Film Reviews & More
★★★★☆ 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.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
In what has to be one of the crazier award ceremonies to grace the Venice Lido on its 76th edition, Todd Phillips’ Joker took home this year’s Golden Lion in a move guaranteed to provoke a flood of hot takes, an avalanche of think pieces and further lubrication for Oscars season.
★★★★☆ Suzhou River director Lou Ye’s wartime espionage thriller Saturday Fiction starts as a mysterious murky mess and resolves itself into a bullet-riddled noir. We first meet Jean Yu (Gong Li) in Shanghai circa 1937 as she is rehearsing a play with director/lead actor Tan Na (Mark Chao).
★★★★☆ Tiago Guedes’ latest offering The Domain dissects a wealthy Portuguese family in the second half of the 20th century as a libertarian young patriarch struggles with duty, family, politics and his own personal destructive freedom.
★★★☆☆ “All hail the king,” proclaim the posters dotted around the Venice Lido. The story of Henry V gets a revisionist, Netflix-backed interpretation from Animal Kingdom director David Michôd as a floppy-haired Timothée Chalamet goes boldly into the breach once more in Venice out-of-competition offering The King.
★★★☆☆ Do you remember when Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking? That was approximately five films and two television series ago. There’s a looseness to his new Netflix-bound Panama Papers takedown The Laundromat that, for both better or worse, smacks of an OAP not giving a tinker’s cuss.