'The Disciple': Film Review | Venice 2020

Naman Ramachandran The 51st Edition of the International Film Festival of India, scheduled to be held at Goa from Nov. 20-28, 2020, has been postponed to Jan.

Lovers Rock, one of the five films in Steve McQueen's Small Axe anthology drama series for the BBC/Amazon about London's West Indian Community, has been added to this year's BFI London Film Festival. The film —starring newcomer Amarah-Jae St Aubyn and BAFTA Rising Star winner Micheal Ward (Blue Story) —will be one of the few films given a physical-only screening at the BFI Southbank, which much of the festival moved online due to the ongoing pandemic.

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Pathé's Venice-bowing comedy-drama The Duke for a range of territories worldwide, including the U.S. The distributor also picked up the film —starring Oscar winners Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren —for Latin America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe (excluding Poland, the Czech Republic and the former Yugoslavia), Russia/CIS, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, South Africa, India and Southeast Asia (excluding Japan and China).

“If you are the big tree, we are the small axe,” this is the Jamaican proverb that has inspired filmmaker Steve McQueen‘s, “Small Axe,” a collection of five films inspired by real-life events about ordinary people showing courage, belief, and resilience to overcome injustice and achieve something transformative in their West Indian community.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn the most transporting scene of Steve McQueen’s “Lovers Rock,” we’re at a London house party that has just hit its smoky seductive dirty-dancing groove. It’s 1980, and most of the revelers have West Indian roots.

Todd McCarthy Watching Lovers Rock is akin to going to see Romeo and Juliet and only staying through the first act, to departing a basketball game after the first quarter, to sipping the soup and skipping the rest of the meal. A mere wisp of a thing, Steve McQueen’s 68-minute feature, the only fictional section of a five-film anthology called Small Axe about London’s West Indian community between the late 1960s and 1980, steeps you in the atmosphere and music of the latter date.

Also Read: Steve McQueen's 'Lovers Rock' Set as New York Film Festival Opening Night FilmCinematographer Shabier Kirchner (“Skate Kitchen”) gets us so close to the action that we’re reminded of why students at Catholic high-school dances are always admonished to leave room for the Holy Spirit.This is very much an ensemble piece, introducing us to various members of London’s West Indian community, but our protagonist is Martha (Amarah-Jae St.

Also Read: 'Fireball' Film Review: Werner Herzog Looks to the Sky and Brings the WonderHerzog and Oppenheimer travel to meteorite craters all over the world, from the Caribbean to India to Antarctica, and in each place they wanted to research more than just the terrain.“I wanted to go to an impact crater where we wouldn’t just go to a hole in the ground. We would connect what we were seeing with deep oral traditions about the site, about a star that fell to Earth.

Mike Fleming Jr Co-Editor-in-Chief, FilmEXCLUSIVE: After blazing on the London art scene with work that won him the Turner Prize, Steve McQueen established himself as an important filmmaker who showed the unbreakable spirit of an Irish hunger strike in Hunger, and the horrors of antebellum slavery in 12 Years A Slave.

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).

Todd McCarthy Go-her-own-way director Chloé Zhao closes out her exceptional trilogy about the dispossessed and left-behind in the modern American West with Nomadland, a cool, contemplative look at contemporary American outcasts whose foothold in society grows more precarious with every passing year.

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.

Chris Willman Music Writer“‘Forrest Gump’ with a mantra” — that’s the underlying premise, in a nutshell, of “Meeting the Beatles in India,” which has filmmaker Paul Saltzman recounting the week he spent hanging with the Beatles under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi during their famous sojourn to the ashram in 1968.

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.

Ed Meza @edmezavarSweden’s Plattform Produktion is teaming up with Dutch production group Lemming Film on director Ena Sendijarević’s colonial drama “Sweet Dreams.”The film, which is set to shoot on location in Southeast Asia next year, follows tumultuous events triggered by the death of a Dutch sugar plantation owner who ends up leaving his Indian Ocean island estate to his young illegitimate son – the child of his Indonesian housemaid – upending not only his Dutch family’s plans but also

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.

coronavirus pandemic, Tamhane plans to be there.“It’s been my dream, in a way to, you know, (to) be in competition at the festival,” he said. “You know, there would be no bigger high than presenting the film in person at Venice.”“I started off almost like a journalist, you know, attending concerts, interviewing musicians and hanging out in these spaces that they inhabit.

Anna Tatarska Chaitanya Tamhane’s “The Disciple,” the first Indian film in Venice Film Festival’s competition since 2001, is set across three different time frames.

Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion in 2001, just before the Twin Towers fell. That’s a long time for a nation’s film-makers to sit on the sidelines, left out in the cold – assuming they ever saw it that way.