This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
Audiences who step into Colossal unaware of where Nacho Vigalondo is taking them will be nothing if not surprised.
The acting in Moonlight elevates the clichés of Barry Jenkins’s script into something approaching lived truth.
Justin Timberlake + The Tennesse Kids acknowledges that it takes a village to make a pop superstar.
Larraín’s Jackie is concerned with elucidating levels of performance in public and private spheres.
Salt and Fire’s final act is one of the strongest sustained sequences of cinema Werner Herzog has crafted in some time.
Damien Chazelle movie-musical pastiche is eager to please those who might vote it into the AMPAS pantheon.
The film isn’t a mesmerizing dream so much as the enervating, and dispiriting, conception of one.
Mascots’s rapid-fire gags result in a hit-or-miss pattern, ranging from the wickedly inspired to the overly broad.
The narrowed scope of Parker’s film recalls that of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
The film is a grab bag of visual punchlines and topical references capped with interchangeable music tracks.
McGregor smooths out American Pastoral’s eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.
Its self-consciously witty dialogue is meant to paper over gratuitous violence with a veneer of nonchalance.
The film’s story threads are of a tonal piece, all about striking poses as opposed to exploring humanity.
Voyage of Time is arguably the fullest expression of the cosmic themes that filmmaker Terrence Malick has explored for the last decade.
A Quiet Passion, like all of Terence Davies’s films, doesn’t lack for density of theme, allusion, and effect.
In the brutal response of authority, Bertrand Bonello offers a mirror image of the young radicals’ own actions.
At most festivals, such curious objects as The Ornithologist or The Human Surge would likely remain the exception rather than the rule, but then Locarno isn’t most festivals.
In the hands of a lesser director, all of The Ornithologist’s competing signs would likely shake themselves apart.
The festival’s triumph was Harmonia, a culture-hopping orchestra melodrama of paradoxically modest tone.
National tragedies are touchy podiums for artistic license, so it’s rare for a work that flexes its creativity responsibly.