Quentin Dupieux is a cinematic rascal. A troll, even. He delights in getting a reaction, and his impish films are more or less shaggy dog stories with just enough bite to get people riled up. So, in a way, my dislike of Full Phil, his bloated-in-more-ways-than-one farce, is exactly what …
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 …
The Difficult Bride is rare on two counts: it is a Bangladeshi film, and its director, Rubaiyat Hossain, is a woman. It is rarer still for being both incredibly supportive and furiously critical of its heroine, who is also both a traditional woman (getting married very young) and a modern …
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 …
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 …
Resident Evil is back again. After the Milla Jovovich-led action flicks, a forgettable trip to Raccoon City in 2021, and the disastrous Netflix series, the video game adaptation returns for a more somber and straight-laced outing. The franchise, which spawned over 30 games, follows survivors of a zombie outbreak triggered …
Does anyone have reverence for Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic? Scratch that – did anyone actively ask for a sequel to Practical Magic? Because, as far as I’m concerned, Susanne Bier’s Practical Magic 2 has no genuine justification for existing. It’s a toothless, unfunny, dull “comedy” that proves the detractors of …
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 …
Memorizu is an incredible movie about the power of the image and the way images keep us connected to each other. It also does this within the context of a three-generation family which loves and likes each other and wants very much to stay connected, even if each generation has …
It’s hard to believe that a movie which begins with a suicide pact is able to feel so heartwarming, but What Is To Come is about a woman moving from the lowest point of her life into – well, something else. This Israeli movie about the importance of never giving …
Before discussing Greenland 2: Migration, it’s best to take this review a step back in time. As in, taking viewers back to 2020, when Greenland was released during the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon release, the film’s core ideology was a Gerard Butler action movie that mostly succeeded. Yet in the pantheon …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a lot of the greatest artists of our time were dealing with mental health issues. It is a further truth that these mental illnesses are handled are not always handled well in film biopics. This can be even more sensitive when the artist …
The Singaporean director Nelson Yeo is a fascinating new name in the country’s younger generation. In 2023, he presented Dreaming & Dying (Hao jiu bu jian) at the Cineasti del Presente in Locarno. Two years later, he took his shorts Durian, Durian to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Through …
The title comes from a song; this isn’t really a Christmas movie. There are ups and downs in every career, but Pedro Almodóvar has been on a downswing lately. He commented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 that he is no longer interested in exploring human sexuality onscreen, though …
“You see how this looks, right?” rehearses Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), as he’s set to trap and apprehend a sexual predator who has been talking to a decoy for what will become the hit NBC television series To Catch a Predator. Throughout Lance Oppenheim’s depiction of the controversial “investigative journalist” …
Does anyone helpfully inform a family member that they are going “out” anymore? Maybe not, but Just an Illusion remembers when that was all the detail a parent required. This French movie about the run up to a boy’s bar mitzvah is the kind of gentle, low-stakes story the entire …