Venice

★★☆☆☆ During the early nineties a series of bombings rocked the cities of Italy. The violence was a response by the Mafia to a political class of socialists and Christian democrats who had come to power via their influence but who were now doing nothing to halt a publicly supported crusade against organised crime. This…

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★★☆☆☆ Returning to the Venice Lido in the Orizzonti sidebar after her mildly gripping thriller Texas Killing Fields premièred here back in 2011, Ami Canaan Mann’s Jackie & Ryan (2014) is a fleetingly entertaining romantic drama set in the world of street music. Former Prince Caspian Ben Barnes plays Ryan, a postmodern train-hopping troubadour, whose…

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★★★★☆ Showing in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, Chaitanya Tamhane’s quietly brilliant Court (2014) takes an individual court case and, through following its laborious labyrinthine process, creates a damning j’accuse of wider Indian society. Narayan Kambal (Vira Sathidar) is the defendant. In the first shot we see him at work in his local community, teaching school children…

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★☆☆☆☆ Showing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Joe Dante’s zom-com Burying the Ex (2014) is an unfunny undead comedy that in harking back to the days of the classic B-movie would be flattered to be classified as an E-movie. Max (Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin) lives with his beautiful but irritating girlfriend Evelyn…

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★★★☆☆ Turkish filmmaker Kaan Mujdeci’s debut feature film and Venice competition entry Sivas (2014) is a well-shot if slight story of a young boy who finds a place for himself in the world as the owner of a fighting dog. Dogan Izci plays Aslan – not the wise lion of The Lion, the Witch and…

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★★★☆☆ In a Venice that has been bizarrely bereft of strong female performances and roles – Bechdel tests at the ready – Xiaoshuai Wang’s Red Amnesia (2014) comes as something of a latter-stage relief. Veteran Chinese theatre actress Lü Zhong catches the eye as Deng, an elderly woman recently bereaved. The newly-made widow keeps busy,…

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★★★☆☆ Novelist, scenarist, journalist, political thinker, opinion maker and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini was and is a huge influence on Italian intellectual life and his murder on the night of 2 November 1975 on a beach near Rome shocked the country and still resonates today. Almost immediately conspiracy theories grew up around the death…

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★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing and perfectly restrained coming-of-age tale which enters the running for the Golden Lion at Venice. Romain Paul plays Victor, a young lad living with his mother Nadia (Clotilde Hesme) in a…

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★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Orizzonti sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, Michele Alhaique’s gangland romance Senza Nessuna Pietà (2014) is a slickly made yet brutally clichéd piece of implausible and ultimately inconsequential nonsense. Mimmo (Pierfrancesco Favino) is a construction worker who sidelines for his criminal uncle collecting debts and roughing people up. A burly giant…

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★★★★☆ A tubercular nightmare vision of war in all its bloody ferocity, Tetsuo (1989) director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain (2014) stormed into competition at Venice with a loud and frankly mad rush to seize its objective, regardless of the cost. Shot through with the same élan that saw steam punk body horror Tetsuo…

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