Adam Driver, Mads Mikkelsen, Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Caleb Landry Jones, Olga Kurylenko Among Actors Set To Attend Venice Film Festival As Hollywood Guest List Takes Shape

Decades after he began his career, experiencing all of the ups and downs, it’s clear that filmmaker Paul Schrader is seemingly doing some of the best work he’s ever done late in life. “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” and “Master Gardener” are all films that prove Schrader still has a distinct voice in the filmmaking community.

Mads Mikkelsen had a slightly heated exchange with a reporter during a Q&A promoting his new movie The Promised Land at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Mads Mikkelsen and The Promised Land director Nikolaj Arcel were confronted by a reporter about the “lack of diversity” on screen and how it could affect their possibilities of getting nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The closing-night awards ceremony of the 80th Venice Film Festival has concluded, with the critical favorite and presumed frontrunner, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Emma Stone-starring adult fantasy “Poor Things,” living up to the buzz — it has taken the Golden Lion from Damien Chazelle’s jury. Other winners include Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Agnieszka Holland, Matteo Garrone and U.S.

fired back at an unnamed reporter at the Venice Film Festival on Friday over a question regarding cast diversity in their new film, “The Promised Land.”The movie is set in 1750’s Denmark. Mikkelsen, 57, stars as an army captain struggling to raise his social status and maintain his values in an increasingly hostile climate.

Director Sofia Coppola’s biopic “Priscilla” made its debut at the Venice International Film Festival, where Coppola was joined by the film’s subject, Priscilla Presley, and stars Cailee Spaeny (who plays Priscilla Presley) and Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley).

Ferrari has defended the casting of Adam Driver against claims of cultural appropriation.Andrea Iervolino, an Italian-Canadian film producer on the Enzo Ferrari biopic, rebuked claims made against Driver’s casting by actor Pierfrancesco Favino, who questioned why Italian actors were not cast more often in Hollywood films.In response, Iervolino said Italy had failed in comparison to other countries in producing Hollywood stars with worldwide visibility, citing examples like Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas from Spain, and Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel from France.Speaking at the festival (via the Telegraph), Ierovlino said: “Italian cinema needs to look beyond Italy and come up with synergies with the international film industry, which wants to invest in Italian icons. Films like Ferrari, which will be distributed in 150 countries, promote Italy and Italian genius.”The producer called on the Italian film industry to “make films based on stories that speak to the whole world, with international stars who work side by side with our own talent”.In his original comments, Favino, who stars in a movie called Comandante which opened this year’s festival, asked why actors on the level of Toni Servillo (The Great Beauty) were not cast more often in Hollywood productions.“There’s an issue of cultural appropriation,” Favino said.“Instead, the parts are given to foreign actors who are distant from the story’s real protagonists, starting with the exotic accents,” he added.

Jacob Elordi towers over Cailee Spaeny at the premiere of Priscilla during the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Mads Mikkelsen and his son Carl Jacobsen Mikkelsen make quite a dashing pair!

Mads Mikkelsen has proved time and again a master at playing quiet, rational, and seemingly harmless men who, when pushed, swiftly reveal themselves also to be skilled executioners; their pent-up rage does not bubble up so much as shoot out of them in sudden bursts of ultraviolence. Mikkelsen proves it once more in “The Promised Land,” the new period drama that reunites him with his “A Royal Affair” Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and premieres in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival this week.

They don’t make them like this any more, except when they do. Bastarden (disappointingly renamed The Promised Land in English) is a historical epic out of Denmark that has all the virtues of a midday movie remembered from childhood, the kind of thing you watched when your mother kept you home with a bad cold: a setting sometime in the olden days, a lawless frontier, sword fights and a gaggle of delectably evil baddies. Those seamy aristocrats and their henchmen, given to torturing, murdering and raping their oppressed tenants, are just lining up to have the tables turned, giving them a rich dose of their own torturing, murdering medicine. Hooray!

It’s been 11 years since Mads Mikkelsen starred in Nikolaj Arcel’s Danish period drama A Royal Affair, one of 2012’s most raved about international films which also went on to an Oscar nomination. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Promised Land” deserves a sexier title than “The Promised Land”: It’s hard to hear those well-worn words and not expect something as beige and starchy as the spuds grown on its titular terrain. It has one, in fact.

Caleb Landry Jones hits the red carpet with longtime girlfriend Katya Zvereva for the premiere of Dogman during the 2023 Venice Film Festival on Thursday (August 31) in Italy.

Luc Besson’s Dogman is a superhero movie in search of a comic-book, which makes a refreshing change amid the summer’s raft of DC disappointments. It skews a little close to Todd Phillip’s Golden Lion winner Joker in terms of weirdness and (especially) wardrobe, but it also offers the perfect showcase for star Caleb Landry Jones, who imbues a boisterously insane action thriller with heart and soul in what must surely be a career-high performance. Which is no mean feat for an actor whose work has always been excellent and has so often gone under the radar.

Jessica Kiang Check under most any post relating to the recently released trailer for Luc Besson’s “Dogman,” and you’ll find one, if not several responses riffing, to various degrees of enthusiasm, on the theme of “OMG, what if ‘Joker’ but with dogs?” That rhetorical question can now be answered, following this numbskulled nonsense movie’s inexplicable Venice Competition premiere, with a resounding “If only.” The bludgeoningly obvious, creatively inert, deathly dull tale of a cross-dressing misfit in a wheelchair who favors canine company over that of humans, it is scarcely fit to lap from the same water bowl as Todd Phillips’ controversial Golden Lion winner. Even those who didn’t much like “Joker” have to admit that it did not so actively treat its audience as if they were brain dead that everyone left feeling about 30 IQ points dumber than when they went in.

Adam Driver has criticised Amazon and Netflix for refusing to meet the demands of actors amid the ongoing Hollywood strikes.READ MORE: Hollywood on strike! Every question about the actor and writer protests answeredThe actor shared his criticism while promoting his new film Ferrari at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday (August 31). Prior to the festival, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) agreed to grant interim agreements to certain productions so they could promote their films.“I’m very proud to be here to be a visual representation of a movie that’s not part of the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) and to promote the SAG leadership directive, which is an effective tactic, which is the interim agreement.”Driver continued: “The other objective is obviously to say, why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon and STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for — this is pre-negotiations — the dream version of SAG’s wish list, but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t?“And every time people from SAG go and support a movie that has met the terms of the interim agreement, it just makes it more obvious that these people are willing to support the people that they collaborate with, and the others are not.”Driver has previously worked closely with Netflix, starring in 2019’s Marriage Story alongside Scarlett Johansson.

The Venice Film Festival is now underway, albeit without a lot of actors on the Lido thanks to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. But Variety reports that “Ferrari” star Adam Driver is at the festival to support Michael Mann‘s latest film (as it’s not part of the AMPTP), and he didn’t hold back about certain companies refusing to meet guild demands.

EXCLUSIVE: Caleb Landry Jones has built an eclectic resumé since he first appeared as Boy on Bike in 2007’s No Country for Old Men. His diverse credits include X-Men: First Class, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Get Out and Nitram, Justin Kurzel’s 2021 mass murder drama which earned Landry Jones a Best Actor prize in Cannes. 

Marta Balaga Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel, who was behind “The Dark Tower” with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey – is bringing back the historical epic with “The Promised Land,” which world premieres in Venice Film Festival competition section. Set in 1755 and based on a true story, it sees captain Ludvig Kahlen (played by Mads Mikkelsen) deciding to finally conquer the Danish heathland and build a colony there. But its ruler, Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), doesn’t want to share the inhospitable land.