Surprisingly given the encroachment of the Toronto International Film Festival and the ongoing rivalry with Cannes, the Venice Film Festival still manages to provide a top quality programme. Although there were definitely some notable absences this year – Paul Thomas Anderson for one – the dearth of blockbuster fare allowed Continue Reading

★★★★☆ If Anton Chekhov had been a reality show creator, Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Postman’s White Nights (2014) might well have been the result. Playing in competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival, this beautifully realised picture tells the story of a small, marginalised village in Northern Russia on the banks Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ During the early nineties a series of bombings rocked the cities of Italy. The violence was a response by the Mafia to a political class of socialists and Christian democrats who had come to power via their influence but who were now doing nothing to halt a publicly supported Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Returning to the Venice Lido in the Orizzonti sidebar after her mildly gripping thriller Texas Killing Fields premièred here back in 2011, Ami Canaan Mann’s Jackie & Ryan (2014) is a fleetingly entertaining romantic drama set in the world of street music. Former Prince Caspian Ben Barnes plays Ryan, Continue Reading

★★★★☆ Showing in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, Chaitanya Tamhane’s quietly brilliant Court (2014) takes an individual court case and, through following its laborious labyrinthine process, creates a damning j’accuse of wider Indian society. Narayan Kambal (Vira Sathidar) is the defendant. In the first shot we see him at work in his Continue Reading

★☆☆☆☆ Showing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Joe Dante’s zom-com Burying the Ex (2014) is an unfunny undead comedy that in harking back to the days of the classic B-movie would be flattered to be classified as an E-movie. Max (Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin) lives with his Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ Turkish filmmaker Kaan Mujdeci’s debut feature film and Venice competition entry Sivas (2014) is a well-shot if slight story of a young boy who finds a place for himself in the world as the owner of a fighting dog. Dogan Izci plays Aslan – not the wise lion of Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ In a Venice that has been bizarrely bereft of strong female performances and roles – Bechdel tests at the ready – Xiaoshuai Wang’s Red Amnesia (2014) comes as something of a latter-stage relief. Veteran Chinese theatre actress Lü Zhong catches the eye as Deng, an elderly woman recently bereaved. Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ Novelist, scenarist, journalist, political thinker, opinion maker and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini was and is a huge influence on Italian intellectual life and his murder on the night of 2 November 1975 on a beach near Rome shocked the country and still resonates today. Almost immediately conspiracy theories Continue Reading

★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing and perfectly restrained coming-of-age tale which enters the running for the Golden Lion at Venice. Romain Paul plays Victor, a young lad living with his mother Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Orizzonti sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, Michele Alhaique’s gangland romance Senza Nessuna Pietà (2014) is a slickly made yet brutally clichéd piece of implausible and ultimately inconsequential nonsense. Mimmo (Pierfrancesco Favino) is a construction worker who sidelines for his criminal uncle collecting debts and roughing Continue Reading

★★★★☆ A tubercular nightmare vision of war in all its bloody ferocity, Tetsuo (1989) director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain (2014) stormed into competition at Venice with a loud and frankly mad rush to seize its objective, regardless of the cost. Shot through with the same élan that saw Continue Reading

★★★★☆ Ognjen Svilicic’s These Are the Rules (2014) is a modest work of quiet desperation, but it’s obvious restraint and slow unwinding has a powerful, unsettling and ultimately moving effect. Middle-aged bus driver Ivo (Emir Hadžihafizbegović) lives with his wife Maja (Jasna Žalica) in a tidy, if dreary high rise Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Saverio Costanzo returns to Venice in competition with his second film, Hungry Hearts (2014), a claustrophobic drama about a young couple and their conflicting views on parenting. Adam Driver plays Jude (Thomas Hardy would be a good point of reference here), a lanky engineer living in New York. He Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Director Benoît Jacquot returns to the Venice Lido with Three Hearts (2014), a slickly presented and thespy relationship drama which flounders on its own lack of originality, humourlessness and absence of credibility. Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde, in his second film of the festival), a tax inspector from Paris, misses his Continue Reading