Venice Review: Nancy Buirski’s ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy’

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.

Ana de Armas is a proud actress. The 2022 Venice Film Festival comes to an end tomorrow and Thursday saw the world premiere of the highly anticipated film about Marilyn Monroe’s life, Blonde. Once the movie ended, there was a 14-minute long standing ovation.According to Variety, the Cuban-Spanish actress was glowing as tears ran down her face.

In his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy. In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family. Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.

The Emersons are modest people. Running a farm, along with raising children to be decent, God-fearing and hard-working, is an all-day, all-week business; there isn’t much time for pretension. Even among the rustling pine trees in their little bit of Washington state, however, teenage boys may pick at guitars, noodle out a few songs that sound a bit like the Eagles, imagine rock stardom and dream of being discovered. The true story of the Emerson brothers would be like thousands of others, except for the fact that they were discovered. And that they were discovered, thanks to the internet, 30 years too late.

The phrase “Joanna Hogg’s Shutter Island” is not a line that many critics expect to bust out in their lifetimes, but with her sixth feature the British director has made a fascinating foray into genre cinema that, while firmly in keeping with the rest of her quasi-autobiographical works, makes a surprising departure from the upper-middle-class realism of her signature film The Souvenir.

John Legend has clarified the reason why he is no longer close friends with Kanye West.During an interview last month, Legend – who has collaborated with West on numerous occasions in the past – explained that the pair’s political divisions proved to be too much to maintain their friendship.He told The Axe Files podcast: “[Kanye and I] aren’t friends as much as we used to be. I honestly think because we publicly disagreed on his running for office, his supporting Trump, I think it became too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly.”Speaking to the New Yorker, Legend has now talked about how many media outlets had “mischaracterised” his comments by focussing on former POTUS Trump as the main reason for their fallout.“Yeah, what it got described as was, we stopped being friends because he supported Trump, which was a mischaracterisation of what I said,” he told the NY.

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.

Though it sets out on a ghost hunt, Adrian Sibley’s fitfully fascinating documentary works better as an exploration of its subject’s public and private personas, charting Richard Harris’ rise from local sports star to screen legend via an unexpected heyday as a chart-topping pop star in 1968.

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.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Roberto De Paolis’ second film has such a heightened sense of the absurd — a playful, almost naïve tone that’s completely at odds with its subject matter — that it can only come from real life. That turns out to be very much the case in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section opener Princess, a story based on the true-experiences of Nigerian sex workers, many of them trafficked, in contemporary Italy. The result is a curiously queasy mix of comedy and drama that, while taking an admirable view of its lead character as a complex heroine rather than a victim to be pitied, falls into many of the same tropes in more cliched depictions of prostitution.

Darius Campbell Danesh was said to be “really excited” to appear in a Pop Idol reunion show just weeks before he sadly passed away.

Fans across the globe are mourning the death of Scots Pop Idol star Darius Campbell Danesh after he passed away at the age of 41.

Darius Danesh Campbell’s hit Colourblind has climbed to the top of the charts, almost exactly 20 years after it first went to number one. The singer and theatre performer was tragically found dead in his apartment in Minnesota last week, with his family confirming the news of his death on Tuesday 16 August. He was 41 years old.

Former Pop Idol judge Pete Waterman has said Darius Campbell Danesh "could have gone on to be bigger than Michael Buble" in a moving tribute. Waterman, 75, joined others from the music industry in remembering the Scottish singer and theatre star, who tragically died aged 41.The Glasgow-born performer's family announced his death in a statement on Tuesday, after he was found unresponsive in bed in his apartment room in Rochester, Minnesota, on August 11. Local police confirmed there were "no signs of intent or suspicious circumstances", with the cause of his sudden death unknown at this stage, according to the family.

A heartbreaking call has revealed the moment Darius Campbell Danesh was found unresponsive in bed. Former Pop Idol contestant and theatre star Darius, who was 41, tragically died at his apartment in Rochester, Minnesota on August 11.The cause of his death has not yet been confirmed.The singer, songwriter and actor first rose to fame on ITV show Popstars in 2001 performing a rendition of Britney Spears' Baby One More Time in his audition. He then won the nation's hearts on Pop Idol, coming third in the first series won by Will Young in 2002.

Simon Cowell has shared his own tribute following the tragic death of Darius Campbell Danesh. There was an outpouring of shock and sadness on Tuesday (August 16) when the family of the former Pop Idol contestant confirmed his unexpected passing, aged 41.

social media to share her condolences. Read more: Lorraine Kelly and Rylan lead Darius Danesh tributes as Pop Idol star dies just 41Taking to Twitter, the Consett-born singer and actress, wrote: "Still processing the new of Darius’s death, a big brother to all of us in popidol. I’ll always remember his wonderful warm tall hugs and his words of wisdom.