‘Run Hide Fight’ Is Exactly Why No One Ever Asked For A School-Shooting ‘Die Hard’ [Venice Review]

James McClain In case you hadn’t heard, social media is now big business — top influencers can pull down six figures for a single sponsored post or brand deal, while Facebook is one of the world’s biggest companies — and few know that market better than tech mogul Justyn Howard.

Composed of a series of striking tableaux, Gianfranco Rosi’s contemplative documentary, “Notturno,” mines the intergenerational conflict on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Bruce Haring pmc-editorial-managerMobile platform Quibi has ordered a Die Hart sequel from Kevin Hart and LOL Studios.

Will Thorne Staff WriterKevin Hart is coming back for more action at Quibi.The short-form content platform has renewed Hart’s comedy action series “Die Hart” for a second season, which will be called “Die Harter.”In the first season, which Quibi bills as its most-watched show of the summer, Hart played a version of himself trying to step out of the role of “comedic sidekick” by going to the world’s greatest action star school.

Unfurling an entire life of failed artistic ambitions in the span of a two-hour film, Chaitanya Tamhane’s remarkable sophomore feature “The Disciple” is decidedly leisurely in its approach. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Tamhane’s film centralizes the world of Hindustani classical music, in which singers perform an improvised raga, modulating their voices depending on the singer’s emotional state.

In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based).

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Beydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Beydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.

It's been 17 years since Gus Van Sant stunned and polarized audiences with Elephant, his transfixing, oddly lyrical response to the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, a national tragedy now almost normalized by the sickening frequency of mass shootings that have continued to stain American soil. A number of films in the years since have reflected on school shootings in provocative ways, among them We Need to Talk About Kevin, And Then I Go and Vox Lux.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIf “‘Elephant’ meets ‘The Hunger Games'” is your idea of an enticing elevator pitch, you’re unlikely to be disappointed by “Run Hide Fight,” though you might want to take a long hard look at your enthusiasm. Kyle Rankin’s fictitious school-shooting thriller echoes multiple previous films in its evocation of post-Columbine classroom terror, before dubiously distinguishing itself by assuming the perspective of one female student tough enough to fight back.

Nancy Tartaglione International Box Office Editor/Senior ContributorWriter-director Kyle Rankin’s school shooting drama Run Hide Fight debuted out of competition at the Venice Film Festival today, and made for a press conference that focused largely on the issue of gun violence in the U.S.

Serious discussions on the perpetuated correlation between race and class in Mexico have dominated the country’s collective consciousness over the last few years. Cinema has actively participated in such reckoning, but never before as boldly as in Michel Franco’s “New Order (Nuevo Orden).” Bound to be contentious at home for its brutal depiction of a not-so-implausible and not-so-distant dystopia, the auteur’s latest shocks with blistering purpose.

Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic.

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

Pat Saperstein Deputy EditorNo one was more surprised than director Kyle Rankin when his new film “Run Hide Fight” was added to the Venice Film Festival lineup after the first group of titles had already been announced.The “Night of the Living Deb” filmmaker knew the story of the victims of a school shooter might draw controversy, but he wasn’t sure if it would resonate as much internationally, given that school shootings are far more prevalent in American than anywhere else.Isabel May stars in

The indie drama “Topside” opens with a startling image: a five-year-old girl sleeping on the ground with a beam of light shining on her from above. She’s underground living in the tunnels of New York beneath the subway system and she’s awoken by workers with flashlights.

June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over.

There are many kinds of documentaries one might want to see from “I Am Greta,” a Hulu portrait about famous teenage Climate Change activist and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg. One might hope for something akin to “The Inconvenient Truth,” with tons of sobering statistics and easy-to-understand graphs and charts led by the passionate teenager (you won’t find that here).

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

The human voice is Tilda Swinton‘s, but the directorial voice is all Pedro Almodóvar in the Spanish legend’s half-hour, English-language “The Human Voice.” Freely adapting – read: ruthlessly modernizing and thoroughly Almodovarizing – the play by Jean Cocteau (material the director has circled around before, most evidently in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Law of Desire“), despite its brevity, his new film is deceptively roomy, allowing us to pace through the superbly