'Apples' ('Mila'): Film Review | Venice 2020

Greece and Catalonia. The result sounds like a mix of Otis Spann, Charles Ives, James Booker, George Gershwin and Thelonious Monk, times two.

Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).

There are still idealistic young writers out there aiming to transform the world, at least in China, and the newsroom drama The Best Is Yet to Come (Bu zhi bu xiu) catches the viewer up in the fast-paced story of an untutored youth from the provinces who breaks a scoop on hepatitis B.

Christos Nikou was there at the start of the Greek Weird Wave as the assistant director on Yorgos Lanthimos' dark comedy Dogtooth (2009), the movie that launched the absurdist cinema movement partly inspired by the chaos in Greece triggered by the global financial crisis. More than a decade later, Nikou is adding his own twist to the movement with his assured directorial debut.

Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

An accidental death in the family turns the lives of five orphaned sisters upside down in The Macaluso Sisters (Le sorelle Macaluso), the second of Emma Dante’s theatrical works to be filmed by the author and playwright. The story is set in lower middle-class Sicily, where five young women struggle to fend for themselves in a big apartment overlooking the sea.

It’s not easy to grab hold of Julia von Heinz’s And Tomorrow the Entire World (Und morgen die ganze Welt), an attempt to describe what motivates a young political activist of the German nobility to embrace the warm chaos of a social commune, where she mulls over the use of violence in the class struggle with like-minded souls.

Set in 1940 in Kobe, Japan, with an epilogue during the bombing of the city in 1945, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intriguingly titled Wife of a Spy (Spy no Tsuma) bookends the Second World War in an absorbing, exotic, well-paced thriller with moments of disconcerting realism and horror. Its spot in Venice competition is a well-earned promotion for the director after his many accolades for films like Kairo, Tokyo Sonata and Before We Vanish.

The three children of a poor Portuguese couple (Lucia Moniz and Ruben Garcia) living in London are forcibly removed from their home by social services, raising questions about responsible parenting and duty of care in director Ana Rocha de Sousa's emotive feature debut Listen. Although the script by Rocha de Sousa, Paula Vaccaro and Aaron Brookner tries to be at least a little bit balanced, the rules-obsessed authorities don’t come out of it well.

At a time when America looks like it's tearing apart at the seams, there’s something altogether reassuring — even downright inspiring — about Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, City Hall, which chronicles municipal life in his old hometown of Boston.

In Night of the Kings (La Nuit des rois), a young man thrown into the infamous La Maca prison in Cote d’Ivoire is forced to invent a story that lasts until sunrise or face the consequences like some kind of modern-day Scheherazade.

With a compassionate eye for the downtrodden that has characterized all Gianfranco Rosi’s work, Notturno brings three years of shooting in Middle East war zones to the screen in an impressionistic collage of ordinary people caught up in conflict.

The scene is nighttime, a rented house in Beverly Hills, the only sources of light a few hurricane lamps and a fireplace blaze. An offscreen interviewer sets the conversation in motion, apologizing for kicking things off with "a real heavy question." The unseen speaker is Orson Welles, his voice booming with authority, and as he spars with Dennis Hopper over the next two-plus hours, there are no light questions, no easy lobs.

A girl living between countries and cultures, and between adolescence and adulthood, tries to come into her own in the Franco-Algerian coming-of-age drama Honey Cigar (Cigare au miel). This is the debut feature from filmmaker Kamir Ainouz and if that name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s the half-sister — and near-homophone — of Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Ainouz.

Emptiness and longing afflict the sad residents of a wealthy gated community outside an ugly Polish city, until a mysterious visitor arrives offering massages with his strong, healing hands. At that point they realize what is missing from their lives and find it almost within their grasp.

Gia Coppola’s first feature Palo Alto chronicled teenagers stumbling toward adulthood way back in distant 2013; her new Mainstream, bowing in Venice’s Horizons section, features a trio of 20-somethings plundering the Internet culture of their time, bartering their values for big cash and followers on social media but still, of course, looking for love. It's a messy, childish scrawl of a film, but it is high on energy.

Boxing champion Nicola Adams will be spending less time the gorgeous home she shares with her girlfriend Ella Baig after signing up for Strictly Come Dancing 2020.The Olympic gold medallist, who was on holiday in Greece when it was revealed she had joined this year's line-up, will be going into training ahead of her appearance on the BBC dancing competition.

A minimalist deadpan dramedy with serious political undertones, Gaza Mon Amour offers up a vision of the Palestinian situation at once realistic and absurdist, revealing how even the simplest of love stories can be thwarted by a repressive government, collective human foibles and an ancient Greek statue with a major erection.

In a welcome sign for a struggling independent film market, the Venice Film Festival kicked off this week with a series of international deals. Sony Pictures Classics picked up worldwide rights, outside of Italy, for Luca Guadagnino’s documentary Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, which covers the life of fashion icon Salvatore Ferragamo.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentDaniele Luchetti’s “The Ties” (“Lacci”), the first Italian film to open the Venice Film Festival in 11 years, garnered warm reviews on its world premiere on Wednesday evening, and has been sold by MK2 Films in a raft of territories around the world.MK2 Films has been able to lure major distributors in key markets, notably France (Pyramide), Spain (Caramel), Latin America (Synapse), China (Huanxi), Portugal (Midas), Greece (Weirdwave), Austria (Thim),