Guy Lodge Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Roberto Benigni, whose film “Life Is Beautiful” won three Oscars in 1999, has come out of the woodwork to support Matteo Garrone’s Golden Globe-nominated “Io Capitano,” which is Italy’s current Oscar candidate for best international feature film. The revered yet reclusive Italian actor/director, whose most recent big screen role is playing Geppetto in Matteo Garrone’s hit 2019 live-action adaptation of “Pinocchio,” is clearly a big fan of “Io Capitano” (the title translates to “Me Captain”). The movie narrates the Homeric journey of two young African men, Seydou and Moussa, who decide to leave Dakar to reach Europe.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Would it have killed him to quit sit-ups for a few months? Maybe load up on some Häagen-Dazs? Famously, Mark Wahlberg wakes in the wee hours for a 3:30 a.m. workout — perhaps he could have treated himself to a five o’clock lie-in? Whatever the case, the star has made no concessions to dadbod reality in “The Family Plan.” Playing milquetoast car salesman Dan, a married father of three whom nobody knows used to be a high-level government assassin, he strips off early in proceedings — on a night of abortive anniversary lovemaking with his weary wife — to reveal a torso as jacked as the day is long.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. “Poor Things” is seducing you with a variety of charming, stylish and tasty partnerships this week alongside its theatrical release on Dec.

Guy Lodge Film Critic You can smell what’s happening in “Starve Acre” before you puzzle the rest of it out. The grassy, peaty dampness of its rural Yorkshire setting seems to hit the olfactory glands without any scratch-and-sniff assistance, only intensifying as the film unearths its literally deep-buried secrets.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Cinema has been a little duller for the eight-year absence of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the Indian-born auteur whose flamboyant formal style carried over from the music video realm into a distinctively sensuous strain of mainstream fantasy filmmaking — halted by the relative disappointment of 2015’s lackluster Ryan Reynolds vehicle “Self/less.” That makes Singh Dhandwar’s return with “Dear Jassi” something of an event, even before considering the film’s surprising expansion of his repertoire: Leaving behind Hollywood, genre cinema and his trademark maximalist mise-en-scène for his first film made in his homeland, the director keeps things simple but stately in this fact-based tale of young, star-crossed love in India’s Punjab region. The result is sometimes slack but incrementally powerful, marked by a palpable sense of renewed purpose on the part of its helmer.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Arriving just as Britain’s dire housing crisis is set to be a key campaign issue in next year’s long-awaited general election, “The Kitchen” offers a solemnly affecting look at what might happen if it’s left to fester. Zooming through a dystopian London in what seems the too-near future, this sharply accomplished feature directing debut from Kibwe Tavares and actor Daniel Kaluuya surprisingly eschews high-concept genre plotting to go with its elaborate sci-fi scene-setting, instead narrowing to an intimate, humane study of Black male bonding in a time of systemic social oppression.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The list of Oscar-winning directors for short films who have gone on to major careers in the feature-length realm is shorter than you might imagine. Andrea Arnold, Martin McDonagh and Claude Berri achieved arthouse success; David Frankel made multiplex hits like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Marley & Me.” But perhaps only Taylor Hackford, a winner in 1979 for an affecting little mockumentary titled “Teenage Father,” became a full-scale Hollywood brand — a name associated with a certain temperature of sleek studio gloss and versatile genre smarts.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It begins as a spatter of heavy rainfall — nothing out of the ordinary for acclimatized Brits, for whom an actual storm can even be cozily welcome after days of noncommittal drear and drizzle. But then it doesn’t stop, deep-set wet turns to invasive flooding, and what seemed a mere bout of inclement weather has swept you — and countless others like you — out of house and home.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The grand-scale Biblical epics that midcentury Hollywood churned out to roaring box-office returns had many drawcards as (so to speak) mass entertainment — brawny action, transporting spectacle, then jaw-dropping effects — but a sense of humor, by and large, wasn’t one of them. That’s something British musician-turned-filmmaker Jeymes Samuel attempts to rectify in his offbeat messiah story “The Book of Clarence,” a newly invented tale that runs parallel to the life and death of Jesus in ways both blithely blasphemous and sincerely Christian.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s the quiet that strikes you in “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” a documentary rejoinder to every image of cacophonous haute cuisine environments — complete with clattering pans, hissing steam and chefs screaming invective — that has been fed to us by “Hell’s Kitchen”-style reality shows and the propulsive drama of “The Bear.” Serenity reigns in Frederick Wiseman’s languidly mesmerising 240-minute anatomy of one of the world’s greatest restaurants: The masters and staff of Le Bois Sans Feuilles, a three Michelin-star establishment in France’s Loire region, work with a hushed intensity of concentration that recalls a science lab, or a surgery table, more than any standard kitchen. That suits Wiseman, a patient, rigorous examiner of institutional structure and process, who observes this culinary cathedral as seriously and methodically as he has such comparatively vast cultural hives as London’s National Gallery or the New York Public Library.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In a genre not traditionally given to brevity, James Marsh‘s literary biopic “Dance First” at least has that on its side: In 100 minutes, it races through the key events and alliances in the life of Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett, even finding time for some metaphysical musings alongside the cradle-to-grave checklist. But Beckett’s characteristic terseness — or radical “lessness,” to borrow a title from one of his stories — isn’t a feature of this creditable but ponderous film, which ultimately achieves its efficient runtime by skirting any meaningful engagement with Beckett’s work and literary legacy.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Long-awaited” isn’t quite the term for Victor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes,” a film that dedicated admirers of the Spanish master may have hoped for, but didn’t dare expect. Instead, Erice’s first feature in 31 years — and only his fourth overall — arrives as something between a desert oasis and a mirage: a shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The negotiations of adult sexual relationships, as well as the demands forced upon single women in society, are recurring fascinations in the work of Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet, albeit to erratic effect: In recent years, particularly in such English-language efforts as “It Snows in Benidorm” and “The Bookshop,” her voice has felt unconfident, even a little stifled. But Coixet strikes with a renewed sense of conviction in “Un Amor,” an adaptation of Sara Mesa’s Spanish-language bestseller that plays to her unusual strengths as a full-blooded feminist filmmaker.

Naman Ramachandran Signature Entertainment has acquired U.K. and Ireland rights to writer-director Warwick Thornton’s Australian drama “The New Boy” from The Veterans. The film follows a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan boy who arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun, disturbing the delicately balanced world.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In his staggering 2012 film “Our Children,” Belgian writer-director Joachim Lafosse turned an unthinkable true-life tragedy — the story of a mentally ailing mother who, one hitherto ordinary afternoon, single-handedly murdered all five of her children — into deeply compassionate drama, focusing not on the lurid whats of the event, but its more intimate, less discussed whys. That approach again serves Lafosse well in “A Silence,” another solemn, upsetting domestic chamber piece that lightly fictionalizes and foregrounds the hidden, knotty familial tensions behind a headline-making scandal.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s the stock answer that many a happy long-term couple has given prying friends and relatives to explain why they haven’t married: “We don’t need a piece of paper to prove our love.” True enough. What can official documents tell you of something as wily and elusive as human desire? Is a band of gold a safeguard against a change of heart? Of course not, yet millions want it anyway, a ratification of feelings that might otherwise seem slippery or intangible from the outside.

Guy Lodge Film Critic As directorial head-to-heads go, Jack Huston versus Stanley Kubrick isn’t anyone’s idea of a fair fight. But that’s exactly the clash the actor and Hollywood scion sets up for himself in his directorial debut “Day of the Fight” — named for Kubrick’s famous 1951 documentary short of the same title, and likewise following an Irish-American boxer through his daily New York routine, in the hours leading up to a climactic evening match.

Guy Lodge Film Critic An Emmy-nominated documentary cinematographer with credits including “Procession” and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Robert Kolodny puts his expert eye for shooting nonfiction to playful narrative use in his feature directing debut “The Featherweight.” A meticulously designed, gutsily played biopic of world champion featherweight boxer Guglielmo Papaleo, better known as Willie Pep — covering not his 1940s glory days but his faltering attempt at a comeback two decades later — the film is convincingly fashioned as a candid all-access documentary, a promotional puff piece curdling before our eyes into an unintended study of mental breakdown. So convincingly, in fact, that uninformed viewers chancing upon “The Featherweight” on the festival circuit may wonder exactly what it is they’re watching, not least if — in a realization of Pep’s own glumly stated fears — they have no idea who this once-celebrated sportsman was.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Zurich Film Festival, which runs Sept. 28 – Oct.

Guy Lodge Film Critic That perky exclamation point sets the tone for “Coup!,” a story of murder, class struggle, One Percent entitlement and a global pandemic that nonetheless unfolds with all the eager, scrappy energy of an off-Broadway musical, minus most of the songs. The pandemic in question is not the one you’re thinking of — Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s puckish comic thriller unfolds against the dire backdrop of the 1918 Spanish Flu — but it also sort of is, as its study of wealthy exceptionalism in a time of national crisis is clearly intended to chime with more recent memories of regimented distancing and mixed safety messages from on high.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Unorthodox family structures yield correspondingly unpredictable drama in “Housekeeping for Beginners,” a vital, febrile multi-character study that further confirms writer-director Goran Stolevski as a talent to be reckoned with. Departing radically from the poise of his folk-horror debut “You Won’t Be Alone” and the gentle intimacy of its swift follow-up “Of an Age,” this study of domestic, romantic and generational conflicts in a crowded queer household instead embraces a spirit of antic chaos, both in subject matter and jagged, hit-the-ground-running execution.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Frank Marshall’s film “Alive” has never exactly been a classic, but for a certain bracket of moviegoers who saw it in 1993, it remains a vivid memory. A heart-in-mouth recreation of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash — from which 16 people eventually survived 72 days stranded in a remote, snowy stretch of the Andes in western Argentina, while 29 perished — it visualized the events past the remit of worldwide news reports and magazine stories.

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.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The closing-night awards ceremony of the 80th Venice Film Festival has kicked off, with Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” among the titles most hotly tipped for prizes from the official competition jury headed by Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle. The list of winners will be updated below as they are announced; full story to follow.

Ben Croll Remarking on the sterling success of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” in Venice and of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” in Cannes, “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger has noticed a trend – and he hopes to apply that recognition back to the German industry. “Film4 came and took [filmmakers like Jonathan Glazer,] Yorgos Lanthimos and Steve McQueen and gave them the opportunity, fostering them and sheltering them and [helping] them make their movies — and look where they are now,” said Berger at a Venice Film Festival panel.

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a faintly between-worlds air to the coastal luxury spa in which the bulk of “Out of Season” is set: Spartan and depopulated, decorated in assorted shades of oyster white and palest aqua, it’s half sanatorium and half heaven’s gate, made uncannier still by the empty, forbidding sprawl of the wintering beach outside. That makes it an apt place for burnt-out actor Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) to come and consider where his life has led him thus far; it also proves a kind of corridor to the past, minus any actual time travel, when his visit reunites him with Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), a spurned lover from years before.

Guy Lodge Film Critic There will come a time, perhaps not even too far from now, when films like “Woman Of…” may feel, if not old hat, at least familiar, part of a genre unto itself: not a coming-of-age story but a coming-of-self one, tracing the particular life stages of identifying oneself as transgender, accepting oneself as such, and finally living that truth out loud. Spanning decades in its closeup portrait of a Polish trans woman traveling that trajectory in a social climate hostile to her very existence, Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s heart-on-sleeve film isn’t aiming to be revolutionary — there’s an old-fashioned melodramatic heft to its episodic construction, setting its heroine’s tale in a pointedly mainstream context.

Guy Lodge Film Critic When Holly’s classroom peers call her “the witch,” she meekly shrugs it off. It’s not the least flattering slur with which the shy, soft-spoken 15-year-old has been bullied, and it beats people complaining about how she smells.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Though it’s become a convenient catch-all term for journalists covering the subject, the phrase “European migrant crisis” can’t help but leave a sour taste in the mouth — implying as it does that Europe, the destination for so many hard-up voyagers from variously ailing or hostile countries, is the disadvantaged party in all this. That bias carries through to the bulk of well-intended films on the matter, which tend to pick up migrants’ stories, however sympathetically, on European turf.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If we’ve learned anything from the last few years of polarized political discourse surrounding everything from gun control to gender identity, it’s that when somebody pulls out the “won’t somebody please think of the children” card, the children are rarely the first thing on their mind. Even as it plays out on a specifically Hungarian social landscape, the satire of Gábor Reisz’s astute, drily funny third feature “Explanation for Everything” — in which an underachieving high-schooler becomes a right-wing cause célèbre on the strength of some dicey tabloid reporting — resonates more widely.