No deer longs for the hunter’s arrow, and no art designed to maintain the status quo is ever as good as it thinks it is. Say what you will about Luca Guadagnino, he has made three solid movies in the last eighteen months, a level of career output rarely seen since …
After copping the Pardi di Domani best direction award for his short film Making Babies (Faire un enfant) in 2023, Canadian screenwriter and actor Éric K. Boulianne made his return to the Locarno Film Festival for his feature directorial debut Follies (Folichonneries), which just had its world premiere in the …
Playing out of competition at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, Nova ‘78, from the directing duo of Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, functions both as a moving paean to the enduring greatness of eminent writer and iconoclast William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and an electrifying snapshot of a bygone period of …
There are other directors who are better, there are others who are more stylish, but there is no director anywhere in the world who is more interesting than Werner Herzog. He was once shot on camera during an interview for British television and actually called the wound “insignificant” as the …
In the following effort for the Croatian director Hana Jušić, she presents God Will Not Help in the Concorso Internazionale of the 2025 Locarno Film Festival. Following her debut at the Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori with Quit Staring at My Plate, the Croatian author takes a look at the …
The experimental director and visual artist Ben Rivers is a respected name in the film festival circuit. The director debuts his works in principal events, such as the Locarno Film Festival, where he premiered his 2024 film Bogancloch and his new work, Mare’s Nest, both in the Concorso Internazionale. In …
In her fourth directorial effort, the Serbian director Ivana Mladenović returns to the Locarno Film Festival, where she premiered her 2019 film Ivana the Terrible, now with Sorella di Clausura. The director, who currently resides in Romania, presents a story about a wasted Romanian talent – someone who never reached …
The Austrian director Elsa Kremser and the German director Levin Peter are known for their documentaries Space Dogs and Dreaming Dogs, which approach the reality of stray dogs in Moscow. In Kremser’s fiction debut, they present White Snail, a romantic drama set in Belarus. The film narrates the story of …
The Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý was one of the highlights of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival with his film Viet and Nam. The film had an extensive festival season, including a main slate slot in the New York Film Festival and a Wavelength selection in the Toronto International Film …
A competitive entry in the Filmmakers of the Present program of the Locarno Film Festival’s 78th edition, Fantasy, the feature directorial debut from Slovenian musician and director Kukla, at times credited as Katarina Bogdanović, is a hypnotic, surreal expansion of the story the filmmaker initially sketched in her award-winning short …
There has been a disturbing recent trend of setting stories in the afterlife, with the position that growth and change is really only possible after you are dead. This removes our agency, and posits that our situation is more important than our free will. This is especially aggravating when you …
Frankenstein is a masterpiece, an instant classic and a complete and utter triumph. It sticks very close to the source material while managing to be something fresh and new, it maintains its historic setting while never forgetting the current moment, and it all hangs on two extraordinary central performances that …
An incommunicable solitude pulsates at the heart of Tabi to Hibi — also titled Two Seasons, Two Strangers — the bifurcated drama from Japanese writer-director Shô Miyake, who just won a career-defining Pardo d’Oro (Golden Leopard) for the movie, following its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale section of this …
Premiering in the Filmmakers of the Present competition of the recently concluded Locarno Film Festival, A Balcony in Limoges, French writer-director Jérôme Reybaud’s feature follow-up to his debut 4 Days in France (2016), is the kind of movie that one might describe as deceptive, or unforeseen at the very least, …
I texted a friend that I’d just seen a movie about how hard it is to be George Clooney and he immediately suggested we show Jay Kelly to every Palestinian. Perhaps there would be less sarcasm about world-famous middle-aged white male American millionaires in life crisis if there was any …
Naomi Kawase is arguably the most well-known Japanese female director internationally. Previously, she competed in the Festival de Cannes competition five times with Shara in 2003, The Mourning Forest in 2007, Hanezu in 2011, Still the Water in 2014, and Radiance in 2017. Her 2020 feature, True Mothers, appeared on …
The Swiss director Fabrice Aragno is known for his collaborations with the cinematic genius Jean-Luc Godard. He worked as a cinematographer in Godard’s films ” Film Socialisme, Goodbye to Language, and Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars. He produced Godard’s last Cannes competition entry, The Book …
The young South Korean filmmaker Syeyoung Park is already very prolific at a youthful age. Since 2020, he has released five feature films: Love (between) Pickle in 2020, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra in 2022, Base Station in 2024, I’d Like That Corner Seat Over There, and The Fin in 2025. The …
From the title of Blue Film, writer and director Elliott Tuttle’s feature debut suggests titillation. This unbelievably challenging work, however, is something far more slippery, enigmatic, and subversive than simple thrills within the milieu of modern sex work. Indeed, the on-screen sex scenes are brief and shot with a curious …
Toronto-based filmmaker Grace Glowicki is no stranger to the bizarre. Recently she, along with husband Ben Petrie, starred in the schlocky, romantic gothic horror Honey Bunch which premiered at Berlin in 2025. Her feature debut, Tito, was an offbeat comedy where she herself played an agoraphobic man whose world is …