ScreenAnarchy

Erin Vassilopoulos’ freewheeling second feature Destroy All Girls premiered in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente. The film follows Alex Martínez (Ani Mesa-Perez), who lives in Union City, New Jersey, where she works in a grocery store and helps care for her older brother Gabriel (Gil Perez-Abraham), a former competitive inline skater left severely disabled after an accident. Their relationship is tender but encumbered by circumstances neither sibling chose.

The Locarno Film Festival has become a home for Bertrand Mandico’s projects, and his latest, Roma Elastica, which premiered in Cannes’ Midnight Screenings, is no exception. Following Conann and Dragon Dilatation, Roma Elastica is an extravagant metatextual venture, as much a tribute to cinema’s golden age as a parody.

The final week of August brings unexpectedly strong genre offerings. Leading off we have Yeon Song-ho's newest, Colony, which our critic calls "another certified classic" from the Train to Busan director. We are also particularly interested in seeing Filipiana, which looks wonderfully odd, and has received extremely positive reviews from those who've seen it at festivals.

What does Spider-Man: Brand New Day have in common with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? Oddly enough, both films, released this summer -- one a queer slasher, the other a two-billion dollar grossing MCU entry -- use the exact same piece of visual symbolism to represent female dissociation.

Locarno’s Fuori Concorso section introduced Nikias Chryssos’ English-language debut Bloody Tennis, which pushes the brutality of sports competition to sadistic extremes. Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) arrives at a supposedly prestigious tennis academy hidden in southern Europe. She is welcomed by the academy’s mysterious director, portrayed by Bertrand Mandico regular Elina Löwensohn.

Darren Aronofsky has been celebrated at the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival with the Pardo d’Onore, recognizing a career willing to risk. Aronofsky gave a talk in Locarno reflecting on his career. His career began because he failed to enter a university sculpture class. His first feature acquired its visual identity because he was broke. Several of his most enduring films were considered commercially disastrous or nearly impossible to finance.

In case you missed it ScreenDaily reported this week that Jang Jae-hyun, director of the Korean horror hit Exhuma, will begin production on their next horror flick, Vampir. Jang Jae-hyun, the director of Korean blockbuster Exhuma, is set to begin filming horror Vampir this month with an all-star cast led by Yoo Ah-in. The star of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and last year’s box office hit The Match, Yoo will play a contract killer who tracks down a mysterious pagan group at the request of a clergyman.

If you need to see Na Hong-jin's sci-fi action thriller Hope "like now, right now", but do not want to wait until its theatrical release date, September 9th, we do not have an immediate solution for your insatiable need but NEON is trying to help.

Last month's big-budget blockbusters The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are still playing at multiplexes nationwide, but for those in search of something new and different, we have a few recommendations for you. First is a mind-bender that starts routinely and then steadily becomes extraordinary. You won't want to miss It Ends. I saw the film at SXSW last year and agree completely with our critic J Hurtado, whose review is linked below.

After an all-too-brief, three-year hiatus, the highly profitable Insidious series returns with its sixth, far-from-final entry, Insidious: Out of the Further. Co-created by James Wan and Leigh Whannell as a counter to the graphic, ultra-violent blood-and-gore Saw series they originated in 2004, Insidious and its follow-ups featured a more traditional, supernatural set-up.