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.
01.09.2023 - 17:45 / deadline.com
Back in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos led the so-called Greek Weird Wave with the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth, an unsettling exploration of a family of teenagers kept from the world by their father in a gated estate that they could never leave. The family is rich, so they can have anything they want except the wide world and their freedom; even sex can be bought in.
Lanthimos’ Poor Things, screening in competition in Venice and certainly one of the most eagerly awaited films at the festival, is packaged very differently. A sort of period film (which period is hard to pinpoint, although more Belle Epoque than anything else) it is stuffed with extravagant costumes and sets that make Disneyland look restrained, all cut from the same spangled cloth as the royal romp The Favourite, Lanthimos’ last film. Strip away the decoration, however, and Poor Things is actually a return to those first concerns of Dogtooth: essentially, what it is to be a human animal.
At the heart of Poor Things – which is based on a novel by the late Scottish novelist Alaisdar Gray, and scripted by Tony McNamara – is a raw innocent called Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) whose history is truly bizarre, even by Lanthimos’ standards. Bella is a grown woman who, when we first meet her, behaves like a toddler. She spits out food, throws plates around to see what happens when they fall, throws tantrums, has trouble balancing as she walks and knows only a few words that she has yet to learn to join up as sentences. This big baby is under the care and control of Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a surgeon of brilliant mind, irascible nature and a man so grotesquely scarred that he appears to have been put together from spare parts.
Perhaps he was; his father was also a surgeon
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.
The Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion has been given to a winner!
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).
Peter Sarsgaard and Cailee Spaeny were among the winners at the 2023 Venice Film Festival!
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.
Patricia Arquette is stepping out for the premiere of her directorial debut!
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.
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.
Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Neon has acquired worldwide rights to Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” ahead of its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, will also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Origin” will be released in theaters later this year.
Total admissions to theatres at this year’s Venice Film Festival have hit 114,851, up 18% on last year, according to figures published by the Biennale this week, as the film event passes the midway point.
The devil is in the details. Pink-nailed toes scrunching on a pink carpet; a packet of false eyelashes; piles of chips in a Vegas casino; the pills. Always the pills: squeezed in a palm that opens to reveal its little white prize; lined up in bottles on the bedside table; slipped into a pocket on the way to school. “Maybe the pills are too much,” ventures Priscilla Beaulieu to her boyfriend Elvis Presley, after one of his flares of temper where she just manages to dodge his fist. “I have doctors looking after me,” he growls. “I don’t need a second opinion.”
Marta Balaga Move over, Richard Donner. In “Behind the Mountains,” premiering in Venice’s Horizons section, Mohamed Ben Attia makes sure “you’ll believe a man can fly” once again. Although it might not be as graceful.
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.
Gabriel Guevara has been arrested.
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”.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Spanish actor Gabriel Guevara, star of Spanish Amazon Prime teen film franchise “My Fault,” has been arrested during the Venice Film Festival on alleged sexual assault charges, the fest has confirmed, specifying that the teen idol was not on the Lido for anything related to the event. Guevara, 22, had arrived on the Lido yesterday, which he publicised in several Instagram posts.
Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor “Sex is back,” said Julie Hintsinger, executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, to a packed house of festival-goers as they took in the newest effort from Yorgos Lanthimos at this year’s 50th anniversary. One of the festivals tributes this year, a pre-screening convo was moderated by director Karyn Kusama, as the two discussed his filmography which included his early works “Kinnetic” and “Alps.” In the audience were Oscar winners like director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and actor Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”), and they, along with the crowd, devoured it.
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.