★★★☆☆ Fans of Game of Thrones will be used to seeing Carice van Houten as a sexually powerful witch whose actions frequently cross moral lines, but her new film in which she stars with Marwan Kenzari, last seen in Guy...
★★★☆☆ A young girl is accused of a terrible crime and her family must come to terms with how much they really know about her in Stéphane Demoustier’s sober courtroom drama The Girl with a Bracelet, which premiered at Locarno....
With the 71st Locarno Film Festival coming to a close at the weekend and the prizes awarded, our contributor John Bleasdale notes some of the highs and lows of Swiss based celebration of film. There were many strong independent and...
The 71st Locarno Film Festival came to a close today and the awards have been announced. The top prize was taken by Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined, a dreamlike noir about a policeman searching Singapore for missing migrant worker....
One of the oldest European film festivals, Locarno celebrates its 71st edition with a vibrant programme of new films featuring 13 world premieres. Artistic director Carlo Chatrain curates his final festival before moving on to take over the reins of...
★★★☆☆ Isabelle Huppert stars as a beleaguered French science teacher who, following a lightning strike, sporadically transforms into a fire lady. Serge Bozon’s absurdist revision of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale has some wonderful moments but doesn’t quite je kill it.Madame...
★★★★☆ A young couple Ji-young (Kim Sae-byeok) and Su-hyeon (Cho Hyun-chul) reach a decisive moment in their lives in South Korean Kim Dae-hwan’s impressive slow-burner The First Lap, which received its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival last...
★★☆☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★☆☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ Hollywood is never happier than when looking at Hollywood. From the polished, ironic magnificence of The Player to the lo-fi grunge of The Canyons, the starry side of LA has swallowed its own tail on numerous occasions, much to...
★★☆☆☆ When Jacques Blanchot (Vincent Macaigne) loses everything – his wife, his son, his house – he finds comfort first in buying a dog, before increasingly behaving like one. Receiving its world premiere at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival,...
★★☆☆☆ Entering the strange world of bodybuilders, Denis Côté’s documentary A Skin So Soft offers a meditative – if at times obtuse – take that is not so much Pumping Iron as Waiting for Glutes. “It can take years to...
★★★★☆ Alexander Fehling and Bérénice Bejo play a couple trying to make their own personal European Union work against the stunning backdrop of the Italian Dolomites in German director Jan Zabeil’s new thriller Three Peaks.Aaron (Fehling) and Lea (Bejo) are...