Venice Review: Kim Ki-duk’s Final Film ‘Call Of God’

A consortium led by Banijay chairman Stéphane Courbit is leading the race to acquire French broadcaster M6, according to reports, with shares in the Bertelsmann-owned network spiking on news of several planned offers.

Olivia Wilde has the seal of approval from Harry Styles’ mom, Anne Twist. The 54-year-old took to Instagram on Wednesday to rave about Wilde’s new film, “Don’t Worry Darling”, which stars her pop star son.

Olivia Wilde has the seal of approval from Harry Styles' mom, Anne Twist. The 54-year-old took to Instagram on Wednesday to rave about Wilde's new film, which stars her pop star son. «First time in the French cinema… first day showing… ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ you were excellent! Really enjoyed from start to finish,» Twist captioned the pics of herself and some friends giving their thumbs up.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” won the Grand Prize of the Deauville American Film Festival on Saturday evening during a ceremony which was followed by the French premiere of Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling.” “Aftersun” had world premiered at Critics Week in Cannes where it won a prize. The movie marks the feature debut of Wells, a New York-based Scottish filmmaker. Headlined by “Normal People” actor Paul Mescal, the bittersweet drama follows a father and his daughter who take a holiday at a Turkish resort in the late 1990s. The movie is being represented in international markets by Charades and will be distributed in North America by A24.

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Every film Jafar Panahi makes is an act of resistance. Currently in jail, the Iranian director has spent the past 12 years in and out of house arrest, banned from traveling or making films outside Iran and faced with numerous obstacles making films at home. That hasn’t stopped him.

In his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy. In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family. Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

I never start a review commenting on whatever the so-called Film Twitter Mafia have to say about it, sight unseen. Starting back at CinemaCon in April when its directo/co-star Olivia Wilde was served legal papers onstage regarding her custody hearings with ex Jason Sudeikis, there has been non-stop gossip about her movie Don’t Worry Darling. There has been so much of it, right up to today’s Venice Film Festival press conference (covered by my colleague Nancy Tartaglione) that you almost have to address the elephant in the room. Others can do that, but let us not forget there is also a movie here, one I was able to preview as just that a few weeks ago in Burbank. As a reviewer, to quote Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, “I like to watch,” and that means only what is on the screen.

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh is up to more deliciously fiendish tricks in The Banshees of Inisherin, a simple and diabolical tale of a friendship’s end shot through with bristling humor and sudden moments of startling violence. It world premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival Monday. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and the small handful of supporting players make the most of the author’s vibrant prose in McDonagh’s first film since Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri five years ago.

Wolf and Dog (Lobo e Cão) is the first feature film by Portuguese director Claudia Varejão. The movie follows a group of queer teenagers growing up in the uber-religious town of San Miguel in the Azores who yearn for more than the small-town ideals and the mundane lifestyle of their parents. Written by Varejão and Leda Cartum, the central characters try to build a community of their own. Still, the adults want the kids to remain stagnant, become farmers, fishermen, or mothers, and force them to enjoy that lifestyle. The movie has challenging moments to get through because they slow the pacing, making it a more tedious viewing experience, but the script works hard to subvert some harmful tropes.

Director Cristina Grosan’s Ordinary Failures (Bezna Selhani) follows three people dealing with everyday problems against the backdrop of impending doom. Written by Klára Vlasáková, is about getting out of your head and experiencing the world in the present before it passes you by (or no longer exists). At first, the plot is confusing, but it eventually comes together in a satisfying (yet bleak) way.

Even before the title flashes up for Venice Film Festival competition entry L’Immensita, we know that Penelope Cruz is the most fun mom – most likely the only fun mom – in town. She doesn’t just set the table for dinner; she puts on music, leads the kids in a choreographed dance and singalong as they pass plates and cutlery, emoting into a passing fork as if it were a microphone. Adults bore her. At a birthday dinner for an ancient relative, she slips under the table to join her children in removing and mixing up everyone’s shoes. “I want to play!” she says, eyes gleaming.

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

A lesbian gym teacher navigates Margaret Thatcher’s Britain under the “Section 28” law in Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s debut feature premiering in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival.

Maureen Kearney’s story is unbelievable. It is a story of unbelief, in fact — of denial, cover-ups, corruption and injustice directed at a small woman who was just doing her job. She’s played with an electric stillness by the great Isabelle Huppert in Jean-Paul Salome’s Venice Film Festival Horizons title The Sitting Duck (La Syndicaliste). There are still plenty of people who openly doubt her story, including people on her own side of politics. Perhaps it would be easier all round if it weren’t true.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Six decades into a career of over 40 films, the last thing you might request of a new feature from 92-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is that it surprise us. Yet after a run of expansive, richly process-oriented observations of mostly American institutions and communities, his new film, “A Couple,” upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways. For starters, it’s laser-focused on just one person, not a heaving collective of human labor and activity. It’s short — very much so, in fact, barely stretching past an hour. Also, lest we be burying the lede, it’s not a documentary. Wiseman’s first ever narrative feature sees him collaborating with French actor-writer Nathalie Boutefeu on a biopic of sorts: a portrait of Leo Tolstoy’s anguished wife Sophia, dramatizing her marital dissatisfaction and psychic pain with with a lyrical, literate ear.

Shia LaBeouf plays the title character in this period piece, and his face dominates the promotional material, but the latest film from the ridiculously prolific Abel Ferrara, now into his 70s, is really more of an ensemble with a supporting cast that’s near-unknown outside Italy.