Elements of “Oliver Twist” are given a West African update in “Our Time Will Come,” an atmospheric and emotionally absorbing feature debut from writer-director Amartei Armar, who thankfully cares too much for his orphaned characters to torture them (and us) with unending miserabilism. Beginning as a road trip, then shifting to a punishing vision of hardscrabble
The family living in the house that “Rehmat” uses as Rashid Ali’s ancestral home lost a son to a drug overdose shortly after Indian filmmaker Gurvinder Singh and his crew first met them. Singh tells Variety, “The actual family that lives there lost their 19-year-old son after we met them for the first time. When
Chilean duo Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña made a dream nightmare debut with “The Wolf House,” a stop-motion fantasy that turned heads both with its wholly original design — incorporating claymation, puppetry and papier-mâché to palpably handmade but immersively surreal effect — and its trajectory from a seemingly juvenile storybook premise to very grownup recesses
Emerging Italian director Giovanni Tortorici, whose feature debut “Diciannove” made a splash last year after launcing from the Venice Horizons section, is in competition at the Locarno Film Festival with his followup, “Ketticè,” a coming-of-age drama set in 2012 Palermo, featuring Monica Bellucci who is among the film’s few professional actors. “Ketticè” explores the dynamics between
Olivia Wilde said she has become “so much more romantic” because of “The Invite.” “It’s melted the cynic out of me,” she said at Locarno. “I have spoken to people who have been through so much with their partners, and people have been in marriages for 40, 50, 60 years. They told me it was
Monica Bellucci’s sneer is a thing of wonder, so why have so few directors used it properly? When allowed full rein to her sense of irony, as given her by Giovanni Tortorici in “Ketticè,” Bellucci has few equals in her ability to project self-aware drama queen with just the right dose of camp icon. Hers
