Venice Review: Gianfranco Rosi’s ‘In Viaggio’

“The Preamble to the Commitment to America,” which lays out their “Commitment to America” agenda for 2023, focusing on what they believe it truly means to be American. The thing is, some of the beautiful archival footage used in their video meant to highlight America, isn’t of America at all, but rather Russia and Ukraine.“America is exceptional,” the video posted on YouTube by Kevin McCarthy begins.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor There’s been no shortage of neo-R&B albums over the past few years, but so many of them are led by breathy female singers who feel like they’re singing in your ear — very few have had full-voiced singers at the forefront. And although Muni Long isn’t a belter and does put on the bedroom voice on a couple of tracks, her first full-length album is a blast of vintage ‘90s R&B that isn’t trying to be cute: It’s filled with frank lyrics about of love and sex from an artist who’s been around for more than a minute. Working under the name of Priscilla Renea, Muni has long been a songwriter whose soul and pop smarts helped forge hits such as Ariana Grande’s “Imagine,” Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It,” Rihanna’s “California King Bed,” along with tracks for Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Miranda Lambert, Selena Gomez and more.She released strong albums under that name too — 2009’s “Jukebox” and 2018’s “Coloured” — but neither of those records had the sparkle, innovation and warmth that her songwriting catalog contained. A change of name, an independently-released EP featuring the haunting, quirky hit “Hrs and Hrs,” and suddenly, Muni Long is a new artist with a remarkably seasoned and strong debut album.

Caroline Framke Chief TV Critic “Andor” is, both by design and circumstance, immediately different from its “Star Wars” television predecessors. Where “The Mandalorian,” “Boba Fett,” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” wove their biggest reveals into the larger fabric of the Lucasfilm universe, “Andor” doesn’t rush toward those moments that might make fans gasp out of pure recognition. Instead, it does something more surprising still: it tells the story of people who have nothing to do with Solos, Skywalkers or Palpatines, but whose lives matter nonetheless. Of course, at least part of the reason the series can take its time this way is because haunted hustler Cassian Andor (Diego Luna, also an executive producer) isn’t a brand-new character at all. As the reluctant hero of 2016’s “Rogue One,” which portrayed the rebel pilot mission to steal the Death Star plans which drive “A New Hope,” Cassian’s “Star Wars” legacy is already written. We already know Cassian’s life will eventually intersect with someone like rebel leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly, returning for more in-depth work in “Andor”). We already know his fate — dramatic and hopeful and unforgettable in those final minutes of “Rogue One” — and that it’s well and truly sealed.  

By this time, don’t we know just about everything there is to know about Alfred Hitchcock? Few, if any, other filmmakers have had their lives and careers examined, explored and analyzed as much as has the vaunted master of suspense. So unless incontrovertible evidence were to be suddenly found that the director secretly fathered a dozen illegitimate children by as many women and personally supplied Churchill with an untraceable poison powder to drop into Stalin’s tea in Yalta, only to see the prime minister chicken out, it’s quite unlikely that much new will ever be added to his life story that we don’t already know.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Though she’s just 22, Noah Cyrus has seen some stuff. As Miley’s younger sister, her music and acting careers launched early — at 16 and 2 (!), respectively — and she released several pop-leaning singles and EPs during her teens, opened an arena tour for Katy Perry in 2017 and was even nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 2021. On the less positive side, there was substance abuse, a bad relationship and lockdown isolation — but she overcame all of it, and that battle informs nearly every song on “The Hardest Part,” her long-percolating debut album, which sees her truly finding her voice in a way that her previous recordings only hinted at. Surprisingly or no, the Nashville native did it by returning home, musically speaking. Although her main collaborators here are Northern Irish producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975) and Australian songwriter PJ Harding (Chromeo, Ruel), the sound is country-leaning, heavy on harmonies, organic instrumentation and Music Row-friendly melodies; its big, stacked harmonies recall everything from the Chicks to Boygenius.

BreAnna Bell Tracee Ellis Ross is busier than ever despite closing the chapter on “Black-ish.” The actor, producer, entrepreneur and CEO’s focus has turned toward a list of projects including the Hulu/ OWN/ Onyx Collective docuseries “Hair Tales” (which she’s producing through her production company Joy Mill Entertainment), voicing the lead character in MTV’s animated Daria-spinoff movie “Jodie” and launching the podcast “I Am America.” In addition, she’s celebrating the three-year anniversary of her hair care company Pattern Beauty. During her keynote conversation at Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit presented by City National Bank, Ross explained how she keeps all these different pursuits in “harmony.”

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals today for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history.

Adam Benzine Guest Contributor Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras slammed the heads of the Venice and Toronto film festivals for “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by programming glossy documentaries from the Clinton family. Her comments come as TIFF this week hosted the Canadian premiere of Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a documentary about the artist and activist Nan Goldin, and just days after the film won Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. It is the rare doc to land slots at the superfecta of Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, and Poitras said she thought “long and hard” about whether or not to voice criticism at the same venues feting her latest work. Nevertheless, she said, “journalists need to ask hard questions.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

RELEASESDolly Parton has recorded a new version of her 1980 single ‘9 to 5’ with Kelly Clarkson. Just in case you ever wanted to know what Dolly Parton would sound like autotuned.Roddy Ricch has released new single ‘Ghetto Superstar’, featuring G Herbo and Doe Boy.Tom Odell will release new album ‘Best Day Of My Life’ on 28 Oct. “One year ago, almost exactly to the day, I set myself the challenge to write and record an entire album using only my voice and my piano with absolutely nothing else”, he says.

A Greater Manchester Police officer who tried to rape a woman in a 'deplorable' violent sex attack will have his sentence reviewed by the Court of Appeal.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer At this point, complaining about Disney’s deathless drive to cannibalize its entire library of animated classics into live-action remakes can feel as futile as complaining about capitalism itself. The studio has immense IP resources to exploit, a hungry well of content to fill, and a commercial imperative to introduce new generations of kids to the characters they’ll soon be expected to recognize on merch and in theme parks. And in truth, the studio could be doing a lot worse with these trawls through the archives. Once in a while genuine inspiration strikes (as it did with the gothy, revisionist “Maleficent,” or Jon Favreau’s visually inventive “The Jungle Book”), and even the least-fortunate of these remakes have mostly just been forgettable.

The cherry blossoms are blooming which means that The Real Housewives of Potomac are coming back to television. Bravo has confirmed that Season 7 of the franchise will premiere on October 9 at 8 p.m. ET with a 75-minute supersized episode.

After a lifetime spent creating outrage and offence, both on and off screen, Korean master Kim Ki-duk has left the world with this final film, finished by his friends after his death. The story of a passionate affair that curdles almost immediately into jealousy and hate – but ends on a lyrically wistful note – is a startlingly appropriate rogue’s epitaph.

Naman Ramachandran The subject of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the topics of discussion at the Venice Film Festival, bubbled to the surface again on Tuesday with Tilda Swinton making a statement with her hair dyed yellow. “It’s my honor to wear half of the Ukrainian flag,” Swinton said at the press conference for Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter,” when complimented on her look by a journalist. Swinton expressed that it was an honor later during the conference as well. The star wore a light blue top, which complements the dark blue of the Ukraine flag. Shot during lockdown, “The Eternal Daughter” follows an artist and her elderly mother who confront long-buried secrets when they return to a former family home, now a hotel haunted by its mysterious past. Swinton plays both mother and daughter. The names of the mother and daughter in the film are Rosalind and Julie, the names for Swinton and her real life daughter Honor Swinton Byrne in Hogg’s “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Francesco Zippel’s Sergio Leone doc, which premieres on Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival, is the first portrait of the Italian master made with full support of his children Raffaella and Andrea. Titled “Sergio Leone: The Man Who Invented America,” the high-profile doc is premiering in the Venice Classics section for docs on cinema. It features an impressive list of voices holding forth on what makes Leone special for them. Among these are: Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Giuseppe Tornatore, Frank Miller, Darren Aronofsky, Damien Chazelle and Robert De Niro (see clip). But aside from Leone’s visionary talent as a director what emerges is that as his career escalated from the so-called “Dollars Trilogy” to “Once Upon a Time in the West” through to his final masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in America,” Leone’s life was steeped in two inextricably linked passions: film and family. 

Ana de Armas keeps it casual while arriving in Venice, Italy on Monday (September 5).

last few days; at least, that’s what Charlie assumes. Given his 600-pound girth, given his blood is pressure is at drop-dead levels, and given his apparently years-long project of slow-mo suicide, one has little reason to doubt him.Our first look at the man only confirms those suspicions.

“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.