‘Un Couple’ Review: Frederick Wiseman’s Stylistic Exercise Is Pleasant, Albeit Plain [Venice]

Maverick in training. Lewis Pullman is not only praising his dad, Bill Pullman, for his generous influence, but also his Top Gun costars Tom Cruise and Miles Teller.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the little-remembered 1950 noir “The Damned Don’t Cry,” Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her late son spurs her to make a new life for herself in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa’s exquisite new film of the same title is named expressly for that Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of that film and others of its ilk into the kind of new-school-old-school heart-tugger — one might say tearjerker if its characters weren’t, true to its title, stoically dry-eyed throughout — that might have been designed for the shoulder-padded diva were she alive in 2022 and, perhaps more crucially, of Moroccan heritage. 

Brie Larson is hard at work on the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lessons in Chemistry!

Cate Blanchett steps out onto the beach in her red palm tree outfit and red sunglasses on Wednesday (September 14) in Venice, Italy.

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. 

Jessica Kiang When the definitive book on dissident filmmaking is written, it will have at least several chapters and a lengthy appendix dedicated to Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who has now covertly made five astonishingly resourceful features since being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian authorities in 2010. But given those circumstances, perhaps the biggest ongoing surprise of his career has been just how lively his illegally shot films have been — even while, as metafictions, they refer continually to the hampered circumstances of their creation. “No Bears,” which premieres in competition in Venice, certainly starts in that register, with a rugpull or two and handful of seriocomic, absurdist observations on the foibles of Iranian village life. But then, as though it were anticipating the worsening political situation which culminated in Panahi’s detention in July 2022 for a six-year prison sentence, the mood darkens, prior to an ambiguous but devastating finale which seems to even include the director’s own tendency toward playfulness in its critique. If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, “No Bears” is where he slams on the brakes. 

Since tying the knot in 2014, George Clooney and Amal Clooney have made the world their own personal runway. The lovebirds make red carpet style look easy, stepping out in coordinated looks that serve up timeless fashion inspiration.

No film at the Venice Film Festival not called “Don’t Worry Darling” has attracted such morbid fascination as Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe not-a-biopic, “Blonde.” Turns out that “morbid” qualifier is soft, to say the least: to call “Blonde” relentless would be about as immense an understatement as one can conjure of a movie that subjects its lead, Ana de Armas’ fictionalized Monroe, to two hours and forty-seven minutes of unending sexual torture, leering voyeurism, and devastating dehumanization.  READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch Much has already been made about the X-ratedness of it all, but god, this is — by design — soul-sapping stuff, leaving you bloodied and brutalized.

Writer/director Florian Zeller cannot manage to reproduce the magic of “The Father” with his latest film, “The Son.” This latest screen adaptation of Zeller’s trilogy of stage plays about families falling apart, co-written with Englishman Christopher Hampton, expands its setting outside the limited confines of a single apartment – yet somehow manages to feel less cinematic. Without a clever conceit to elevate the material, this domestic drama is a mostly middling piece of maudlin manipulation.

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.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

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.

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.

A man scribbles in his diary. The pages are visible by dim light, the wooden table nondescript.

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.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Frederick Wiseman, a voracious reader, doesn’t watch television. In fact, he’d never really gotten through a whole series until recently, when he watched HBO’s “The Wire.” “I don’t know why, but it was interesting,” he tells Variety drily. Every couple of years, the 92-year-old master documentarian behind such seminal films as “Titicut Follies” and “Juvenile Court” has churned out a sprawling documentary fixated on a microcosm of society or some sort of social issue, but when the pandemic paused those efforts for two and a half years, it’s Wiseman’s literary proclivities that drew him to Sofia Tolstoy’s writing for his new fiction film “Un Couple,” which premiered Friday in Venice’s Competition section.