Quentin Dupieux is not only an electronic musician (who earned a UK number one back in 1999) but also the finest surrealist filmmaker of our times. To say his movies are unpredictable, illogical, ridiculous and violent is an understatement. But their wildness and their misbehaviour has the feel of ordinary …
It was notable at this year’s Cannes how many movies re-examined France and the Second World War. It’s been obvious for some years now how the French film industry has been retelling its own stories and creating blockbusters for home audiences without caring too much about how they’ll land overseas. …
The director Sebastian Brameshuber presents his new film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section. London portrays the life of a seventy-two-year-old man, Bobby Sommer, who drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, in Austria. He gives lifts to people traveling to these cities and he …
For a movie about the limits of memory, Blue Heron made the bad decision to be from the point of the youngest family member. That’s to say, the person present with the most limited understanding of what was happening while it was happening. The fact that the young daughter, Sasha …
Dollars to donuts director Rodrigo Sorogoyen was not happy to learn about Sentimental Value. Its brief outline is the same to that of The Beloved – volatile director tries to reconnect with his daughter by working with her on a movie – but of course Sentimental Value came out last …
The most shocking thing in Parallel Tales is Isabelle Huppert lighting a cigarette with a toaster. There’s a sense of unpredictability in that one moment that the rest of Parallel Tales was aiming for and somehow didn’t achieve. It’s hard to say why it falls so flat, since there is …
In the rich history of Brazilian filmmaking, animation is a medium that does not have as profound a filmography as others. Before the 2000s, there were very few examples, like Meow by Marcos Magalhães and Frankenstein Punk by Cao Hamburger and Eliana Fonseca. However, in the 2000s, the animation sector …
Emmanuel Marre won the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for A Man of His Time aka Notre Salut, because it does the impossible: it is a comedy about the slide into fascism. But the film is clearly of personal as well as professional importance to Mr. …
One of the most culturally talked-about moments of 2026 was the Super Bowl Halftime Show performed by Bad Bunny. Despite the political opposition from the far-right groups, who considered his choice as non-American (even if Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States), the fifteen-minute show was a success. …
The end credits confirm genAI was used for parts of Titanic Ocean. This is a disgraceful choice by writer-director Konstantina Kotzamani because it insults all the hard work of her cast and crews. This is especially unforgivable because the young actresses had to do a large amount of underwater work …
The oeuvre of Denis Côté is uncomfortable, answerless. His multiple works approach the mundane, the psyche, leaning towards complicated places. Paul, his latest film, is a documentary on a simp, a man who pleasures himself through humiliation from women. Now, he returns to the Locarno Film Festival with an intriguing …
French family film Words of Love aka Quelques Mots d’Amour is about a tough but ordinary topic: how a child comes to terms with the fact the family they have is not the family they want. It features a single professional actor, Hafsia Herzi, as Erika the mother. All the others …
In 2018, the Chilean duo Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña made a splash with their creepy animated film, La Casa Lobo (The Wolf House). It became a sensation, especially during the pandemic, even leading to their invitation to contribute to Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid. Two years ago, their sophomore …
You don’t realise how tough it is to make a good documentary until you see ones which fall short. For a documentary to succeed, it needs to back up its assertions in ways which will stand up in court, access to the people who will give you that backup, and …
Following the trend of selecting young filmmakers in the competition, as with Nelson Yeo’s The House on the Moon, Locarno also presented Lê Bảo’s Hearing (Thính Giác) in the main section. The project is a continuation of his works involving the senses; he released Scent (Mùi) in 2014, and Taste …
In 2018, the Spanish director Meritxell Colell Aparicio presented Con el viento (Facing the Wind), which played at the Berlinale Forum section. Four years later, she presented Dúo at the Málaga Film Festival. Now, she has been upgraded to the Locarno Film Festival competition with her latest work, Far From …
Writer-director Katharina Rivilis is clearly telling an personal story with I’ll Be Gone in June, an observant film about one German girl’s year as an exchange student in New Mexico. (How personal? According to the press notes some of the costumes are her own clothes from the time.) The southwestern …
The Brazilian experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz is probably best known for her 2022 project É Noite na América (It is Night in America). The project premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, and she has now returned to it with Fire Flower (Hanabi). Shot over the last ten years, her latest …
It’s rare that the context of a movie’s making is as important to appreciating it as that of A Girl’s Story. It’s not only that the writer whose story has been adapted, Annie Ernaux, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. Ms. Ernaux has spent her life documenting, well, …
In the recent history of the Brazilian society, despite the majority in numbers, the Black population is a minority economically. This fact reflects the hundreds of years of slavery that exploited those coming from the African continent, and after their freedom, led them to the margins of the society. One …