Movies

From practically the moment that it first hit theaters in June of 1977, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” John Boorman’s follow-up to William Friedkin’s enormously successful 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-seller, has been written off as one of...

A teenage boy talks to his machine, giving it commands.His first task begins innocently enough: “Stand on one foot,” the boy says. The machine obeys.His second task reveals a sinister edge: to target nearby onlookers. The boy orders his...

Fred Rogers’s song “What do you do with the Mad that you Feel” comes to mind when watching director Alexander Ullom’s existential road-trip nightmare, “It Ends.” In his song, Rogers articulates a need for vessels to place our rage,...

Every year I’m reminded that Locarno is a festival whose cinema is earned. This is my third straight year covering the festival that’s nestled amid picturesque Swiss mountains, which requires a trans-Atlantic flight into Milan, an extended train ride...

My final dispatch from Locarno is probably the most varied of the quartet that I’ve filed. Fittingly, it’s composed of four films, each from a different section of the festival. Collectively, they’re also the most likely to travel outside...

Rory Kennedy has followed up her searing documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” with an update, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing.” The first film focused on the two 737 crashes within five months of each other, killing 346 people....

Bold. Radical. Urgent. Those words could describe the last few years the Locarno Film Festival has screened its daring classic retrospectives. But they’ve never been felt more than in the latest edition curated by filmmaker, writer, and programmer Ehsan...