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, […]
★★★★☆ Suzhou River director Lou Ye’s wartime espionage thriller Saturday Fiction starts as a mysterious murky mess and resolves itself into a bullet-riddled noir. We first meet Jean Yu (Gong Li) in Shanghai circa 1937 as she is rehearsing a […]
★★★★☆ Tiago Guedes’ latest The Domain dissects a wealthy Portuguese family in the second half of the 20th century as a libertarian young patriarch struggles with duty, family, politics and his own personal destructive freedom. We’re in Portugal 1943, and a father […]
★★★☆☆ The story of Henry V gets a revisionist, Netflix-backed interpretation from Animal Kingdom director David Michôd as a floppy-haired Timothée Chalamet goes boldly into the breach once more in Venice out-of-competition offering The King. “All hail the king,” proclaim […]
★★★☆☆ Do you remember when Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking? That was approximately five films and two television series ago. There’s a looseness to his new Netflix-bound Panama Papers takedown The Laundromat that, for both better or worse, smacks of an […]
★★★☆☆ Ema (Mariana Di Girólamo) is a young dancer with a Daenerys Targaryen bleach job and a love of Reggaeton. She’s also a bit of a pyromaniac. The first shot we see in Pablo Larraín’s new film Ema is of […]
★★★☆☆ The Dreyfus Affair is chronicled as a turn of the century espionage thriller worthy of Le Carré in Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy. There was a good chance that his film could have been withdrawn after the […]
As the 76th edition of Venice commenced this week, the oldest film festival in the world has entered some choppy waters. First of all, there was a Hollywood Reporter article that slammed Venice as the “Fuck you” festival, essentially ignoring […]
The winner of last year’s Golden Lion for The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro joked “Let me see if I can pronounce this,” before announcing to very few peoples’ surprise that Alfonso Cuarón had won Venice’s top prize for […]
★★★★★ We’ve already had A Star Is Born here at Venice. Now, with Brady Corbet’s latest film Vox Lux, we have A Star Is Torn – a truly unique power-pop epic starring Natalie Portman as the mononymous singer Celeste, whose rise […]
★★☆☆☆ S. Craig Zahler falls between ever-widening stools with his brutal new crime drama Dragged Across Concrete, which might have been more representative of the viewing experience had it been called Dragged Slowly Across Concrete. Recently-released criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) […]
★★★★☆ Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino doesn’t so much remake Dario Argento’s Suspiria as use the influential Italian horror movie as an incantation with which to weave his own brand of red-black magic. Berlin, 1977. The Wall […]
