One week into the 65th edition of the Berlin film festival, I’d like to tell you that the hottest ticket in town is for a hitherto under-the-radar world cinema sugar rush that has taken the competition by storm, or for a triumphant return by an established master, or even for the redemption-seeking director’s cut of 54, the maligned disco-era odyssey from 1998 – the kind of curio that only the Berlinale programmers, among their European festival peers, have the combination of earnest queerness and perverse humour to include.

More predictably, however, it’s the world premiere of Fifty Shades of Grey, Berlin’s hosting of which demonstrates roughly the same playful virtues. There’s a slight sense of sheepishness, however, to the inclusion of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s not-half-bad sexcapade in the same lineup as new works by Terrence Malick and Jafar Panahi. With only one public screening and no press conference – fuelling gleeful rumours that stars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson can barely tolerate each other off-camera – it’s almost as if, grateful as he is for the added media presence, festival director Dieter Kosslick would rather audiences saw something else.

Something like, for example, Andrew Haigh’s extraordinary 45 Years – which, at the time of writing, is unlikely to be surpassed as this critic’s film of the festival. An exquisitely wrought, ineffably tender study of a pension-age marriage in silently dignified crisis, it even has Fifty Shades trumped for the fest’s most memorable sex scene: Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay enact the pained pauses and pressures of older intercourse with a specificity few actors, and fewer films, dare. This is the kind of poetic authenticity to be expected from Haigh, recently kept busy on the HBO drama Looking, and here making his first feature since 2011’s lovely gay romance Weekend.

One might not have known, however, that he had such piercing narrative instincts in him: liberally adapted from a short story by David Constantine, this tale of a Norfolk couple unfurling long-held secrets on the eve of their 45th wedding anniversary proceeds with the taut, tense discipline of a domestic thriller. Critical revelations emerge without words, as the storied faces of Haigh’s tremendous leads do the heavy lifting. Anyone who thought François Ozon’s Under the Sand would remain Rampling’s career summit has another thing coming; it would be a shock if her devastating turn doesn’t win best actress from Darren Aronofsky’s jury, and a shame if we aren’t talking about her Oscar chances this time next year.

Screening on the first night of the competition, Haigh’s film was a welcome palate cleanser following the curdled Europudding of the festival opener, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s self-defeatingly titled Arctic saga Nobody Wants the Night, with a never-worse Juliette Binoche as headstrong American explorer Josephine Peary and Japanese star Rinko Kikuchi as, er, an Inuit. Ethnically blind casting is, believe it or not, among the least of this icebound bore’s problems; after bucking the opening-night curse with last year’s curtain-raiser, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Berlin is back on form, so to speak.

Happily, Coixet’s folly has also remained the low point of a festival otherwise richer than usual with unforeseen discoveries and promise-fulfilling attractions. After the relative uplift of his Oscar-nominated No, Chilean provocateur Pablo Larrain returned on imperiously brutal form with The Club, a scorching, semi-comic confrontation of the Catholic church that leaves last year’s Calvary for dust. Slowly planting bitter seeds of bad faith for its first hour, before culminating in a violent, hellish climax, it’s stunning in the manner of a hammer to the head.

More immediately propulsive was the fest’s best homegrown offering: Sebastian Schipper’s after-hours romance turned unlikely heist thriller Victoria, which follows a troupe of young nightclubbers on a mad, off-the-cuff exploit through the streets of central Berlin – all in the space of one unbroken, vertigo-inducing, 135-minute take. It’s a logistically mind-boggling stunt, garnished with surprising human stakes, that rather takes the shine off Birdman – which, after all, only faked its whizzy technical conceit.

Not that artifice is a debit in itself, as proven by Mr Holmes, Bill Condon’s endearingly dotty shaggy-dog envisioning of Sherlock’s later years – elevated by Ian McKellen in very fine fettle – or, more substantially, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi. The third and most purely enjoyable of the Iranian director’s self-reflexive protest films made in the wake of his 2010 house arrest, this shot-from-the-dashboard road movie finds Panahi masquerading as a cab driver, ferrying a disparate assortment of fares – a jovial DVD bootlegger, a politically impassioned schoolteacher, Panahi’s own precocious niece – through the chaotic streets of Tehran. The emerging discourse is lively and many-layered, defending both personal and national liberties.

Of course, no festival is without its elevated auteur stumbles, and this year yielded none loftier (or waftier) than Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, a dismayingly vapid, misogynistic journey into a Hollywood underbelly on which the reclusive auteur may not be the greatest authority. Taking the hushed New Age-y incantations that marked The Tree of Life to self-parodic levels, this glisteningly shot guff tested the patience of even this To The Wonder defender.

If nothing else, it had more verve than two flaccid disappointments from local legends. Wim Wenders’s pulse-free grief melodrama Every Thing Will Be Fine was notable only for its peculiar application of state-of-the-art 3D to therapy-speak-ridden conversations, while Werner Herzog’s flatly conventional, Nicole Kidman-starring Gertrude Bell biopic Queen of the Desert already seems to have been collectively forgotten by the Potsdamer Platz crowd. Both films (plus another in the secondary Panorama section) star James Franco, who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being the most ubiquitous star mascot for this year’s festival, without one good film to show for it.

Another Desert refugee, Robert Pattinson, had better luck with his festival alternate, deftly playing celebrity photographer Dennis Stock in Anton Corbijn’s smart, lushly styled Life, a sexually tinged reading of Stock’s career-enhancing friendship with James Dean. As Dean, Dane DeHaan charges the film with a witty, inspired interpretation of an icon on the rise, though it was a fetchingly bearded Pattinson – arguably a risen icon, to judge by the red carpet squeals – that the crowds turned out to see. Berlin knows the value of star power, even as the nose-dripping February freeze keeps it from Croisette levels of glamour; the more challenging reaches of its programme serve as the salt beneath the celebrity snowfall.