★★★★★ Greek weird wave director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) hits his stride with his strangest yet most deeply satisfying comedy fable yet, Poor Things. This exhilarating mix of Fanny Hill and Frankenstein is adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name.
★★★★☆ Following Agnieszka Holland’s land-bound refugee tale Green Border earlier this week, Matteo Garrone’s new film Io Capitano departs geographically further south and takes its characters on an epic journey which involves land and sea. But its direction and terrain are not the only difference here.
★★★★☆ The ‘multiverse’ is one of the worst concepts to enter storytelling since Victoria Principal woke up in Dallas and discovered it had all been a dream. And so it’s weird to find yourself in a universe where the concept finally gets a decent cinematic treatment in Timm Kröger’s The Theory of Everything, not to be confused with Eddie Redmayne’s black hole.
★★★★☆ 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.
★★★★☆ 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.
★★★★☆ 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.
★★★★☆ 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.
★★★☆☆ 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.
★★★★☆ 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, 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.
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.