Venice

★☆☆☆☆ Director? Malick? Where have you gone? There was a time when you took the lives of individual characters – sociopathic youth, itinerant workers, a platoon of soldiers – and via them glimpsed the sublime through the cracks their lives made in the world. Yet now your gaze is directed wholly at the glory and…

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★☆☆☆☆ Venice is notorious for foisting shoddy local produce on its delegates, but this year has been particularly chronic. Director Alberto Barbera admitted in an interview that many of the best Italian filmmakers had either just released a film or were not in time to be considered for inclusion. In competition we’ve had the ambitious…

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★★★★☆ Natalie Portman must love Venice. When twirling psycho-ballerina drama Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan debuted on the Lido in 2010, Portman definitively glissaded away from her precocious debut in Luc Besson’s Leon and all those godawful Star Wars prequels. This year sees her give two stunning performances: the eponymous, awards-ready role in Pable Larrain’s Jackie…

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★★★☆☆ There’s a lot that’s wonderful about Andrei Konchalovsky’s Holocaust drama Paradise and yet there’s something fundamentally wrong with the film. Beginning in France in the 1940s, we first meet a French police officer in the upper echelons of the Vichy regime. He’s a family man who enjoys brisk walks in the woods with his…

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★★★☆☆ Emir Kusturica enters the race for the Golden Lion with On the Milky Road, a bonkers Balkan wartime romance that, with its full fat, double cream richness, may be too much for many. That said, the first half-hour features some exhilarating filmmaking and there are moments of pure joy mixed in with the feathers,…

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★★★★☆ Pablo Larraín makes his English language debut with the Darren Aronofsky produced Jackie which, although more conventional, is no more a biopic than his Cannes triumph Neruda. In a career best role, Natalie Portman plays the role of America’s most famous First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman who went from being a fashion clotheshorse to…

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★★★☆☆ Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martinez) is a celebrated Nobel Prize-winning author living in Barcelona. He hasn’t returned to his hometown of Salas, Argentina in forty years despite setting all of his novels there. To the surprise of everyone he agrees to personally collect a proffered reward as a ‘distinguished citizen’ and maybe rediscover his roots.…

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★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Vincent Biron’s Prank is a coming of age story that never quite escapes the constraints of its own claustrophobic Quebecois world. Stefie (Etienne Galloy) is a gormless teenage loner who spends his spare time practicing the clarinet – the similarity to Ferris…

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★★☆☆☆ The general rule of thumb is that the best Italian films looking to premier each year go to either Berlin or Cannes, because in Venice any Italian effort in competition is viewed with suspicion. In the case of Roan Johnson’s by-the-numbers pregnancy comedy Piuma, the suspicion is amply justified. This is as light as…

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★★★★☆ One More Time with Feeling is a music documentary in a minor key, a song sung about grief and loss and trying to carry on when you really do not want to carry on. Like Cave’s music, there is melancholy and honesty. Shot in an immersive and starkly beautiful black and white 3D, the…

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