The Circuit

The Guardian's David Cox didn't have a good time at Locarno.  In fact, sounds like it was downright awful:

However, it wasn't such forlorn masterpieces that imprinted themselves on my consciousness. Rather, it was the more numerous specimens of Euro-arthouse endeavour that were grotesquely, unbelievably bad. No, actually a good bit worse than that. In some of these proud festival entries, not the faintest prospect of entertainment, stimulation or enlightenment was to be discerned.

How could these abominations ever have got past their creator's first two seconds of deliberation, let alone won funding from a regional film board, a festival invitation and respectful applause from an audience of supposed cinephiles?

Variety's Derek Elley has Locarno's lineup, opening with the preem of Julian Jarrold's "Brideshead Revisited" (pictured) and closing with Solveig Anspach's comedy "Back Soon."

In between, eight more world preems unspool in the 7,000-seat Piazza. They include Austrian slasher pic "Dead in 3 Days 2," by Andreas Prochaska; French comedy "La Fille de Monaco," by Anne Fontaine; Julian Temple's film opera "The Eternity Man," shot in Sydney; 1938 Nazi mountaineering drama "North Face," with Benno Fuermann; and "Lesson 21," the English-language helming debut of Italian scribe Alessandro Baricco, starring Noah Taylor and John Hurt.

Flying the Stars and Stripes in the 7,000-seat Piazza will be the world preem of the Weinstein Co.'s Vikings-meet-an-alien actioner "Outlander"; Sundance comedy "Choke," screening in tribute to thesp Anjelica Huston, this year's Excellence Award recipient; and WB's "Chaos Theory," with Ryan Reynolds and Emily Mortimer.

Full lineup here.