Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale Boyhood seemed the odds-on favourite to capture the Golden Bear top prize at the Berlin film festival on Saturday, but dramas from Northern Ireland and Germany were hot on its heels.
Critics and audiences swooned over Linklater's latest picture, a moving, leisurely paced story made over a 12-year period with the same actors including Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and the director's own daughter Lorelei.
If it doesn't capture the gold among the 20 international contenders, commentators said a Silver Bear award for best actor for its star, Ellar Contrane, or a best director gong for Linklater could be on the cards.
"It is 164 minutes short and, mildly put, fantastic," Berlin's daily Der Tagesspiegel wrote on Friday, joining a chorus of praise for Boyhood in a year with only a handful of standout pictures.
"(The film) is wonderfully funny again and again and often so beautiful you could cry."
The Berlinale, as the 11-day event is known, also saw impressive feature debuts from two filmmakers who may well be invited on stage at the gala ceremony Saturday night.
Yann Demange's '71, an escape thriller set at the height of Northern Ireland's sectarian violence, wowed viewers with its hair-raising pace and keen insights into a spiral of violence.
"The Troubles have rarely been more troubling onscreen than they are in 71, a vivid, shivery survival thriller that turns the red-brick residential streets of Belfast into a war zone of unconscionable peril," film bible Variety said.
The Paris-born Demange is the director of hit British television series Top Boy.
On the last day of competition, festival-goers cheered Macondo by first-time filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai, who gathered a cast of Chechen refugees as lay actors for a documentary-style drama set in Vienna.
Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) about a teenage girl in Germany who falls victim to a fundamentalist Catholic sect drew high marks for tight direction and a knock-out performance by lead actress Lea van Acken.
In 2013, the tragedy "Child's Pose" about a son from Romania's new monied class who kills a poor child in a car accident claimed the Golden Bear.
