Fresh from a tumultuous Venice and a Madison Garden concert in between, Harry Styles was back on the festival circuit this weekend for the Toronto world premiere of Michael Grandage’s My Policeman.
01.09.2022 - 14:11 / deadline.com
Lars von Trier stoically put in an appearance at the Venice Film Festival via video link on Thursday for the premiere of his upcoming series The Kingdom Exodus, making his first international appearance since announcing in August that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
The Oscar-nominated, Cannes Palme d’Or winning Danish director said he was feeling better following his diagnosis.
“I am doing good, but the shaking will take some time to fight. I’m feeling better but a little bit more stupid than I used to be so that says a lot,” he said to applause from the press corps.
The Kingdom Exodus, the third and final instalment of von Trier’s rebooted 1990s cult supernatural TV show The Kingdom is already creating strong buzz ahead of its Out of Competition screening on Thursday.
The trilogy initially began in the 1990s and is set in a hospital built on top of the old bleaching ponds in Copenhagen, where evil has taken root.
Von Trier said the conditions under which he had made the latest instalment had been very different from the first season.
“The first episodes were made with very little time and very little money and this time I worked on it for three and a half years.”
The show is being represented physically in Venice by producer Louise Vesth and cast members Bodil Jørgensen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and Ida Engvoli who attended the press conference in person.
Jørgensen, who plays a sleepwalking woman called Karen at the heart of the new season, explained that she regarded her new role as a continuation of her first collaboration with von Trier in the 1998 feature The Idiots, in which she also played a woman called Karen.
“In my world, I’m the same woman, 30 years older. For an actor to revive things after so
Fresh from a tumultuous Venice and a Madison Garden concert in between, Harry Styles was back on the festival circuit this weekend for the Toronto world premiere of Michael Grandage’s My Policeman.
Looking dapper in a blue blazer, Oliver Stone is chit-chatting with the press inside a glass box on the terrace of an antiquated hotel on the Venice Lido. He’s been posing for a few photos and doing rounds of interviews during this afternoon of rain that has somewhat dampened the festival glamor.
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.
Marta Balaga Casting director Bonnie Timmermann, behind such films as “Heat” and “Dirty Dancing,” finds herself on the opposite side of the camera in Venice doc “Bonnie,” directed by Simon Wallon. Brian Cox, Mark Ruffalo, Benicio del Toro and Melissa Leo are featured, while Kinology is handling sales. “It’s almost as if she was the one being auditioned. I wanted to treat her almost like a character in a movie. She is looking straight into the eyes of the audience,” says Wallon. Adapting to the new role was hard, Timmermann tells Variety in Venice, but luckily it came with some perks.
Oliver Stone is in Venice this year to debut his latest documentary, Nuclear. Written alongside political scholar Joshua S. Goldstein, the film sets out to re-examine the role nuclear power can play in our lives and makes the case that the energy source is humanity’s only realistic alternative to fossil fuels in the fight against climate change. Deadline sat down with Stone and Goldstein prior to the film’s premiere on the Lido to discuss why the pair decided to link up and how the lengthy production process almost “took the life” out of Stone.
Chris Pine's rep is denying a fan theory. In a statement to ET, the 42-year-old actor's rep shuts down claims that Harry Styles spit on Pine at the premiere of their flick, at the Venice Film Festival. «This is a ridiculous story… a complete fabrication and the result of an odd online illusion that is clearly deceiving and allows for foolish speculation,» Pine's rep tells ET.
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.
Fans can’t get enough of this Chris Pine video.
Reviews of Olivia Wilde’s psychological drama “Don’t Worry Darling” premiering at the Venice Film Festival are now out. And while it’s a little too early to land on a consensus (our review is mixed), unless you’ve been living under a rock, the film and the spectacle surrounding it have threatened to become one of the biggest, nosiest dramas of the year.
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.
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.
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.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Venice Film Festival title “Music for Black Pigeons,” directed by Danish filmmakers Jørgen Leth, best known for “The Five Obstructions,” and “The Lost Leonardo” helmer Andreas Koefoed, has debuted its trailer with Variety. The documentary, which premieres on Tuesday in Venice’s Out of Competition section, explores the lives and processes of some of the world’s most renowned and prolific jazz musicians, including Jakob Bro, Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Paul Motian and Midori Takada. Leth, who has directed more than 40 films including landmark works such as “A Sunday in Hell” (1977) and the surrealist short “The Perfect Human” (1968), returns to Venice after his feature documentary “The Five Obstructions,” which he co-directed with Lars von Trier, screened on the Lido in 2003.
Film premiere and headlines spilling from a trio of fests in full swing (Venice), just starting (Telluride) and queued up (Toronto) have indie exhibitors and distributors the most hopeful since Covid hit that a stream of new films could fire up the arthouse market.
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.
Alpha Violet founding co-heads Virginie Devesa and Keiko Funato are in Venice this year with Indonesian filmmaker Makbul Mubarak’s first film Autobiography, which plays in Horizons ahead of trips to TIFF and London BFI among other festivals.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Hillary Clinton and Universal’s Donna Langley praised U.S. director, producer and social justice activist Ava DuVernay for being “a pathbreaker, a change-maker, a historical filmmaker,” as Clinton put it, during the 13th DVF Awards. The gala was held Thursday on the sidelines of the Venice Film Festival by fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg to honor extraordinary women. The former U.S. secretary of state noted that DuVernay – who is among this year’s DVF honorees – “became the first African American woman ever nominated for an Academy Award as director [for “Selma”]. “Yes, her visionary works about Black histories and experiences are more relevant today than ever,” Clinton added. But Clinton went on to further praise DuVernay for “opening doors not just for herself, but for so many others.”
Naman Ramachandran Danish auteur Lars von Trier is coming to terms with continuing his distinguished career with Parkinson’s Disease, which he has been diagnosed with. The filmmaker did a press conference and select media interviews via Zoom for the Venice Film Festival, where his latest work, MUBI and Viaplay series “The Kingdom Exodus,” premiered. He was diagnosed some four months ago, but has had it for a longer time, von Trier said in a group media interview. “That means that I had not lived up to the way I wanted to be as a director, because I was ill. And that’s a pity for the [“The Kingdom Exodus”] actors, but I think they did okay,” von Trier said.
The 49th Telluride Film Festival opens Friday in a much-awaited edition that is set to feature world premieres of Searchlight’s Oscar hopeful Empire of Light from director Sam Mendes, starring Olivia Coleman and Colin Firth; Women Talking from director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand in the ensemble; Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh; and Sony/Netflix’s sizzling new version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover with Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell; among other films.
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “The Kingdom Exodus” begins with a joke, and for the next five hours, it never gets serious, not even for a second. That’s not what you might expect for the long-delayed finale to Lars von Trier’s made-for-TV horror series, though it sure makes this over-the-top return to the haunted Rigshospitalet — that big, brutalist medical center in the heart of Copenhagen — a lot more fun. For all of two minutes, von Trier tricks us into thinking that maybe this third season is going to look like a polished, peak-TV miniseries of the sort you might find on HBO or Netflix (after all, the original series came out in 1994, one year before the artifice-renouncing Danish revolution that was Dogme 95, and von Trier has since gone back to making dark fantasies with heightened style). We open on a closeup of a woman’s eye, ideally lit and steadily framed, reflecting a TV screen on which a tuxedoed von Trier appears, a quarter-century younger, over the credits of Season 2’s final episode.