'I Am Greta': Film Review| Venice 2020

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

Early in the Georgian feature Beginning, when the central character's husband is dealing with a crisis in the religious community he leads, she confesses her own urgent predicament. "It's as if I were waiting for something to start," Yana tells him.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a middle-aged couple facing an existential crisis in Supernova, a poignant portrait of love in autumn from young British writer-director Harry Macqueen. Firth and the London-based Tucci have been friends for years, notching up several shared screen credits already.

Greta Thunberg’s climate protests and transatlantic boat journey feature in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary about her life.

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.

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.

At such a young age, Greta Thunberg has become the face of a worldwide discussion. The teenager found herself at the center of the climate change discussion after she bravely protested in her native Sweden.

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.

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.

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.

Nathan Grossman had no idea what he was in for. Back in August 2018, the Swedish documentarian heard from a friend about a teenager who had decided to stage a protest — a "school strike" — in front of the Swedish Parliament, demanding action on climate change.

Guy Lodge Film CriticWho is Greta Thunberg? On the one hand, practically everybody on the planet knows: She’s the Swedish teenage climate change activist with the Pippi Longstocking braids and the stern, strident oratorical style, who has resolved to be a thorn in the side of all major world powers until they make her environmental agenda their top priority.

A documentary on teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, making its premiere Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is seeking to remind a world consumed with the coronavirus crisis that the climate crisis is just as urgent and isn’t going away.

coronavirus crisis that the climate crisis is just as urgent and isn’t going away.Thunberg appeared by video conference from school on Friday for the Venice launch of “I Am Greta,” which is screening out of competition.