★★☆☆☆ Italian writer-director Francesca Comencini adapts her own fraught, hysterical novel for the big screen in Stories of Love that Cannot Belong to this World, which remains as fraught, hysterical and unbearable as her protagonist – even via a new medium.Lucia Mascino plays Claudia, a literature professor who lives in Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Premiering at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, Samuel Jouy’s feature debut Sparring sees Mathieu Kassovitz star as an ageing slugger in a boxing movie which mixes up the below the belt pounding of Fat City with the emotional jabs of The Champ.Steve (Kassovitz) is a veteran boxer coming Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Multiple New York stories interlace in Salt Lake City-born director Dustin Guy Defa’s Locarno 2017 select Person to Person, an ensemble piece which hails back to early John Sayles and Jim Jarmusch for inspiration but doesn’t quite live up to its heavyweight influences.Bene (Bene Coopersmith) gets a call about Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A beguiling, baffling and occasionally beautiful work which premiered at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners is a genre-hopping tale of class, race, sexuality and werewolves in modern day São Paulo.Clara (Isabél Zuaa) goes for a job interview as a nanny for Continue Reading