Venice
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Venice 2013: ‘Child of God’ review
★★★★☆ Hot on the heels of his previous feature-length offering, Cannes select As I Lay Dying, James Franco made his directorial bow on the Venice Lido with last year’s Child of God (2013), a Gothic tale of violence, perversion and madness in the hill country of Tennessee, adapted from American writer Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated third…
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Venice 2013: ‘Why Don’t You Play in Hell?’ review
★★★★☆ Sion Sono returns to the Lido this year with Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (2013), a deliriously silly homage to cinematic violence. Hiroki Hasegawa plays protagonist Hirata, a young indie filmmaker with big ambitions. He roams the streets with his gang, the ‘Fuck Bombers’, shooting footage of whatever crosses their path – including…
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Venice 2013: ‘The Canyons’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Numerous derelict cinemas litter the opening of Paul Schrader’s now-infamous The Canyons (2013), screening out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival; and more may follow this portent omen of things to come. Make no mistake – Schrader’s latest isn’t Basic Instinct 2 bad or even quote-a-long bad, as in the case of…
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Venice 2013: ‘Gerontophilia’ review
★★☆☆☆ Canadian auteur Bruce LaBruce opened the Venice Days sidebar of the Biennale’s 70th incarnation with Gerontophilia (2013), a romantic comedy (of sorts) following 18-year-old Lake (Pierre-Gabriel Lajoie), who finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with his girlfriend and at the same time attracted to older men. In order to further investigate his newfound fetish, Lake gets…
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Venice 2013: Venezia 70 programme preview
With the rise of the encroaching Toronto, the domestic competition offered by Rome and a hugely successful Cannes this year, the 70th Venice Film Festival – which begins on 28 August – is facing some pretty stiff competition. The lineup, however, is on the face of it relatively low-key, though there are some very interesting…
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Venice 2013: ‘Gravity’ preview
Alfonso Cuarón admirers have been waiting patiently for a new feature from the esteemed Mexican filmmaker for seven years now, his last endeavour the positively received dystopian drama Children of Men back in 2006. Near-future sci-fi certainly seems to be Cuarón’s cinematic weapon of choice at present as the first images and a teaser trailer…
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Venice 2011: ‘Contagion’ review
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) – with a large ensemble cast including Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Jude Law – marks a re-emergence of the old ‘revenge of nature’ genre, but rather than sharks, bees or birds, the enemy to humanity here is much smaller (microscopic in fact) but far more deadly: a…
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Venice 2011: ‘Texas Killing Fields’ review
★★☆☆☆ Ami Canaan Mann’s (daughter of Michael Mann) debut film Texas Killing Fields (2011) is a run-of-the-mill police procedural, which really has no place this year’s Venice Film Festival. Detectives Souder (Sam Worthington) and Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) are investigating a series of abductions and murders of young women. The older detective is gripped by…
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Venice 2011: ‘Faust’ review
★★★★☆ Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2010) – awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival – begins high above the earth, gazing into a mirror that looks like a cinema screen, before we – flapping and twirling in the wind – descend towards a teeming city, a cramped besieged metropolis; part-European citadel, part biblical-Babel.This…
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Venice 2011: ‘Faust’ wins Golden Lion
The gongs have been distributed at this year’s Venice Film Festival and the winner of the coveted Golden Lion is Aleksandr Sokurov‘s Faust, starring Hanna Schygulla, Isolda Dychauk, Georg Friedrich and Maxim Mehmet. The film looks remarkable, with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel employing all sorts of distortion from fairground mirrors to fuzzy lenses, creating a world which…