit much.

Patrice Leconte’s Félix et Lola stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as a girl with a secret past (maybe) in yet another quirky French tale of amour fou. At least it was better than Catherine Breillat’s À ma sœur, where an unlikely dea ex machina stroke from the director allows the teenage fat-girl heroine to take revenge on her beautiful but selfish sister and her uncaring mother. The one African entry, Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal, looks at the divide between Africans and African-Americans in Harlem; it says more about the American black experience than all of Spike Lee’s posturings, but maybe not enough. Set in 1947, José Luis Garci’s You’re the One (title after Cole Porter, but shouldn’t it be “You Are the One”?) is a TV-movie story about a blonde rich girl whose lover dies in one of Franco’s prisons but finds solace with the “real people” in the northern province of Asturias. And Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim, an uneasy melding of The Mayor of Casterbridge with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, has lush scenery but no characterizations. The one German competition film, Philippos Tsitos’s My Sweet Home, is set in the working-class Berlin district of Kreuzberg, where immigrants act out their love-hate relationship with the city; it has a heartrending performance from Nadja Uhl but no Turks (even though they make up 25 percent of Kreuzberg’s population) — is that because the film is a Greek co-production?

Outside the competition, I caught Tom Tykwer’s latest, The Princess and the Warrior, a bank-heist-gone-bad love story with a mystifying ending that, by midnight of the day I arrived, I wasn’t up to unraveling. No amount of sleep could have rescued Elaine Cassidy’s Disco Pigs, whose two “soulmate” protagonists might just be the most self-indulgent and self-absorbed in the history of cinema. As for the cinematic version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell wrote and directed and stars, so it’s faithful to the musical. I’m not sure Hedwig doesn’t work better on stage, but if you liked the original, you won’t be disappointed by the movie.

The best film I saw, Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning drama Wit, is dead certain to come to America, but since it’s an HBO production, Emma Thompson won’t be Oscar-eligible for her searing portrait of the Donne scholar who fights a losing battle with ovarian cancer (she should have been Best Actress here). The hottest ticket was the restored 147-minute version of Fritz Lang’s 1926 silent classic Metropolis, which, screening as part of the Lang retrospective, had an original score by Bernd Schultheis played live by the 100-strong Berlin Radio Symphony: even the aisles were packed. Would Boston flock to this if it screened at the Wang Center with the BSO accompanying?

Where does this leave the Berlinale express? Next year Dieter Kossick, who’s been the head of Germany’s largest film-subsidy board, will take over. Some think he’ll be more sympathetic to the German film industry; on the other hand, Berlin loves its Hollywood films, and even more its Hollywood stars. The trick is still to find the best films in a cinematic world where good ones seem in increasingly short supply and the big studios are increasingly reluctant to expose their product to the critics. Still, one could ask why this year there were no competition films from Iran or Turkey, only one from China, one from Africa, and one from South America. How about it, Dieter?