Venice

★★★☆☆ 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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★★★★☆ 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 lightly,” says a female refugee from Iraq. “You suffer hardship just to get to safety.”…

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★★★☆☆ In Lebanese-born director Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, an apparently minor argument on a Beirut street escalates into a full-blown legal battle, which itself threatens to erupt into civil violence as it rips open the festering wounds of historic religious and national resentment. Tony Hana (Adel Karam) is a mechanic living in an apartment with…

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★★★☆☆ Opening the Horizons sidebar, Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988 is a biopic of the German songstress who found fame with The Velvet Underground. Danish singer and actress Trine Dyrholm plays the diva with verve and energy, in a portrait which is also something of a reevaluation.“Don’t call me Nico,” Christa Päffgen (Dyrholm) tells her manager…

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Celebrated American director Alexander Payne’s high concept sci-fi comedy Downsizing will open the 74th Venice International Film Festival (30 August-9 September) in a spot that has become a great launchpad for Oscars success (see Gravity, Birdman and La La Land). Downsizing stars Matt Damon who also turns up in George Clooney’s Suburbicon, co-penned by the…

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