Tagged venice film festival

Land of Dreams, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s eccentric political satire set in a dust-ridden United States where censuses collect dream data, is a profoundly American film – and a profoundly Iranian...

There are sure to be countless Covid films tackling the biggest global disruption of our lifetimes, and The Falls takes an interesting approach, relegating this cataclysm to a sub-plot. We begin in Taipei,...

Directing your debut feature as an established actor has its pros and cons. You can call in favours to land a stellar cast including Olivia Colman, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley,...

The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s latest men-with-swords epic, is a medieval courtly tale for the #MeToo era. If this take sounds utterly meaningless, that is because it is, a state of affairs that entirely...

Some films have a profound message in the gaps between their 24 frames a second, and some just want to show you a damn good time. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon spirits up a woozy vibe that thrills for every...

The Inner Cage’s rural Sardinian prison is due to be shut down, but an administrative hiccup forces a skeleton staff to remain and guard a dozen prisoners who can’t be moved elsewhere yet. Every frame...

Watching Atlantide at the Venice Film Festival, in the heart of the Venice Lagoon, is a sobering experience. Gone are the hordes of tourists and expensive film stars, gone are the gondolas and fridge magnets...

The Hand of God is Paolo Sorrentino’s most personal film yet, re-telling key events of his youth in Naples, including the tragic moment that left him orphaned. His films have always had an air of melancholy,...

Much has been made of Denis Villeneuve’s crusade for the physical institution of cinema but one thing is for certain: his much-delayed Dune is a phenomenon fit for the largest of screens. This is sheer...

Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana biopic, Spencer, gets about as far away from a cradle-to-grave template as possible, instead charting the three days of Christmas, 1991, as the pressure to conform to royal...

The Card Counter marks a highly anticipated return for Paul Schrader, after his career-best First Reformed. He’s paired with another acting heavyweight in Oscar Isaac to explore the gambling world (one of...

Parallel Mothers is a twisting tale of two single mothers, Janis (Penélope Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit), whose fates become entwined. Where some films could survive on just an affair, or just an unexpected...

This film was previously reviewed in September 2019 as part of our Venice Film Festival coverage. It’s hard to avoid the twin evils of mawkishness and misery when making a film about cancer, but Shannon...

This review was originally published as part of our Venice Film Festival coverage on 03/09/2017. Self-indulgent, glacially slow, and painfully boring, Robert Guédiguian’s The House by the Sea is...

Imagine if someone told you there was a film in Venice competition that could be described as ‘like Twin Peaks but starring Jeff Goldblum’. Now, imagine the disappointment when that sentence is followed up...