Festivals

★★★☆☆ Showing Out of Competition at Venice, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond goes behind the scenes on the shooting of Miloš Forman’s Man on the Moon, and reveals how Jim Carrey’s portrayal of Andy Kaufman was partly a tribute to the subject and partly flat-out insanity.Kaufman was as much a performance artist as a…

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★☆☆☆☆ Sebastiano Riso flies the Italian flag on the Lido with his new film Una Famiglia, a claustrophobic, scuzzy drama about a couple engaged in the illicit trade of selling babies. It’s a dour, monotonous, predictable and dull effort that doesn’t deserve its place in competition.We first spot Maria (Micaela Ramazzotti) and Vincenzo (French singer…

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★★★☆☆ When a factory owner is murdered by an ex-employee the guilt appears certain and the case cut and dried. However, an ambitious lawyer soon discovers that there are layers of guilt and ends up wondering who can judge who in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder.Japanese auteur and festival favourite Kore-eda has made his reputation…

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★★☆☆☆ In the black comedy Suburbicon, George Clooney takes us to the small town, white bread America that Donald Trump wants to MAGA us back to and uncovers that it wasn’t as great as all that. It joins the race for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.George Clooney hit the ground running…

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★★★☆☆ Three middle-aged siblings gather after their father suffers a stroke in The House By the Sea, a beautifully observed ensemble piece from French director Robert Guédiguian which today entered the competition for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.“Family isn’t a word. It’s a sentence,” ran the tagline to Wes Anderson’s The…

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★★★★☆ War, grief and family are the themes of Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot, which joins the race for the Golden Lion at the 74th Venice Film Festival. It’s a daring and bold film, highly-stylised and imaginative, portraying an Israeli family’s reaction to bad news from the army.Samuel Maoz was in his late forties when he made…

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★★★★☆ Fans of Bone Tomahawk won’t be disappointed with director S. Craig Zahler’s bone-crushing, face-smashing, slow-burning genre mash-up Brawl in Cell Block 99. It stomped onto the Lido with a swagger and boasts a thumpingly good performance from Vince Vaughn.Bone Tomahawk was a bold debut. Half-John Ford Western, half-Ruggero Deodato gore-fest. Brawl on Cell Block…

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★★☆☆☆ British director Andrew Haigh gallops onto the Venice Lido with Lean on Pete, an equine coming-of-ager about a young boy and his horse. An adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s novel, Haigh shifts from his arthouse roots of Weekend and 45 Years to full-blown Americana. Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) is a 15-year-old boy living in Portland,…

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★★★★☆ Premiering at Venice, Gilles Bourdos’ Endangered Species plays like a French Riviera version of Robert Altman’s Shortcuts. It’s a deliciously shot vivisection of family life via three intertwining tales based on the short stories of American writer Richard Bausch.We open with a thrilling ride through the night as a group of young people on…

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★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Horizons sidebar at Venice, Jason Raftopoulos’ debut film West of Sunshine is a day in the life of Jim (Damien Hill), an inveterate gambler who somehow has to come up with the money to see off his bookie while at the same time looking after his son.Gamblers, like alcoholics, are a…

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