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.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
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.
This Wednesday (29 August) will see the official opening of the 75th Venice Film Festival. The programme is crammed with internationally renowned directors and stars, boasting its most promising selection in years. Here are just a few of the most...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★☆☆☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★☆☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★☆☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ Receiving its world premiere at Venice, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei crosses borders with his wide-ranging documentary Human Flow, an angry and compassionate witnessing of what looks like being the greatest man-made tragedy of our times.“No one leaves home...