Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek has filed a long dispatch from the Berlin Film Festival, where she’s seen and loved two films that have been widely derided by the bulk of the press corps: Tom Tykwer’s opening night flick The International, and Lucas Moodysson’s Michelle Williams-starring Mammoth. Being on the wrong side of the angry mob has led Zacharek to contemplate what she perceives as a pronounced anti-Hollywood bias among critics at the festival. First, w/r/t The International:

I began hearing the anti-Tinseltown drumbeat last Thursday, when German director Tom Tykwer’s strange and beautifully made thriller The International…yes, The International is a Hollywood picture in the sense that it has relatively big stars and a major studio (Columbia) behind it. But the movie I saw and loved, even in my jetlagged state, at the press screening last Thursday felt “Hollywood” to me only in the best sense: Tykwer obviously had some money to work with here, and he spent some of it on the kind of elaborate, elegantly constructed set pieces that few mainstream directors know how to do anymore.

I’ve heard numerous critics here complain that with “The International” Tykwer … has sold out. I’ve heard others call it boring, which is at least a step toward some sort of valid critical assessment. But while it used to be a given that a talented director might like the opportunity to work in a variety of styles, and, when possible, with a budget of more than 85 cents, there are still plenty of critics (and not just European ones) who seem to believe that an earnest “little” picture inherently has more worth than an ambitious “big” one.

Zacharek’s assessment matches up only partially with the reviews on record: Screen Daily noted that the film “frequently switches between being US studio-smooth and Euro-pudding awkward,” before comparing its dialogue to The Karate Kid.” indieWIRE declared the film “frivolous and commercial,” but also shoddily made.

Zacharek says the same complaint apparently came up after the press roundly booed Mammoth:

Mammoth is the most affecting picture I’ve seen at the festival so far…So why all the hooting? When I asked an English colleague about it, he said that perhaps this largely European audience felt that Moodysson, after making some rough, challenging movies, had gone soft in trying to make a picture that’s more acceptably Hollywood (there’s that ubiquitous adjective again). Maybe, he added, the perception was that Moodysson wanted to make some money (another term for “selling out”).

That point of view is reflected in Shane Danielsen’s latest Critic’s Notebook at indieWIRE, in which he brushes off Mammoth (in a mere three sentences) as the director’s “attempt to re-connect with commercial audiences following a couple of wayward semi-experimental (or just plain unpleasant) features. A slick, globe-hopping slice of contemporary First World guilt, in the tradition of Babel (right down to its interlocked, tripartite structure), and like that film, it was positively besotted with its own worthiness.”

Not having seen either film but knowing all too well how festival buzz spreads over the course of a week like a game of telephone (witness the fate of Push, which was privately derided by many of the first journalists to see it on the first day of Sundance 2009, and somehow ended up as the festival’s sweetheart), I wonder how folks in Berlin will respond to An Education, which I believe premieres there today. In a crowd jaded by disappointment, will Lone Scherfig’s fine but overpraised tale of doomed first love play as a revelation, or final confirmation that Berlinale 2009 is a disaster?

UPDATE: The first 5 minutes of The International are embedded at Living in Cinema.