Locarno Film Festival — A–Z of films

All The Fires is a film built out of contradictions from which meaning gradually emerges.

Hüller has always been an unfussy actress, who allows a character's flaws to shine out in interesting ways.

Vlagopoulou’s performance has a raw intensity that you don’t dare question, less still look away from.

In general, the film is better in terms of its physical surfaces than its emotional depths.

Writer-director Romain de Saint-Blanquat sets the story in an in-between space, reflecting the threshold Françoise stands upon, but despite her intentions, seems hesitant to cross.

Scott surpasses himself. The visual quality of the action sequences is exceptional.

The vibrancy of childhood skips from the screen.

There's a deep irony in Amir being constantly told what to do by the quasi-authority figure of the sat nav while offering up a means of escape to the city's youth that doesn't rely on roads to take them there.

Jude masterfully keeps the audience attached to the screen for almost three hours without relying on heightened tensions or conventional plot twists.

What’s missing in most folk horror tales –and indeed in many otherwise diligent historical films – is an understanding of the different perspectives of people with pre-enlightenment beliefs. It’s here that writer Karpala truly triumphs.

The end product might not feature too many surprises, but the dialogue is occasionally dazzling and leads to many poignant moments.

Gummo rewards repeated viewings like little else; there is so much to be gleaned from every vignette and even more from the film as a whole.

Sometimes the rumblings are of the Shaw Brothers, at others the Marx Brothers.

Lousy Carter provides pleasant enough distraction in the moment but gives viewers very little to take away.

Rap is a rapid-fire art form, washing you in a torrent of thoughts, the beat carrying you through, and Tariq's film has a similar approach, but there are so many ideas being fired out that it's no wonder it sometimes struggles to retain its rhythm.

There are extreme and moderate views here, which recall many a social media debate about everything from slavery street names to flags.

Will anyone see this who wouldn't anyway?

What really drives the film is the quietly powerful central performance.

While there is much to admire about Spring Breakers in terms of visual aesthetic and directorial style, those aspects are undermined by a run of the mill narrative not nearly as subversive as it appears to want to be.

More poem than conventional narrative, Sweet Dreams explores the tropes of the colonial fable with a romantic eye and a sharp wit.

Its slow, observational style allows us to get much closer to the key figures and explore aspects of motive which are commonly lost.

This is joyful, beautiful, up-lifting - and bleak too, a clarion call to direct climate action at the personal and the political levels.

This may be, ironically, rather stagey, but for all its artificiality and slightness, it packs an emotional punch.