Most Recent. In Festivals.

Festivals

Venice 2023: Hit Man review

★★★★☆ Tales of lone assassins and guns for hire are all based on urban myths. That’s the fact gleefully revealed in Richard Linklater’s latest crime comedy Hit Man, premiering at Venice this week. “Think about it,” asks the film’s protagonist Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), “is someone really going to risk the death penalty for a few thousand bucks.” It’s a good point.

Venice 2023: Green Border review

★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.

Venice 2023: Evil Does Not Exist review

★★★★☆ Once, when talking about Stanley Kubrick’s seminal Barry Lyndon, Martin Scorsese referred to the film’s “almost Japanese sense of time”. If one was to be cynical, one could snipe that it’s just a fancy way of saying a film is boring, but it goes to the point of how cinema makes the relativity of time visible and tangible to the audience.

Venice 2023: Priscilla review

★★★★☆ Following Baz Luhrmann’s deliriously over-the-top 2022 film Elvis comes Sofia Coppola’s decidedly more understated Priscilla. In fact, it’s the polar opposite of Elvis both aesthetically and emotionally. If Luhrmann captures the whole lotta shakin’, Coppola is more concerned with the end of lonely street for The King’s beleaguered wife.

Venice 2023: The Killer review

★★★☆☆ The perennial theme of the hitman is so of the zeitgeist at the moment that just in this latest Venice edition there are three films with the figure of the assassin as protagonist. Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft, Richard Linklater’s Hitman and now David Fincher’s The Killer join a culture neck-deep in John Wicks and Equalizers, Black Widows and Liam Neesons.

Venice 2023: Maestro review

★★★★☆ Bradley Cooper is back in the director’s chair for another musically-oriented film, a biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein entitled Maestro. And yet, this isn’t really a conventional biopic at all. Rather, it’s the portrait of a marriage between Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia (a luminous Carey Mulligan who takes the headline credit). His career is more in the background, yet occasionally comes to the fore with exhilarating force.

Planet Cinema announces winners of 2023 edition

Planet Cinema, the premiere online film awards competition, has proudly unveiled the winners of its 2023 inaugural round, spotlighting a slew of innovative independent filmmakers. Leading the roster with an impressive nine awards and 11 nominations is Oh My Night from the Netherlands, directed by the prodigious Isis Mihrimah Cabolet.

Lonely Wolf Film Festival 2023: Programme announced

Adrian Perez, founder of the Lonely Wolf International Film Festival, is elated to announce the official jury selection for its 2023 summer classifiers, now available on the official festival website, lonelywolffilmfest.com. The selection exemplifies the festival’s unwavering dedication to diversity and innovation in cinema.