‘Lubo’ Review: Riveting Performance From Franz Rogowski Anchors Tale Of Dislocation And Deception – Venice Film Festival

Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.

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).

The story of the harrowing 1972 crash of the airplane carrying members of the Uruguay Rugby team in the remote snowy mountains of Argentina has been told cinematically a few times before. There was a rather crass version released in America as Survive! in 1976, and later a notable take on the story from director Frank Marshall called Alive through Disney studios and starring Ethan Hawke and others in 1993.

Marta Balaga In Giorgio Diritti’s film “Lubo,” based on Mario Cavatore’s novel “Il seminatore,” Franz Rogowski seduces as Lubo, a Yenish traveling performer, father and husband, who has to join the Swiss army in 1939. He is one hell of a charmer, although his passion has dark undertones. “Our take is more playful, but the book put more emphasis on the fact that this man impregnated over 100 women in Zurich.

Ben Croll Seated before a photo of filmmaker Sarah Moldoror, panelists at this year’s Women in Film roundtable shared strategies for greater industry parity, while reflecting on recent successes and standstills in that ongoing pursuit. Variety has been give access to the video of the panel discussion.

Everyone assumes Mathieu’s life is marvelous. He is a popular film actor, as evidenced by the waiters and receptionists who take it upon themselves to give an appreciative commentary on his film career as they serve the soup or sign him into a hotel. He is married to a celebrity news anchor. When he checks into a spa retreat in a seaside town otherwise deserted for the winter, he finds a glossy magazine with his face on the cover next to one of the relaxation chairs. The story inside has him talking about his marvelous life, in particular his forthcoming stage debut, with accompanying quotes from his highflying wife. This is the woman who was too busy even to say goodbye before he came here. But the worst of it is that he is there: He has pulled out the play. When it came to it, he was afraid to do something new. Nobody knows it yet, but he is a failure.

There’s been a lot of jealous talk about nepotism in the film world lately, but who would really want to come into the movie world as a, what, fourth-generation Huston? There are likely swords already being sharpened for Jack Huston, the handsome, charming, 40-year-old nephew of Anjelica, grandson of Jack and great-grandson of Walter. But his directing debut, Day of the Fight, which premiered this week in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons Extra section, is certainly worthy of the family name. It’s a little earnest, sometimes a bit too style-conscious, and Huston is inclined to put performance before story every time. But the emotional input really earns its payoff in a confident, imaginatively mounted calling card.

Jessica Kiang For around half of the entire last century, there was a semi-official policy enacted by the Swiss state to forcibly separate the children of “itinerant” parents from their families. The program, known as “Kinder der Landstrasse” (“Children of the Road”), was ostensibly designed for the protection of such children from the perils of vagrancy and criminality which the state imagined rife among the traveller population.

In Ava DuVernay’s 7th feature, Origin, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival tonight, the exploration of caste systems as a mode of oppression takes center stage. Written by DuVernay and Isabel Wilkerson, the film is adapted from the latter’s book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. The narrative delves into the deep-seeded intricacies of caste and how it underpins much of society’s discrimination, sometimes transcending even race. The film stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, and includes performances by Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood and Connie Nielsen.

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.

The delicate balance between personal emotions and professional responsibilities forms the core of the first two episodes of Jasmila Zbanic’s I Know Your Soul. Starring Jasna Duricic, Lazar Dragojevic, and Ermin Bravo, the show examines familial bonds, societal expectations, and the shadows that secrets cast over relationships. With the first two episodes directed by Alen Drljevic, the series promises an exploration of complex human emotions, social pressures and intricate mysteries that don’t just lie outside but within the very confines of our homes.

Richard Linklater brought his Hit Man to the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, world premiering the comedy thriller out of competition to a six-minute ovation inside the Sala Grande.

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

“I feel like there’s a sort of mouth over the city, ready to eat us up,” says Enea, sophisticated young nightclubber, tennis champion and coke dealer; if anyone is trying to swallow the Eternal City whole, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mother hosts a television chat show about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the city’s most exclusive sports club, the city’s most exclusive parties and, even more thrillingly, rendezvous with the criminal classes, homespun proletarians to a man. “You need to marry Eva, have a child with her, make her happy. If you have no one to kiss, you go crazy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and family man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of work and with the company he keeps, Giordano isn’t going to last that long.

As if to come to the aid of her national cinema after the debacle that was Roman Polanski’s The Palace, Poland’s Agnieska Holland, soon to turn 75, restores some of her homeland’s cultural dignity with a devastating exposé that angrily, and quite brilliantly, questions its humanity and political integrity. At 144 minutes, and in black and white, it is not exactly a Trojan horse, and its moral rigor does not come with a spoonful of sugar. But Green Border earns every second of that running time, and with a focus and energy that belies its directors age. Awards-wise, this may prove to be the international feature to beat.

The plan was for renowned director William Friedkin to be appearing at the Venice Film Festival presenting the out of competition World Premiere of his latest production, an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s 1954 play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Unfortunately Friedkin died August 7th, but the show goes on anyway.

In principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin. But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world. The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.

Bertrand Bonello is a director, like Bruno Dumont, whose ascent to date has been quite closely associated with the Cannes Film Festival, so it is a surprise to see his latest — a two-hander starring French movie queen Léa Seydoux — make its debut on the Lido. It is sure to be just as divisive here as it would on home turf, but, for those willing to accept its longueurs and absurdities, The Beast is a provocative piece of sci-fi that follows Twin Peaks: The Return down the rabbit hole of dream logic, spanning three time zones in a surreal but compelling examination of human relationships.

Roman Polanski’s Venice Film Festival feature The Palace received a 3 minute ovation tonight at its world premiere screening.

Five years after his triumphant A Star is Born world premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Bradley Cooper is back on the Lido with Maestro. Except, the director and star is only here in spirit owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike.