Review: "Two Seasons, Two Strangers" wins Locarno

by Cláudio Alves

Berlin, Cannes, and Venice are considered the major European film festivals, holding on to a level of world renown rarely afforded to such institutions. While not meaning to question their importance, it's worth noting that they are far from the only celebrations of cinema happening around the Old Continent, nor are they the ones most welcoming to the challenging and the avant-garde. Rotterdam has them beat on that account, not to mention more non-fiction-focused events and, of course, the Locarno Film Festival. With their propensity for honoring cineastes like Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, and Wang Bing, the Swiss fest will always struggle to capture the attention of more conventional-minded cinephiles, but they deserve some love. Indeed, it's about time we counted the Golden Leopard on par with the Bear, the Palme, the Lion. 

This year's victor was announced last weekend, as the festivities drew to a close at Piazza Grande, making Shô Miyake the fifth Japanese filmmaker to take Locarno's highest prize. And after all that talk about audacious artistry, it's worth noting that Two Seasons, Two Strangers is hardly radical. Nevertheless, it makes for a formally rigorous, moving, occasionally humorous look at the toll of loneliness through a graceful feat of mise en abyme…

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Cannes Diary 06: "Sirât" derails expectations

by Elisa Giudici

Film festivals remain the last true sanctuary for an endangered species of film experience: going in cold. Armed with little more than a title, director, an evocative still, or a whisper of plot, you surrender to the unknown. The magic of Sirât is that even this meager intel offers no real map for the territory director Oliver Laxe is about to unveil; not even the most seasoned cinephile will be able to predict the journey ahead. The bittersweet truth, however, is that in describing this film, I am surely chronicling an experience that will be increasingly hard to replicate. Like its protagonists, Esteban and Luis, you must lose yourself in Sirât, allowing the unexpected to detonate within you. But can such a pure encounter survive an age where every narrative tremor is seismically registered and dissected online mere hours after a world premiere?

Nevertheless, I'll endeavor to convey the thrill of what has been, for me, the most electrifying jolt in this year's competition...

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Review: "The Fall Guy" Starts Summer Off Right

by Christopher James

It’s funny that a movie that’s a love letter to the unsung heroes behind our favorite movies succeeds mostly due to the star wattage of two A-Listers. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are a delight to watch in the otherwise sweet, but standard, action-romance-comedy The Fall Guy. Not every ingredient works, but you might miss it thanks to the commitment and charm of Gosling and Blunt. The Fall Guy is a strong way to kick off summer movie blockbuster season...

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Doc Corner: Wiseman and McQueen's duelling 4-hour epics

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Like any sane and rational person, I devoted eight precious hours of my festive season to watching the two (yes, two) four-hour documentaries that have been offered up by famous directors. Length notwithstanding, the very idea of new films by Frederick Wiseman and Steve McQueen should be hard to pass up most of the time and so we have Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros and Occupied City, two very different movies that use their epic lengths to differing effect. Some better than others.

Although Wiseman’s familiarity with such a runtime makes his film the perhaps more naturally more successful, McQueen at least has enough ideas to make his latest work of non-fiction to (somewhat) keep up with the pace set by the chefs of three supreme eateries in France. Although it becomes quite clear that length, in this case, is not equal.

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168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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