‘Finally Dawn’ Review: Lily James & A Starry Cast Can’t Save A Painfully Dull Italian Drama [Venice]

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian multi-hyphenate Ilaria Borrelli’s Arabic-language feminist drama “The Goat” – featuring Mira Sorvino and John Savage, alongside a stellar Egyptian cast – is set for back-to-back launches at Egypt’s upcoming El Gouna Film Festival, followed by the closing film slot at the Rome Film Festival. A rare, if not unique, case of an Arab production directed by an Italian, “The Goat” stars young Egyptian TikTok star Jessica Hosam as an 11-year-old pregnant orphan named Hadya who after being forced into marriage becomes the target of a western corporation that seeks to control the only water source in her village.

Sean Durkin’s wrestling drama, The Iron Claw, is the latest in a string of upcoming A24 theatrical releases to get cleared for a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement.

READ MORE: Toronto International Film Festival 2023: 26 Must-See Films To Watch At TIFF A transformation suddenly bubbles to the surface right around the crucial first-act closing mark of the period drama, “Widow Clicquot.” And it’s not a second too late. About the widow who nearly single-handedly transformed Veuve Clicquot into the world-renowned champagne brand it is today, just as the film threatens to suffocate the viewer with the dreary, stately, oh-so-proper and drab sheen of tragedy and frumpy dourness that overwhelms so many dowdy period dramas of this ilk, it froths to life, its cup running over.

Uh oh! Liam Payne is back in the hospital!

Stephen Saito Cages can’t contain the sheer amount of imagination on offer in “Sing Sing” — not just in the way director Greg Kwedar and his writing and producing partner Clint Bentley conceived of the prison-set drama, but also as an animating force among its characters. Apart from Colman Domingo and a few others, most of the cast are formerly incarcerated alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, which stages theatrical productions at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

The high-concept elevator pitch description for Christy Hall’s “Daddio” would probably be something along the lines of “‘Locke’ as a two-hander,” or maybe “‘Collateral’ without the killing,” though it’s better than either of those loglines might lead you to believe. The premise is a simple one: Dakota Johnson (never named on-camera) plays a young woman coming home to New York who takes a cab from JFK to her home in Hell’s Kitchen.

Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) lives behind an exceptionally well-locked door. Her apartment has three locks of different kinds, keeping out anyone who managed to get past the intercom protecting the front entrance. As a woman living alone with a teenage daughter, perhaps she has her reasons. Just tonight, a man followed her home from her high school reunion, catching the same train, shadowing her from the station and finally sleeping outside her building under a plastic bag. Strangely, she is quite blasé about that: In the morning, she deals with it, demanding this man’s phone and finding someone in his contacts who can come and pick him up.

It’s hard to encapsulate the cinema of a particular filmmaker in just one word, but if one were to try their hand at it with Mexican maverick Michel Franco, a word that’d come to mind is violence. The filmmaker’s work is built upon the looming expectation of violent transgression, society standing flimsy atop the fragile idea of cordiality.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, who is a two-time Cannes jury prizewinner, with “Gomorrah” in 2008 and “Reality” in 2012, is in competition at the Venice Film Festival for the first time with his immigration-themed drama “Io Capitano.” Shot in Senegal, Italy and Morocco with a cast of largely non-professional actors, “Io Capitano” narrates the Homeric journey of two young African men, Seydou and Moussa, who decide to leave Dakar to reach Europe. Garrone’s own company, Archimede, produced with RAI Cinema and Belgium’s Tarantula Film as a co-producer. The drama is backed by Pathé, which is handling world sales through Pathé International.

Netflix has unveiled more cast, trailer (see below) and first-looks for its highly-anticipated Chicken Run sequel.

You don’t need to know much about the criminal justice system to understand its broken, biased, and grim nightmare— unfair, unjust, unforgiving, a bureaucratic Kafka-esque hellscape you never want to be trapped within. Turkish filmmaker Selman Nacar (“Between Two Dawns”) understands this all too well—he was a law student for several years before switching to filmmaking and saw all the flaws in the legal justice system firsthand.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera is adamant about his decision to place six Italian movies in this year’s 23-title festival lineup. “Nobody accused the French of chauvinism because they had seven French films in competition in Cannes this year,” Barbera quipped to a snarky Italian reporter when the Venice lineup was announced in July, though he did concede, “It’s true that in the past I have not done this.” Indeed, Barbera’s previous limit on Italian movies in competition for the Golden Lion was five titles last year, which some local critics considered a stretch.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Vicky Krieps, best performance prize winner in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard for “Corsage,” will star as Sophie Toscan du Plantier in six time-Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan and David Merriman’s “Re-creation,” which is being presented in the Venice Gap-Financing Market. The docu-drama, which centers on the brutal murder in 1996 in Ireland of French film and TV producer Toscan du Plantier, has been co-written and will be co-directed by Sheridan, best known for “My Left Foot” and “In the Name of the Father,” and Merriman.

It’s hard to believe that it’s now over 60 years since Roman Polanski teamed up with Jerzy Skolimowski for the landmark 1962 Polish thriller Knife in the Water. But it’s even harder to believe that these two giants of international cinema reunited more recently to pool their braincells and come up with the most terrible, joyless farce since the heyday of the ’70s British sex comedy. Forget for a moment, if you can, the furor surrounding Polanski’s controversial status as a fugitive from justice and concentrate instead on the fact that the Venice Film Festival, in its infinite wisdom, went ahead and booked this entirely dreadful offering anyway, deeming it somehow worthy of a prestigious Out of Competition slot.

A scene early in Ibrahim Nash’at’s chilling new documentary “Hollywoodgate” makes clear the stakes of Nash’at’s undertaking. Invited by the Taliban to film a top leader, the new air force commander Malawi Mansour, and a lower-ranking Taliban Mukhtar, after the departure of American Troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Mansour makes clear his feelings about the documentary and Nash’at.

Before “Maestro” plunges into the sharp monochrome of its first chapter, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein relays to a camera crew how he can still feel the presence of his wife within the walls and gardens of their beautiful countryside manor. “I miss her so much,” he says, the passage of time denounced by the sprawling maze of wrinkles that frames his youthful blue eyes.

Despite its soft-sounding title, Stefano Sollima’s crime drama is a gripping call-back to the heyday of poliziotteschi movies, a peculiarly Italian genre that dealt with inter-gang wars in a country where the police were often more venal than the bad guys. Adagio, though, takes a unique tack, borrowing from Martin Scorsese’s fatalistic masterpiece The Irishman to portray to tell a story in which a trio of gangsters — one blind, one suffering early-onset dementia, and another with terminal cancer — are forced to reunite against a team of bent cops involved in an elaborate blackmail plan.

The glory days of Cinecitta are evoked in Finally Dawn (Finalmente l’Alba), a sprawling story of uncertain tone – sometimes thrilled, sometimes appalled and sometimes as generally bewildered as nervous ingenue Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), an ordinary young woman of Rome who finds herself leading the way through this warren of a Wonderland. Cinecitta has recently revived its fortunes after a long slump, with a slow build of refurbishment and expansion, but director Saverio Costanzo leans heavily into nostalgia for times past, setting his story in the ‘50s when there were still legions of centurions marching around the studio lot and live animals awaiting their close-ups. A lion features here, roaring at passers-by. It may well be the film’s most sympathetic character.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Mousy and diminutive, to the point that she practically disappears beneath a frizzy bramble of brown hair, Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci) adores movies. In “Finally Dawn,” she stumbles into one, drafted into being a featured extra on a swords-and-sandals epic shooting at Cinecittà. Doing so makes Mimosa a potential target in a meandering true-crime-adjacent period piece inspired by the death of Wilma Montesi, which plays like an Italian spin on the Black Dahlia case.

Mads Mikkelsen has proved time and again a master at playing quiet, rational, and seemingly harmless men who, when pushed, swiftly reveal themselves also to be skilled executioners; their pent-up rage does not bubble up so much as shoot out of them in sudden bursts of ultraviolence. Mikkelsen proves it once more in “The Promised Land,” the new period drama that reunites him with his “A Royal Affair” Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and premieres in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival this week.