Adam Driver Is a Hitler Studies Professor in Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise’ Teaser

Manori Ravindran International Editor High-profile espionage cases in the post-war period often invoke the grisly fate of the Rosenbergs, the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed by electric chair for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union in peace time. But in the new documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” filmmaker Steve James tells the incredible story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who shared classified nuclear secrets with Russia — and got away with it. The Participant and Kartemquin Films-produced documentary, which has its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 2, is one of a number of films at this year’s festival that tackle the topic of nuclear disaster: Projects from Noah Baumbach’s feature adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” through to Oliver Stone’s on-the-nose documentary “Nuclear” all contemplate some aspect of our nuclear past and future.

Man, the 20th century really thought it was something, didn’t it? Thankfully, in the middle of the 1980s, just when Western (read: American) culture was fully losing the run of itself in a frenzy of gum-snapping consumerism and prescription narcotics, Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise” appeared — you might almost say manifested — as a mischievous, mindbending 326-page reminder to the century that it wasn’t, in fact, all that.

The BFI London Film Festival has unveiled its full list of titles, with the program comprised of 164 features and 23 world premieres across film and TV.

Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.  The model, 41, made sure to show off her endless pins in the hot pink number with very daring thigh-high splits and a chiffon cape.  She wowed the crowds as she walked the red carpet at the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi.

has officially kicked off, with stars including Adam Driver, Tessa Thompson, and even Hillary Clinton turning out for the opening gala. White Noise, starring Adam and Greta Gerwig and directed by Noah Baumbach, opened the annual festival, with celebs showing out in force on the red carpet. Adam suited up in a tuxedo, while co-star Greta stunned in a beautiful black gown.

Venice Film Festival got off to a quieter start on Wednesday night with the premiere of “White Noise.” Noah Baumbach’s Netflix-backed adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig was met with a tepid 150-second standing ovation, a short smattering of applause on the Lido.“White Noise,” which is set in the ‘80s, features an array of Easter Eggs for movies of the era from “Back to the Future” to “E.T.” Some of these references might have gone over the head of the Venice crowd. The film, which was met with mixed reviews, is a twisty, talky family drama about the despair of a married couple (played by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig) facing their own mortality.

and knockabout laughs — are the trickiest to make breathe onscreen.But it moves with purpose from the get-go as composer Danny Elfman’s Coplandesque strains herald a new school year coming to life for Jack, a protective husband/father in a bustling family with kind, attentive fitness instructor Babette (a crispy-permed Greta Gerwig) and their hyperaware brood: contrarian know-it-all adolescent Heinrich (Sam Nivola); observant tweener and eating-health monitor Denise (Raffey Cassidy); and littler ones Steffie (May Nivola) and Wilder (Jodie Turner-Smith). At his college, Jack’s popular Hitler Studies class has a rock-worship tinge, and at the orderly supermarket gleaming with candy-colored name brands, shopping is the family’s regenerative power source (while news footage of calamities are their favorite home entertainment). In private, though, Jack and Babette can barely manage their palpable everyday dread — Lol Crawley’s textured suburbia cinematography turning one imaginatively directed bedroom nightmare of Jack’s into something out of an existentialist “Poltergeist.” And Babette’s private popping of a mysterious white pill hasn’t gone unnoticed by Jack or Denise.But when a semi crashes into a train carrying toxic chemicals, creating a black cloud and a mass evacuation to a crowded highway and a cramped scout camp, mortality comes front and center, bonding everyone in fear, conspiracies, and speculation.

is going to arrive in force, isn’t it?Please?That’s the feeling in the community I like to think of as Hollywood’s Kudo-Industrial Complex. That community limped through one year, 2020, in which theaters were closed, film festivals were canceled or moved online and almost all the shows were virtual; and a second year, 2021, that started out to be a cautiously muted season but was then blindsided by a COVID resurgence that forced a return to streaming and virtual events.Now, as the Venice Film Festival begins on Wednesday, followed by the three-day Telluride Film Festival on Friday and then the mammoth Toronto International Film Festival next Thursday, there’s a palpable yearning for things to return to normal.

The 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off Wednesday night with an emotional opening ceremony celebrating 90 years of the event, the world’s oldest festival that first launched in 1932.

Don DeLillo’s post modernist 1985 novel, White Noise has been long desired by filmmakers trying to crack the nut of how to bring the complex dark comedy to the screen. Barry Levinson made an attempt that didn’t come to fruition in 2004. Director Michael Almereyda was announced in 2016, also going nowhere. James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films had it optioned at one point. But it seems entirely appropriate that it should finally land into the hands of Noah Baumbach, a self-professed mega fan of the book he read first in college in the late 80’s  and saw it as a very satiric yet accurate account of the sad state of affairs of the world at that time. However by 2021 when he got around to adapting and directing the first of his own films he didn’t write as an original screenplay, the multiple themes running though the book not only were still relevant, they seem more of this time then the 37 years since the book’s publication.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are stepping out to support their new movie.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic As a filmmaker, Noah Baumbach has always been a dyed-in-the-wool dramatic realist, talky coastal neurotic division. He hasn’t always been as good at it as he is today; “The Squid and The Whale” (2005), the divorce drama that established his reputation and is held in supremely high regard by many cinephiles, isn’t half the movie that “Marriage Story” is. The latter film was Baumbach’s culminating achievement after 25 years as a writer-director, and it brought his strengths to a new pitch of mastery: his ability to nail the dynamics of troubled relationships in all their frayed layers, his extraordinary skill with actors, and the nimble levity of his dialogue, which emerges from the human comedy as surely it did in the great films of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky.

Manori Ravindran International Editor “Everything is extra!” blurts out Don Cheadle at the press conference for “White Noise” at the Venice Film Festival. The Noah Baumbach-directed film, an adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel, opens the Italian festival on Wednesday night, and is nothing if not theatrical, as its cast members explained at length before the screening. “When [Baumbach] started re-reading the book, I did too,” said Greta Gerwig, who is Baumbach’s real-life partner. “[The writing] has this quality that makes you want to say, ‘Listen to this!’ and read sections out loud. There’s a performative quality to it; you want to share with other people. It seemed to be both emotionally and intellectually exciting.”

Noah Baumbach passed through the Lido Wednesday afternoon where he broke down the origins of his Venice Film Festival opener White Noise, starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle.

Brace yourselves, Noah Baumbach fans: “White Noise” has its world premiere in just five days at the Venice Film Festival. Baumbach’s latest also opens up the New York Film Festival this year, too, before it hits Netflix later this year.

Netflix has shared the first teaser for White Noise, an upcoming black comedy film from writer and director Noah Baumbach.The film is based on Don DeLillo’s 1985 dystopian novel of the same name, and stars Adam Driver as a professor of Hitler studies who, alongside his wife Barbette — played by Greta Gerwig — must save his family from an apocalyptic event threatening his university town. Watch the teaser above.Lifting a quote from the source material, which earned DeLillo the U.S.

Viewers are getting their first look at Noah Baumbach’s latest project, “White Noise”.

Now that we are in August, with fall on the immediate horizon, we know what that means: It’s time for prestige pictures from renowned and acclaimed directors to take hold of the moviegoing consciousness. With the honor of having its world premiere as the opening film for the Venice International Film Festival on August 31st, as well as opening the New York Film Festival on September 30th, the new film from writer-director Noah Baumbach can safely fill that bill.

The debut trailer for writer/director Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise just debuted online!