Cinema Verité Meets Sci-Fi in Venice Production Bridge Buzz Title ‘Nothing But the Truth About Extraterrestrials’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Sofia Coppola drew from her own experiences in telling the story of Priscilla Presley.

It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).

With three competition titles across the last four editions, no contemporary filmmaker has been more present on the Venice Lido than director Michel Franco. 

Christopher Vourlias The fall festival circuit features a powerhouse lineup of Polish cinema that showcases an industry in full stride, with hard-hitting topical dramas, award-season hopefuls and potential box-office breakouts highlighting the strength and diversity of filmmaking in a country with a storied cinematic history. Among the hotly anticipated premieres at this week’s Toronto Film Festival is “The Peasants,” a lavish, hand-painted animated feature from the filmmaking team behind Oscar nominee and box-office sensation “Loving Vincent.” Meanwhile, three-time Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland will be on hand for the North American premiere of “Green Border,” her searing portrayal of Europe’s refugee crisis that just bowed in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: The Veterans is launching international sales on upcoming UK period comedy Fackham Hall at Toronto and has unveiled first members of the ensemble cast.

Director Sofia Coppola’s biopic “Priscilla” made its debut at the Venice International Film Festival, where Coppola was joined by the film’s subject, Priscilla Presley, and stars Cailee Spaeny (who plays Priscilla Presley) and Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley).

Not so much beginners as people who never get a fair go, the mixed bag of gay men and women in Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping For Beginners, showing in Venice’s Horizons section, lives on a knife’s edge. Dita (Anamaria Marinca) owns the house where they jostle along together. Her Roma partner Suada (Alina Serban) has a teenage daughter Vanesa and another daughter, Mia, who is only five. Suada is volatile, belligerent and dying of cancer. Death is focusing her mind in alarming ways. Swear to look after the children, she shouts at Dita, holding a knife over her own arm.

Priscilla Presley went through an emotional experience as she watched “Priscilla,” the new film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Priscilla Presley’s emotional reaction to Sofia Coppola’s film: ‘Only being 14, you look back and look ‘Why me?’’Priscilla Presley knew something was ‘not right’ days before Lisa Marie’s death: ‘I still can’t believe it’Premiering in Venice over the past week, “Priscilla” is based on the memoir “Elvis and Me,” written by herself and follows Presley’s life and romance with Elvis. “It’s very difficult to sit and watch a film about you, about your life, about your love,” said Presley.

With 12 reviews so far, Roman Polanski’s latest film, “The Palace,” currently sits at a horrendous 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Polanski hasn’t really had a hit film in a very long time and has also been at the center of controversy for decades, but a 0% is still really rough, with some reviews calling it the worst movie of the year.

Sofia Coppola’s new film about Priscilla Presley is earning rave reviews.

The tears flowed for Priscilla Presley following the world premiere of Sofia Coppola’s biopic, “Priscilla”, in Venice on Monday.

Guy Lodge Film Critic About 20 minutes pass in “Enea” before someone asks the young, handsome, splendidly attired title character what he does for a living, during which time audiences are likely to be wondering the same thing. This, to be fair, is not a negligent omission in writer-director-star Pietro Castellitto’s script, which tells us early on that Enea, the elder son of a wealthy Roman family, ostensibly manages a high-end sushi restaurant, atop an assortment of more underhand dealings.

On its surface, a comedy about a college professor who becomes a phony hitman for the police department to catch criminals hoping to whack a stubborn spouse or bothersome business associate might seem an odd fit for a European festival noted for heavy dramas and extended runtimes. It helps, of course, that Hit Man, which premieres at Venice Film Festival this evening, is directed by Richard Linklater, a noted master of independent filmmaking for more than 30 years, and that initial reactions to it have been universally effusive.

William Friedkin’s last film The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will make its U.S. premiere on October 6 on Paramount+ with Showtime.

Late Oscar-winning Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was celebrated at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday with the Out Of Competition premiere of concert film Opus.

Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla got a rousing response at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Monday evening. The pic, a biopic of Priscilla Presley, who was in attendance for the move based on the memoir she co-authored, scored a 7-minute, 45-second ovation.

Jacob Elordi towers over Cailee Spaeny at the premiere of Priscilla during the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

The devil is in the details. Pink-nailed toes scrunching on a pink carpet; a packet of false eyelashes; piles of chips in a Vegas casino; the pills. Always the pills: squeezed in a palm that opens to reveal its little white prize; lined up in bottles on the bedside table; slipped into a pocket on the way to school. “Maybe the pills are too much,” ventures Priscilla Beaulieu to her boyfriend Elvis Presley, after one of his flares of temper where she just manages to dodge his fist. “I have doctors looking after me,” he growls. “I don’t need a second opinion.”

The most powerful aspect of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” premiering in Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is in the title: to focus on Priscilla Presley, née Wagner, formerly Beaulieu, is to show a side of a marriage and of the King himself less familiar than and in some ways different from the romantic popular legend. But Coppola’s film does much more than simply show us the facts of how a fourteen-year-old girl gets to become the girlfriend and then wife of one of the biggest artists of all time.

A quote by William Friedkin himself opens “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” describing the film, as well as all the filmmaker’s other works, as being about “the thin line between good and evil.” This line is all the thinner here, in the American director’s final feature, for it is entirely a matter of opinion. We are not given to see the facts of this story as they unfolded; we cannot watch and make up our own minds as to whether the people involved were right or wrong to act the way they did.