Venice Review: Carolina Cavalli’s ‘Amanda’

A reformed criminal goes on the run in The Hanging Sun, an adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s novel Midnight Sun. The author also co-writes the screenplay of this fiction feature debut from Francesco Carrozzini, the photographer who helmed the documentary Franca: Chaos and Creation. The closing film of Venice Film Festival, it’s well performed and gripping enough, though geographically confusing.

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. 

Ben Croll Venice’s red carpet became a stage for quiet protest on Friday, as festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore, among many more, held a somber walk-out to stand in solidarity with imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Traffic on the red carpet flowed normally as attendees made their way into Venice’s Palazzo del Cinema for the world premiere of Panahi’s latest film, “No Bears.” And then, at 4:30 pm sharp, the doors to the theater swung open and a sea of people filed out. Moore stood with a delegation that also included fellow juror Audrey Diwan, Horizons jury president Isabel Coixet, and filmmakers Laura Bispuri and Sally Potter.

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.

Chris Pine's rep is denying a fan theory. In a statement to ET, the 42-year-old actor's rep shuts down claims that Harry Styles spit on Pine at the premiere of their flick, at the Venice Film Festival. «This is a ridiculous story… a complete fabrication and the result of an odd online illusion that is clearly deceiving and allows for foolish speculation,» Pine's rep tells ET.

Myrmecology is a study of science that looks at the life, society, and hierarchy of Ants. Early Myrmecologists believed that Ant culture was utopian and thought by studying them in encased Ant farms, they could find solutions to human problems. However, in Gianni Amelio’s Italian post-WWII drama, The Lord of the Ants (Il Signore Delle Formiche), flips this idea around. It examines why strict societies foster cultures of oppression where everyone must play their role or be punished. The screenplay by Amelio, Federico Fava, and Edoardo Petti chooses its dialogue with precision. They want us to know they resent post-Mussolini Europe and how not just homosexuals but anyone on the margins is oppressed under fascist rule. 

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.

Reviews of Olivia Wilde’s psychological drama “Don’t Worry Darling” premiering at the Venice Film Festival are now out. And while it’s a little too early to land on a consensus (our review is mixed), unless you’ve been living under a rock, the film and the spectacle surrounding it have threatened to become one of the biggest, nosiest dramas of the year.

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.

Even before the title flashes up for Venice Film Festival competition entry L’Immensita, we know that Penelope Cruz is the most fun mom – most likely the only fun mom – in town. She doesn’t just set the table for dinner; she puts on music, leads the kids in a choreographed dance and singalong as they pass plates and cutlery, emoting into a passing fork as if it were a microphone. Adults bore her. At a birthday dinner for an ancient relative, she slips under the table to join her children in removing and mixing up everyone’s shoes. “I want to play!” she says, eyes gleaming.

Irina Shayk and Stella Maxwell are looking so chic on the red carpet!

Penelope Cruz turned heads in two amazing looks at the 2022 Venice Film Festival this weekend!

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.

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.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety has been given exclusive access to a first-look clip for “Amanda,” Carolina Cavalli’s quirky Italian-cool film in Venice Horizons, starring Benedetta Porcaroli (star of Netflix series “Baby”), and featuring Italian heavyweight Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and Italian “X-Factor” winner Michele Bravi. The film, which is reminiscent of early Wes Anderson, premieres at Venice on Monday, then goes to Toronto – it’s the only Italian film to play both fests this year. Charades is handling international sales. I Wonder is distributing in Italy. The film centers on Amanda, 24, who lives mostly isolated and has never had any friends, even if it’s the thing she wants the most. When she discovers that as toddlers her and Rebecca used to spend a lot of time together, Amanda chooses her new mission: to convince her that they are still best friends.

Jodie Turner-Smith has given us an incredible denim moment on the red carpet!