‘The Disciple’ Is A Profound Study Of A Failed Artist [Venice Review]

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.

Choose your fighter: Orson Welles, recently back in LA after a decade of European exile, and embarking on a project so meta he will emulate the film’s director-protagonist and die at 70 never having finished it; or Dennis Hopper, mere days after the end of an 8-day marriage, struggling to edit the metafiction that will kill his directorial career for nearly a decade? The documentary, “Hopper/Welles,” cutely credited to Welles as director, but put together by “The Other Side of the Wind” producer

Jessica Kiang The existential road movie gets an offbeat, elliptical yet peculiarly compelling Transcaucasian makeover in director Hilal Baydarov’s second fiction feature, “In Between Dying.” Set against the striking, often purgatorially stark backdrop of Azerbaijan’s rural landscapes, with their striated mountains, autumn forests, fog-shrouded fields and silvery pebbled lakesides, it’s a film indebted to its influences.

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.

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.

So somebody somewhere one day had a thought: “What if ‘Die Hard’ except a school shooting?” and not only didn’t they immediately check themselves for other symptoms of lead poisoning but thought, “Yep, that’s a winner” and went on to make the movie.

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.

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.

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 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.

An audacious what-if scenario lies at the heart of Regina King‘s poised, well-crafted but conceptually conflicted directorial debut, “One Night in Miami,” a high-minded drama that plays as an all-star real-life Black superhero team-up: What if newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay, singer Sam Cooke, NFL record breaker Jim Brown and a Malcom X on the cusp of breaking with the Nation of Islam, spent the pivotal night of February 25, 1964 sparring, bickering and mutually inspiring

Close your eyes and imagine what Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” would evolve into if its tone were more uplifting than unsettling and its protagonist wasn’t preying on humans but trying to heal them. That new material would remain a film about a mysterious entity coming into a foreign land, or planet, and peculiarly engaging with its inhabitants—who may never unearth the origin or exact motivations of their unannounced guest.

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

Over a year after Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant loosed each other’s corsets and fell in love in a French Cannes film, and less than a week before Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet are due to do the same in coastal England at TIFF, Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby play American, mid-19th century secret lesbian lovers in Mona Fastvold‘s Venice competition title “The World to Come,” a beautiful and quiet, seasons-spanning tale of poetry and pining pioneerwomen.

It’s a proper shame we’re not allowed physical contact at the moment, because Quentin Dupieux‘s “Mandibles,” among its many other silly pleasures, offers up a modified fist-bump-style handshake that could easily have swept the Venice Film Festival campus as the greeting du jour any other year.

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.