Venice Film Festival Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Sure, we’re still in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, but it’s also time to look ahead to the fall festivals, as it appears the Venice Film Festival has added yet another high-profile film to its lineup. So far, we have a Venice that is going to include the sci-fi epic, “Dune,” the horror sequel, “Halloween Kills,” a family drama, “The Power of the Dog,” and now, a highly-anticipated biopic.

Only two films announced so far, and the 78th Venice International Film Festival already looks like it’ll be one of the biggest festivals of 2021. Denis Villeneuve‘s highly-anticipated “Dune” is already scheduled to appear, and now Venice organizers have revealed that David Gordon Green‘s “Halloween Kills” will make its world premiere at the festival.

If I told you that Jane Campion’s new film, “The Power of the Dog,” was going to debut at a film festival this year, you wouldn’t be crazy to guess that it was going to be at Cannes. The filmmaker remains the only female director to ever win the Palme d’Or at the prestigious event and has debuted a number of her films in France over the years.

If the news about “The French Dispatch” going to Cannes for its world premiere is Hollywood’s worst-kept secret that eventually was confirmed, then the next worst-kept secret about “Dune” heading to the Venice Film Festival must be ready for announcement, right? READ MORE: Bong Joon Ho Named Jury President For This Year’s Venice Film Festival Well, according to Deadline, it appears that all the speculation is true—Denis Villeneuve’s highly-anticipated sci-fi epic, “Dune,” is set to debut at this

If the news about “The French Dispatch” going to Cannes for its world premiere is Hollywood’s worst-kept secret that eventually was confirmed, then the next worst-kept secret about “Dune” heading to the Venice Film Festival must be ready for announcement, right? READ MORE: Bong Joon Ho Named Jury President For This Year’s Venice Film Festival Well, according to Deadline, it appears that all the speculation is true—Denis Villeneuve’s highly-anticipated sci-fi epic, “Dune,” is set to debut at this

After a year of digital-only film festivals, it appears that 2021 is going to finally usher in some in-person events. Cannes and the New York Film Festival are going to attempt to do in-person screenings this summer.

Last year, as the second wave of COVID-19 swept through Europe, bringing many countries back into lockdown, the folks at the Cannes Film Festival revealed plans for alternative dates for the event if the typical May timeframe wasn’t a possibility. Let’s call May “Plan A” and the alternate dates in June/July were “Plan B.” Well, it appears Cannes is well past Plan A and already looking at Plan B…while drafting up a possible Plan C.

2020 was definitely not a great year for many people around the world, with the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc. However, before the world seemingly shut down for most of the year, director Bong Joon Ho was riding high thanks to the record-breaking success of his film, “Parasite,” which had just come off of some incredible, surprising wins at the Oscars.

Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a directorial polyglot, no doubt about it, but he’s more fluent in some cinematic languages than others.

Composed of a series of striking tableaux, Gianfranco Rosi’s contemplative documentary, “Notturno,” mines the intergenerational conflict on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Unfurling an entire life of failed artistic ambitions in the span of a two-hour film, Chaitanya Tamhane’s remarkable sophomore feature “The Disciple” is decidedly leisurely in its approach. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Tamhane’s film centralizes the world of Hindustani classical music, in which singers perform an improvised raga, modulating their voices depending on the singer’s emotional state.

With a much different than usual Venice Film Festival now come to a close, it’s time for the annual awards ceremony that marks the beginning of the awards season, whatever that means in this strange year.

In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based).

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Beydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Beydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.

Serious discussions on the perpetuated correlation between race and class in Mexico have dominated the country’s collective consciousness over the last few years. Cinema has actively participated in such reckoning, but never before as boldly as in Michel Franco’s “New Order (Nuevo Orden).” Bound to be contentious at home for its brutal depiction of a not-so-implausible and not-so-distant dystopia, the auteur’s latest shocks with blistering purpose.

So somebody somewhere one day had a thought: “What if ‘Die Hard’ except a school shooting?” and not only didn’t they immediately check themselves for other symptoms of lead poisoning but thought, “Yep, that’s a winner” and went on to make the movie.

Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic.

The term “predator” can mean a number of different things. Obviously, there’s the definition that relates to animals in nature, the hunter after the prey.

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

Regina King is now getting noticed for her work behind the camera.

The indie drama “Topside” opens with a startling image: a five-year-old girl sleeping on the ground with a beam of light shining on her from above. She’s underground living in the tunnels of New York beneath the subway system and she’s awoken by workers with flashlights.

A director whose film is premiering at the Venice Film Festival has said the decision to wear see-through masks on the red carpet in support of deaf and hard of hearing communities is an “inclusive message”.

June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over.

An audacious what-if scenario lies at the heart of Regina King‘s poised, well-crafted but conceptually conflicted directorial debut, “One Night in Miami,” a high-minded drama that plays as an all-star real-life Black superhero team-up: What if newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay, singer Sam Cooke, NFL record breaker Jim Brown and a Malcom X on the cusp of breaking with the Nation of Islam, spent the pivotal night of February 25, 1964 sparring, bickering and mutually inspiring

There are many kinds of documentaries one might want to see from “I Am Greta,” a Hulu portrait about famous teenage Climate Change activist and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg. One might hope for something akin to “The Inconvenient Truth,” with tons of sobering statistics and easy-to-understand graphs and charts led by the passionate teenager (you won’t find that here).

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

The human voice is Tilda Swinton‘s, but the directorial voice is all Pedro Almodóvar in the Spanish legend’s half-hour, English-language “The Human Voice.” Freely adapting – read: ruthlessly modernizing and thoroughly Almodovarizing – the play by Jean Cocteau (material the director has circled around before, most evidently in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Law of Desire“), despite its brevity, his new film is deceptively roomy, allowing us to pace through the superbly

Over a year after Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant loosed each other’s corsets and fell in love in a French Cannes film, and less than a week before Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet are due to do the same in coastal England at TIFF, Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby play American, mid-19th century secret lesbian lovers in Mona Fastvold‘s Venice competition title “The World to Come,” a beautiful and quiet, seasons-spanning tale of poetry and pining pioneerwomen.

It’s a proper shame we’re not allowed physical contact at the moment, because Quentin Dupieux‘s “Mandibles,” among its many other silly pleasures, offers up a modified fist-bump-style handshake that could easily have swept the Venice Film Festival campus as the greeting du jour any other year.

Multiple faiths believe in its concept. And frankly, people should be hopeful that it happens sooner rather than later.