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Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 Riga coverage. Toxic is now streaming on Mubi.

It’s a shame Toxic wasn’t around for the recent excretions of body-horror discourse. Saulė Bliuvaitė’s debut feature, winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, does at least as much to turn the stomach with its tablet of tapeworm eggs than either of The Substance or A Different Man‘s Faustian cures. The rub in Bliuvaitė’s film is that such a pill exists, if only for those willing to wade onto the dark web––even Googling its side effects, as the protagonist discovers, should be done with some degree of caution. The anatomical anxieties and queasy professional demands that create a market for such horrors are the subject of Bliuvaitė’s film, which follows two teenage girls living in the shadow of a Lithuanian...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will debut 17 world premieres, including new works by Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, as part of its 2024 competition program. This year’s event runs from August 7 – 17.

The festival announced its competition lineups this morning. The Hong Sang-soo feature is titled Suyoocheon (By The Stream) and stars Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee. The Wang Bing feature is a France, Luxembourg, and Netherlands co-production titled Hard Times. Scroll down to see the full Locarno competition lineup, which also includes new titles from Ben Rivers, Mar Coll, and Christoph Hochhäusler.

The festival today also announced that French acting veterans Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet will receive the event’s honorary Excellence Award Davide Campari at the opening ceremony on August 7. Previous recipients of the award include Riz Ahmed and Aaron Taylor Johnson.

Locarno’s separate Piazza Grande lineup features 18 titles, including Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig,...

Titas Laucius: 'My closest friends say that I'm 70 years old, in my head, in my soul. I really like the feeling of nostalgia and I wanted to get this feeling' Photo: Courtesy of Poff Titas Laucius shows a knack for absurdist comedy in his very funny first feature Parade, which sees a woman, Migle (Rasa Samuolyte) become embroiled in Catholic bureaucracy as she tries to help her long-ago divorced ex (Giedrius Savickas) annul their marriage in the eyes of the church, while also facing the more immediate problem of her daughter (Barbora Bareikyte) quitting the school orchestra she conducts. In addition to his own film, which had its world premiere in the First Feature Competition at Tallinn Black Nights, he also co-wrote horror film Pensive, which had its premiere in the festival’s Baltic Competition strand. We caught up with the director in Tallinn to chat to him about comedy,...