Chinese director Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice was a popular choice as winner of the Golden Bear award for best film at this year's Berlin film festival.

His third feature (pictured) is drained of colour and makes striking allusions to film noir thrillers as do his choice of protagonists, an ex-police officer and a femme fatale.

But Yinan's film also invites us into the lives of "ordinary" people who lead extraordinary lives in the northern China of 1999.

It opens with the discovery of several corpses in a small town. A detective links the series of murders to a young and enigmatic woman who works at a local drycleaners.

Falling in love with her, he realises it is not always possible to separate guilt from innocence, and that a murder case five years before which led to his disgrace may not have been solved after all.

Though Black Coal, Thin Ice was a deserving winner, I personally was rooting for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which carried off the jury's special prize.

Set in Europe between the last two world wars, it recounts the picaresque exploits of a hotel concierge. His narrative of the hotel's life is eccentric yet elegant in this skilfully designed and directed exercise in nostalgia. Brilliant.

Best actress award went to Haru Kuroki for her role as a housemaid in a middle-class Japanese family in the 1940s in Yoichi Yamada's The Little House and and there was another notable Chinese winner, Liao Fan, voted best actor for his role in Black Coal, Thin Ice.

It was great to see the Silver Bear best director award go to Richard Linklater. His Boyhood, 11 years in the making and in my view his best yet, could quite easily have won the top prize.

A film with real gravitas, it charts the development of the son of divorced parents and gives an honest representation of an ordinary family, their experiences and struggles, leaving the sense that life moves incredibly fast.

Alain Resnais also won a Silver Bear for the comedy Life Of Riley, which follows three couples whose peaceful lives in the English countryside are ruffled by an enigmatic man, the eponymous Riley.

Though it has its good moments it is all too often a wildly overcooked and overacted film. Remarkably unoriginal.

I would have preferred British director Yann Demange to be among the winners. His film '71 marks a terrific debut.

Set at the height of the Troubles in Ireland, it tells the story of a soldier who finds himself stranded alone on the wrong side of the Falls Road in Belfast.

It's a tense and visceral thriller which is well worth looking out for, as are many of the features in this year's adventurous festival programming.