Opening with a screening of the Julianne Moore romantic drama vehicle “Gloria Bell”, which also stars John Turturro, the Luxembourg City Film Festival programme for 2019 features a slew of famous names. The closing film, for instance, is Harmony Korine’s hugely anticipated stoner drama “The Beach Bum” starring Matthew McConaughey. In between, the festival will screen Julian Schnabel’s Van Gogh biopic “At Eternity’s Gate”, for which Willem Defoe is nominated as best actor at the Academy Awards and Neil Jordan’s stalker thriller “Greta” starring Chloë Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert as well as Peter Strickland’s new dive into the weird and wonderful world of 70s style genre movies with the luscious “In Fabric”.

Other English-language films being screened at the festival include the latest offering by Ben Wheatley, “Happy New Year, Colin Burstead” in which the director of “Sightseers” and “High Rise” has made what The Economist thinks could be the “first great Brexit film”.

The line-up for the official competition includes films from around the world, among them a British feature by photographer Richard Billingham. “Ray & Liz” is a bleak but fascinating film about the artist’s 1980s childhood in the West Midlands and features fictional portrayals of the parents he so vividly captured in his book “Ray’s a Laugh”. The other English-language film up for the festival’s main prize is Canadian small-town escape drama “Firecrackers”.

But the other official competition films will be shown with English subtitles. They include Turkish film “The Announcement” about a military coup, Mexican tribal drug crime thriller “Birds of passage”, Russian rural drama “The Man Who Surprised Everyone” about a forest ranger with terminal illness, Argentine corruption drama “Rojo” set in the 1970s, Greek mystery “The Waiter”, historical Vietnamese tangled romance “The Third Wife”, contemporary German thriller “The Ground Beneath My Feet” and Spanish political thriller “El Reino”.

As usual, the festival also has programmed an interesting documentary competition with films whose subjects range from war reporting in Syria in “Still Recording” to a young Ukrainian female footballer struggling to raise a family in “Home Games” and an Australian ghost hunter with a dark past in “Ghosthunter”.

Of course, Luxembourg film is also well represented at the festival with a slew of new features films and an evening of shorts. Among the most anticipated co-productions are Israeli dark comedy “Tel Aviv On Fire” about a border guard giving script advice to a soap opera director. Thrilling South African feminist Western “Flatland” and fascinating documentary by “California Dreaming”, about a semi-abandoned desert ghost town are also on the bill.

The 10-day festival is packed with other special screenings, events and workshops. For the full programme, visit the festival website.

During the festival, Delano will pick a film of the day as a guide to readers.