‘Other People’s Children’ Review: Virginie Efira Stuns in Moving Rumination on Parenting [Venice]

Olivia Wilde addressed all the drama surrounding her film "Don't Worry Darling" during a late night TV experience. Wilde confirmed that Harry Styles did not spit on Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival in early September while speaking to Stephen Colbert. "Spit-Gate," as Wilde referred to it, occurred after a video of Styles heading to his seat went viral on the internet.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box Filmshas acquired U.S. distribution rights to Alice Winocour’s heartfelt drama “Paris Memories” which world premiered at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and had a gala screening at Toronto. It’s one of the five finalists for France’s official submission to the 95th Academy Awards. The critically acclaimed film stars Virginie Efira as Mia, a survivor of the terrorist attack that hit Paris venues, including the Bataclan concert hall and several bistros, in November 2015. Three months after the tragedy, Mia still feels unable to pick her life back up so she sets off to investigate her memories to find a way back to happiness.

Marta Balaga With its seventh edition coming to an end, Venice’s Book Adaptation Rights Market (BARM) is already eyeing the future. The three-day event – taking place during the Italian fest – is now recognized as the third most important annual rendezvous by the publishers, states Pascal Diot, head of industry sidebar Venice Production Bridge. “It’s starting to be ‘the’ event for the publishers to attend,” agrees VPB’s Chiara Marin. “Before, I would go to all these book fairs and when I would mention Venice Film Festival, people would go: ‘What are you doing here?,’ ” she laughs.

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.

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Tessa Thompson rocked a new look at the latest premiere during the 2022 Venice Film Festival.

Sarah Ferguson has shared a moving tribute to the Queen, labelling her "the most incredible mother-in-law and friend" in a moving Instagram post.The Queen died at the age of 96 on Thursday afternoon, with family members including Charles, who now goes by the title of King, Queen Consort Camilla and Princess Anne. Sarah had been in Venice for the film festival and following news of the Queen's turn for the worst, she was seen getting onto a plane at the Italian city's airport. In a statement posted on Instagram late on Thursday night, Sarah shared her devastation at the Queen's death.

Blonde” debuted to a massive 14-minute long standing ovation during its world premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Ana de Armas, who plays Marilyn Monroe, was in tears at the screening, her face glowing as tears streamed down. Before the film’s world premiere Brad Pitt, who is among the film’s producers, de Armas, director Andrew Dominik, Adrien Brody and Julianne Nicholson created commotion on the red carpet, largely for Pitt who worked the crowds wearing a black Covid mask when he came into close contact with fans to sign autographs and do selfies. Pitt made a surprise appearance in Venice since he was not present at the film’s press conference earlier in the day. Dede Gardner, who is also among “Blonde” producers, was also on hand.

The Son star Hugh Jackman told the Venice press corps today that his role in the film has had an impact on how he behaves with his own kids. “For many, many years as a parent the job was to appear strong and dependable and never worried and I don’t want to burden my children. But certainly since this movie I’ve changed my approach. I share my vulnerabilities more with my 17- and 22-year-old and I see their relief when I do.”

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.

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.

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

Brendan Fraser has played plenty of big-screen heroes, ranging from “George of the Jungle” to Rick O’Connell in “The Mummy” movies, yet he believes his latest role — a severely obese man in “The Whale” — may be the most heroic character he’s ever played.

Blended families, where children alternate between parents and spend their lives with an assortment of half-siblings or kids from their parents’ previous relationships, are now so normal that it’s easy to overlook how painful the blending process can be. Bitter separations, disrupted households, new beds and new people appearing in them, the resentments children feel for the grown-ups’ failures and the interloping new partners pawing at the mom or dad who is rightfully theirs: none of this is easy, even in splits later described smoothly as “amicable.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.

French director Rebecca Zlotowski makes her Venice Film Festival competition debut on Sunday with drama Other People’s Children, casting the often neglected, sometimes maligned figure of the stepmother in a fresh light.

Ben Croll Some films spring from abundance, while others are born of a need. Premiering in competition in Venice, Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Other People’s Children” clearly falls into the latter camp. “I’ve often used cinema as a guide for living, only aspects of my own life hadn’t been told,” Zlotowski tells Variety. “I imagined a 40-year-old woman, nearing the end of her fertility, who is a stepmother to others, and thought, why hadn’t we seen that character before?”     Filling in the missing pieces, Zlotowski’s romantic drama follows Rachel (Virginie Efira), a Parisian high school teacher who feels pangs of maternity when she falls in love with a recent divorcé – and with him, his four-year-old daughter. Tinged in bittersweet tones, the film tracks the ecstasies of a new and all-enveloping love affair and the tradeoffs that arrive with mid-life relationships. Because in this particular love-triangle – as common in the real world as it is rare on screen – there are certain bonds a new partner cannot join.

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.

A lesbian gym teacher navigates Margaret Thatcher’s Britain under the “Section 28” law in Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s debut feature premiering in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival.