Tagged venice film festival

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...

To get to the heart of what makes Brimstone a terrible film, one has to look at the tone. On the surface this 19th century-set tale is bleak, as it charts the life of the mute Liz (Dakota Fanning)....

As hinted by its nicely simple title, Jim & Andy is a documentary exploring the brilliant but difficult comedy minds of Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman, centring on how those minds became one on the...

A rare foray into more genre-style filmmaking for master of small family dramas Hirokazu Koreeda, The Third Murder is a slow-burning, twisty mystery that is ultimately too convoluted to really satisfy as a...

Deliberately opaque for its first 20 minutes, it’s hard to see exactly what film Sebastiano Riso’s Una Famiglia actually is for a good while after it starts. Come the end, you’ll wish it never revealed...

A sensationally funny and affecting dark comedy, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri arrived at Venice just as the festival was hitting a slump, and has reinvigorated it with a fiery passion. Martin...

The highlight of any season of the FX anthology American Horror Story is always the creepy and evocative opening titles based on whatever that year’s theme is. At 90 seconds long, they’re perfect snapshots...

Paolo Virzi’s The Leisure Seeker wastes no time getting started. No sooner are we introduced to its world than we are listening to a phone call of a son screaming at his sister that their sickly old parents...

Self-indulgent, glacially slow, and painfully boring, Robert Guédiguian’s The House by the Sea is atrocious. It’s baffling that it made it through the screening process to play in Competition at Venice,...

Generally the first exposure to foreign film for a British child is in a French lesson towards the end of term. Over the last decade or so, 2004’s The Chorus and the 2008 Palme d’Or winner The...

S. Craig Zahler’s follow up to the hallucinatory Bone Tomahawk was always going to be something unique, but very little can prepare you for Brawl in Cell Block 99. By a wide margin the strangest thing at...

Legendary director William Friedkin steps behind the camera for another exorcism – this time a purportedly real one that he gained exclusive access to the Vatican to film. It should be a knockout, but...

Alexander Payne kicks off the 2017 Venice Film Festival with a strange, ambitious, and often pummellingly downbeat story. After Norwegian scientists make the miraculous breakthrough of cellular miniaturisation...

In Frantz Franco-German relations in the wake of the Great War are explored, but at its heart Ozon has crafted an old-fashioned movie that nevertheless pulses with a modern vitality. The setup is simple...

To Mel Gibson and Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge is a shot at redemption. For Garfield, it’s to be taken seriously again after the failure of the Amazing Spider-Man films. For Gibson, well, it’s a lot more...