At first glance, it might seem like Pablo Larraín’s last two films share only a couple of superficial commonalities: they are both biopics in the sense they tell stories of real-life people, Princess Diana in 2021’s “Spencer” and Augusto Pinochet in 2023’s “El Conde”; and they have both premiered in competition at the glitzy Venice Film Festival. 

Alas, scratch the surface and both films stand as an unlikely diptych about dysfunctional families dealing with the generational sins that have made and broken their bloodlines.

Continue reading ‘El Conde’ Review: Larraín’s Pinochet Satire Is A Roaring & Timely Vampire Saga [Venice] at The Playlist.

Writer/director Florian Zeller cannot manage to reproduce the magic of “The Father” with his latest film, “The Son.” This latest screen adaptation of Zeller’s trilogy of stage plays about families falling apart, co-written with Englishman Christopher Hampton, expands its setting outside the limited confines of a single apartment – yet somehow manages to feel less cinematic. Without a clever conceit to elevate the material, this domestic drama is a mostly middling piece of maudlin manipulation.

Continue reading ‘The Son’ Review: Hugh Jackman Ably Anchors A Devastating, But Ultimately Dull Domestic Drama [Venice] at The Playlist.

Romain Gavras wastes no time in “Athena” informing the audience of the stakes. There have been three cases of police brutality within two months in the titular majority-minority community. Tensions are already high when law enforcement addresses the controversies in the film’s opening scene – and then a coordinated group of young men from the neighborhood storm and stack the station.

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch

Before anyone can catch their breath, Gavras is over ten minutes into “Athena” … and still has yet to have a single cut.

Continue reading ‘Athena’ Review: Romain Gavras’ Police Brutality Thriller Is Positively Electrifying [Venice] at The Playlist.

While watching Frederick Wiseman’s “Un Couple” — the legendary documentarian’s first fictional drama— a different literary giant comes to mind besides the ones whose mercurial marriage is depicted on screen. The film’s fickle love recalls a verse from Latin poet Catullus, undoubtedly familiar to anyone who studied the language in school: “what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.”

The woman in question in “Un Couple” is Sophia Tolstoy, wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo, as embodied in the film by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu.

Continue reading ‘Un Couple’ Review: Frederick Wiseman’s Stylistic Exercise Is Pleasant, Albeit Plain [Venice] at The Playlist.

Quentin Tarantino never met a camera or microphone he didn’t love, and in Luca Rea’s documentary “Django & Django,” they love him right back. The title is a bit of a misnomer – it’s not really about Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western “Django” nor Tarantino’s 2012 “Django Unchained” that paid reverent homage. A more apt title might be “Sergio & Quentin,” given the focus on personalities over product.

Continue reading ‘Django & Django’: This Supposed Sergio Corbucci Doc Mostly Caters To The Musings Of Quentin Tarantino [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Where to begin with “Freaks Out,” a Nazisploitation fantasy caper with circus trappings and a tin-ear for taste. The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

Israel (Giorgio Tirabassi) is a ringmaster and father figure to a small troupe of circus performers – in the film’s vernacular: four sideshow freaks.

Continue reading ‘Freaks Out’: Gabriele Mainetti’s Circus-y Nazisploitation Fantasy Caper Is A Hot Mess [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Like finding a grubby, balled-up bill in your spangly g-string and uncrumpling it to discover doughy old Ben Franklin staring benignly back at you, Ana Lily Amirpour‘s third feature is a sweet, scuzzy surprise made all the sweeter/scuzzier because you don’t know quite what you did to deserve it. Certainly, at the Venice Film Festival –where “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” snuck into competition – giggling into one’s mask at its garish but gladhearted genre excesses felt like getting away with something naughty.

Continue reading Ana Lily Amirpour’s ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon’ is a Sweet, Scuzzy Blast of Pure Escapism [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Anyone familiar with the work of Mexican director Michel Franco, whether they be admirers or detractors, can attest to the “this is not going to end well” sentiment his sordid cinematic provocations instill. With a pensive angle, “Sundown” – a reteaming between the filmmaker and his “Chronic” star Tim Roth – upholds that tension of expecting the worst to come the characters’ way.

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

Luxurious accommodations, salted-rim cocktails, and enviable ocean views comprise a paradisiacal vacation in Mexico for a wealthy British family of four.

Continue reading ‘Sundown’: Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg Play Siblings In Michel Franco’s Tragic Acapulco-Set Drama [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

A journey of discovery rooted in questions about faith, fate, and mortality, “Miracle” offers up revelations like slow drips from a faucet, building to a staggering conclusion that synthesizes all of the film’s narrative ingredients. Part two of director Bogdan George Apetri’s Romanian trilogy, the film is self-contained as a piece, yet features characters from 2020’s “Unidentified” along the edges, expanding the tapestry of this world while germinating an entirely new story.

Continue reading ‘Miracle’ Lives Up To Its Name, Seamlessly Blending Narrative, Style, & Technique With Devastating Results [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“The Peacock’s Paradise” is one of the worst types of films to watch and review. Ineffectual in its style, but inoffensive in its content and execution, Laura Bispuri’s most recent directorial effort fails to move beyond the rudimentary elements that comprise the average movie.

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

The narrative centers on an estranged family gathering to celebrate the birthday of Nena (Dominique Sanda), its matriarch.

Continue reading ‘The Peacock’s Paradise’: Laura Bispuri Crafts A Masterclass In Mediocre Filmmaking [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment.  While on a grand tour of Europe in 1938, David Kurtz, a Polish-American man, traveled to Nasielsk, the town of his birth, and brought with him a 16mm camera filled with Kodachrome, a novelty at the time.  He took three minutes of footage there that was embedded in a larger film of his travels and, like many such films, it sat forgotten in a basement for years. Around 2009, David’s grandson Glenn Kurtz rediscovered the footage and recognized that the once-ordinary film was now an extraordinary historical document – the only remaining visual record of a Jewish community that was annihilated in the Holocaust. 

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

Director Bianca Stigter takes the 1938 footage and uses it as a prism, looking at every detail to see how much of prewar Nasielsk can be exhumed.

Continue reading Giving Life to a Lost Community in ‘Three Minutes – A Lengthening’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Guess it had to happen sometime, but it’s a shame that the previously-thought-to-be inexhaustible energy resource of Edgar Wright’s omnivorous, giddy cinephilia should finally be showing signs running out right now, just when a jaded, weary, pandemic-drab world could use it most. Don’t get me wrong: with its dual-timeline gimmick and its evident love for the pastichey recreation of London in the Swinging Sixties decorating a coming-of-ager that becomes a fish-out-of-water drama that morphs into a murder-mystery that then turns into a slasher-horror, “Last Night in Soho,” which premiered today at the Venice Film Festival, boasts as ambitious a genre-melding concept as Wright has ever fielded.

Continue reading ‘Last Night In Soho’ Sees Edgar Wright Running On The Fumes Of Old Enthusiasms [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“Why does it take so long to break up? Why does no one talk about the fact that [divorce] is endless trauma?” Jessica Chastain asks in a heartbreaking moment from HBO’s devastating marital and breakup mini-series “Scenes From A Marriage.” A modern adaptation of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s brutally emotionally honest 1970s series, now written, directed, and executive produced by Israeli filmmaker Hagai Levi, (“Our Boys,” “The Affair,” and “In Treatment”), this new HBO version is intimate, intense, equally painful, and hard to watch at times; a re-examination of many of the spousal complications the original series interrogated.

Continue reading ‘Scenes From A Marriage’: Jessica Chastain & Oscar Isaac Shatter Hearts In Wrenching Divorce Series [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Beginning with a dizzying one-shot that follows Judith – or is it Margot? – around a high-end clothing store before a fainting spell upends her shopping trip, Antoine Barraud’s “Madeleine Collins” is a laser-focused character study that literalizes a double-life, following Judith (a calculated Virginie Efira) as she attempts to balance seemingly having two husbands, two sets of children, two complete lives. Wisely withholding key information about how Judith came into this situation until the very end, Barraud’s film effectively grafts the tropes of Hitchcockian thriller onto a domestic portrait of a woman’s life spiraling out of control.

Continue reading ‘Madeleine Collins’ Starring Virginie Efira Is A Knotty Exploration of A Dual Life [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

There are shades of Ruben Ostlund’s “The Square” if it were remade to target the film world, in Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s crowd-pleasing Spanish comedy “Official Competition” starring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas. Controlled pacing, visual punchlines, and an insider knowledge of the varied pretensions within filmmaking make this a consistently amusing – if never downright hilarious – vehicle for the well-honed comic sides of two of Spain’s most famous exports. 

Continue reading ‘Official Competition’ With Penélope Cruz & Antonio Banderas Is A Crowd-Pleasing Comedy That Skewers Film-World Pretensions [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Near the town of Cerchiara, in a valley nestled within the Pollino massif of mountains on the border between the Calabria and Basilicata regions of lushest Italy, there is a hole. It’s not the biggest hole, but at the time of its exploration, it was the second-deepest. In the summer of 1961, a team of speleologists in from Turin plumbed the depths of what would be known as the Bifurto Abyss, and did so largely without incident.

Continue reading Michelangelo Frammartino’s ‘Il Buco’ Is a Mournful Meditation on Earth’s Vanishing Mysteries [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

A film about politics with a title like “Promises” all but comes with a get-out clause for failing to deliver on early hopes. And so it is with French director Thomas Kruithof’s lackluster second feature, which tries to pass gesturing vaguely at social ideas off as storytelling. This is all the more disappointing as early scenes suggest a sober, grown-up drama about migrant tenants at a neglected Parisian housing project run by exploitative landlords (referred to as “slumlords”) and Mayor Clemence (none other than Isabelle Huppert), who wants to help the tenants to secure a 63 million subsidy before she retires after two terms and 12 years in the job.

Continue reading ‘Promises’ With Isabelle Huppert Is A Lackluster Political Drama [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“A great man doesn’t seek to lead; he is called to it,” Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) says somberly to his son Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), in Denis Villeneuve’s dynastic epic space odyssey “Dune.” The Duke speaks to duty, purpose, and destiny, but the words are laced with burden and uncertainty for Paul, seemingly undecided about his future. When Villeneuve (“Sicario,” “Prisoners”) once spoke about making “Dune” as a “’Star Wars’ for adults,” he wasn’t kidding.

Continue reading ‘Dune’: Denis Villeneuve Crafts A Spellbinding Arthouse Blockbuster Odyssey About Destiny & Betrayal [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

If you have even the smallest dislike of the grotesquely redundant and regressive institution that is the British monarchy, one of the greatest pleasures of the shamelessly pleasurable, archly self-aware, high camp masterpiece that is Pablo Larraín‘s “Spencer,” is envisioning how it will play to the still-living people it glancingly portrays. Imagine the creasing of Royal brows sending Royal spectacles cascading down Royal noses! Picture the Royal flushes creeping up Royal necks!

Continue reading Kristen Stewart Is An Incandescent Diana In Pablo Larraín’s Tremendous ‘Spencer’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

What if you’ve paid your debt to society, but the spiritual weight of what you truly owe for your past actions can never be repaid in full? Following the terrific comeback reception to “First Reformed” and the spartan, Bresson-ian transcendental style employed within, feeling good about his chances, filmmaker Paul Schrader doubles down on austere slow cinema again in “The Card Counter,” a movie about the moral balance a man can accrue.

Continue reading ‘The Card Counter:’ Oscar Isaac Scorches In Paul Schrader’s Hypnotic, Slow-Burn Moral Thriller [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“I don’t like reality anymore. Reality is lousy,” teenager Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) says mournfully at a crucial, spiritually lonely moment in Paolo Sorrentino’s evocative new coming of age story, “The Hand Of God.” Sitting on a mountain, looking to the sky, the heavens, for answers, Fabietto should know. Reality has given him a raw deal; tragedy and heartbreak, the kind that no kid should experience that young.

Continue reading ‘The Hand Of God’: Paolo Sorrentino Touches Divinity With An Evocative Coming Of Age Magnum Opus [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

The ghost of a legendary cowboy named Bronco Henry haunts “The Power of the Dog,” an evocative, sensory psychodrama set in the American West of the 1920s. While Bronco is long gone and never seen on the screen, his spirit is felt everywhere in this soulful exploration of masculinity and repressed love, one that is equal parts untamed and delicate and wholly gorgeous.

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch

All that to say, let’s hope Jane Campion doesn’t deny us her graceful cinema for this long a stretch again.

Continue reading ‘Power Of The Dog’: Jane Campion Crafts Cinematic Poetry In Her Triumphant Big-Screen Return With Benedict Cumberbatch [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Daniel Gellar and Dayna Goldfine’s “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” begins at what is, by most definitions, the end: with Cohen’s final concert, in December of 2013. He roams the stage, growling out the title song in his trademark fedora and black suit, with all 79 of his years behind it, and it sounds like both a dirge and a celebration. By this time, the omnipresent “Hallelujah” was the song Cohen was most associated with, its strange combination of spirituality and sin, of operatic emotion and shrugging acceptance, making it a standard – the 21st century’s “Yesterday.” 

Telluride 2021 Preview: 10 Must-See Films To Watch

But there’s a whole oddball history there, a strange, twisted story of the “Hallelujah” path from forgotten album track to cultural ubiquity, first told in Alan Light’s 2012 book “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’” (Light is credited here as a consultant), and later on in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” podcast.

Continue reading ‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song’ Is A (Mostly) Fascinating Chronicle Of A Musical Masterpiece [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

It’s late August, and while the leaves aren’t falling just quite yet, the Fall Film Festival season is upon us. As usual, the Venice Film Festival always starts with the Telluride Film Festival following on its heels just a day or two later. Venice’s line-up has been stellar the last few years—in part due to Netflix’s ongoing battle with Cannes and their French theatrical rules—and this year is mostly no different.

Continue reading Venice Film Festival 2021 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch at The Playlist.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar‘s latest film, “Parallel Mothers,” starring Penelope Cruz, Israel Elejalde, Julieta Serrano, and Rossy de Palma, will open up the 78th edition of the Venice Film Festival in September. “Parallel Mothers,” or “Madres Paralelas,” as it’s known in Spain, centers on the story of two mothers who give birth the same day. The film also stars Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón.

Continue reading Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Parallel Mothers’ Will Open The 2021 Venice Film Festival at The Playlist.