‘Bobi Wine: Ghetto President’ Review: A Portrait of Unfathomable Political Courage [Venice]

Iranian director Jafar Panahi remains behind bars in Tehran but his cinema continues to travel.

good nurse: attentive in her job, loving towards her children, eager to please. She’s also suffering from a heart condition; blood blisters have formed on her ventricles, and she requires a heart transplant sooner than later.

First a little warning. I had the good fortune to see The Good Nurse knowing absolutely nothing about it except it was a Netflix movie starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne. I had no idea which one was even ‘the good nurse’ of the title, and I was not familiar with the book it is based on, or even the fact it is actually a true story. For all I knew it was like a female version of Freddie Highmore in The Good Doctor. Netflix set up a screening for me at a local screening room. I sat by myself for two hours stunned by what I was seeing slowly take place, a turn of events I did not see coming as I realized I had the same experience in some ways as a viewer as Chastain’s character, Amy Loughren had in real life.

Standing between Steve Buscemi’s newest directorial effort, “The Listener,” and his last time on the director’s chair for the Sienna Miller-starring drama “Interview” is a whopping 15 years. Buscemi has been open about his desire to direct again, but nothing seemed to work out until Oscar-nominated writer Alessandro Camon knocked on his door, script in hand.

There’s always been a haunted mood in Joanna Hogg’s films, felt both in the deceptively mundane domestic rhythms of the likes of “Exhibition” and “Archipelago,” and in the exquisite memory pieces, “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II.” Like the best and most personal of storytellers—Chantal Akerman comes to mind as a creator with akin sensibilities—Hogg is a filmmaker possessed by the slivers of her recollections.

Julianne Moore sparkles her way down the red carpet for her latest appearance at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.

The tragedy at the center of “Love Life,” the new film from Japanese director Kōji Fukada which premieres in Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, does not come to disrupt a perfectly happy family. Cracks are visible in the facade of the life shared by Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) even before the fatal accident that claims the life of Keita (Tetta Shimada), her young son from a previous marriage.

Refresh for latest…: Ever since Olivia Wilde first introduced her sophomore directorial effort, Warner Bros/New Line’s Don’t Worry Darling, at CinemaCon last April, followed by a steamy trailer a few days later, anticipation surrounding the film has escalated — for various reasons. It’s now at a fever pitch here in Venice where the movie will world premiere this evening.

Will she, won’t she? Social media is abuzz with intrigue over whether Florence Pugh will be in Venice tomorrow as her film Don’t Worry Darling makes its World Premiere. This is a thing, because of rampant speculation there might be fireworks at the press conference, as inquiring minds ask director/co-writer and co-star Olivia Wilde to clarify comments she made about her New Line/Warner Bros movie, the circumstances of Shia La Beouf’s withdrawal, and the rumors that Pugh wasn’t happy when Wilde and La Beouf’s replacement Harry Styles reportedly began dating after they met on the set, and might have been distracted.

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

Mia Goth is celebrating her new film.

The greatest strength of Ti West’s “X,” the very A24 vibes ‘n all sex-slasher which premiered to tepid acclaim at South By Southwest earlier this year, was never its reverence for “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” nor its lurid ‘70s grit and grain, nor its abundance of pornstaches. No, no: a double-dipping Mia Goth was the lynchpin, be it caked in prosthetics as the melting, murderous octogenarian Pearl or starlet-in-the-making (with an aptly porn-y name) Max Minx.

Mia Goth is stepping out to support her new movie.

If you ever questioned it before, let “Bardo” — wordily subtitled ‘or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,’ as was the director’s wont with 2014’s “Birdman” — lay your queries to rest: Alejandro Iñárritu really, really loves Fellini. He’s not the only one, naturally: comparisons to “8 ½” are par for the course whenever a filmmaker comes out with a notionally autobiographical work, as with Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” in 2019.

A lesbian gym teacher navigates Margaret Thatcher’s Britain under the “Section 28” law in Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s debut feature premiering in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity — the stars of Ryan White’s inspirational and wonderfully engaging “Good Night Oppy” — were designed to last 90 days on the Red Planet. Instead, they went right on exploring the alien terrain for years, sending invaluable data and images back to NASA the whole time. For scientists, students and astronomy buffs around the world, the two robots became mascots for a historic mission, the goal of which was to find evidence of past water on Earth’s nearest neighbor, for that in turn could suggest the possibility of life on Mars. To call the MER experiment a success would be an understatement, but it wasn’t until this delightful documentary that a more important point became clear: As it turns out, for nearly 15 years, there was life on Mars: Within the opening minutes of “Good Night Oppy,” White convinces us that these two solar-powered, remote-controlled research tools weren’t just machines but sentient characters with personalities, every bit as relatable as Pixar’s lovable trash compactor, WALL•E, or the Johnny 5 droid from “Short Circuit.”

To love is to want to consume someone whole, to pick their skin and sinews out of the gaps between your teeth, to swallow their pancreas and wash it all down with gulps of throat-fizzing stomach acid. Take the age-old question that dominates the Grindr lexicon: do you want to be someone, be with them, or be inside them? “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s typically sumptuous, deeply romantic American parable — about a pair of teen cannibals, coming of age against the backdrop of ‘80s Reaganism — literalizes this allure, as any great anthropophagist love story should.

As a child growing up in the United States, you’re taught that betraying the country is a terrible act, punishable by death. Every morning, in most public schools, you’re forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which overtly puts your patriotism at the forefront of the day’s events.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Master documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose “Sacro Gra” won the Venice Golden Lion in 2013, is back on the Lido with “In Viaggio,” a doc about Pope Francis’ travels in which the director creates a counterpoint between archival footage and images that Rosi shot himself. Variety has been given access to an exclusive clip (above) from the film, which premieres in Venice on Sept. 5. In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his key issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war. Intrigued by the fact that two of Francis’s trips – the first to the refugees landing in the Sicilian island of Lampedusa; the second in 2021 to the Middle East – so closely mirrored the itineraries of the director’s “Fuocoammare” (Fire At Sea, 2016) and “Notturno” (2020), Rosi follows the Pope’s Stations of the Cross. “He sees what he sees, hears what he says,” the press notes point out, and interweaves archival footage of Francis’ travels with images taken by Rosi himself and recent historical events.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Those who make their allegiances clear still tend to keep all factions in their fanbases sweet by limiting divisive rhetoric, or filtering their politics through broadly palatable humanitarian causes; those who speak a little more frankly still risk the wrath of the public, the internet and their record labels alike. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting a little more directly involved in national politics than most such celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary symbolic stand — a certain path to honorable defeat that “Bobi Wine: Ghetto President” documents with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor.