Venice Review: Paul Schrader’s ‘Master Gardener’

A disparate group of characters collide in Dry (Siccita), a semi-apocalyptic drama premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Paolo Virzi directs this glossy portmanteau film that assembles a strong cast for overlapping storylines and satirical social comment. 

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. 

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age (concessions to modern sensitivities have to be made, and digital cinematography somehow just doesn’t cut it with the subject matter), it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz have joined the raft of famous faces making appearances at the Venice International Film Festival. The Hollywood heavyweights were pictured in apparent good spirits, as they arrived for the event on Tuesday evening ahead of the premiere of their film Dead For A Dollar. The pair star in the Western, which is written and directed by Walter Hill, alongside actress Rachel Brosnahan.

Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe buddy up on the red carpet for the premiere of their movie, Dead For A Dollar, during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6) in Venice, Italy.

can judge a film by its title. Consider “Dead for a Dollar:” It certainly sounds like a Western, doesn’t it? The “dollar” might call to mind some of the classics of the genre, while the “dead” at least promises a few good shoot-outs, a bit of bloody fun.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

Dead For A Dollar stars Christoph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt pose with director Walter Hill at the film’s photo call during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6).

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. 

Paul Schrader is under no illusions about “Master Gardener,” the sure-to-be-divisive final chapter in an informal trilogy that kicked off with 2017’s “First Reformed” and continued with last year’s “The Card Counter.” For starters: the film centers on a former white supremacist (played by Joel Edgerton) and his attempts at redemption. “This one is going to piss people off,” Schrader told IndieWire of the film, which premiered out of competition this weekend at the Venice Film Festival, where the auteur is also being given a lifetime achievement award.

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.

Blended families, where children alternate between parents and spend their lives with an assortment of half-siblings or kids from their parents’ previous relationships, are now so normal that it’s easy to overlook how painful the blending process can be. Bitter separations, disrupted households, new beds and new people appearing in them, the resentments children feel for the grown-ups’ failures and the interloping new partners pawing at the mom or dad who is rightfully theirs: none of this is easy, even in splits later described smoothly as “amicable.”

Paul Schrader is under no illusions about “Master Gardener,” the sure-to-be-divisive final chapter in an informal trilogy that kicked off with 2017’s “First Reformed” and continued with last year’s “The Card Counter.” For starters: the film centers on a former white supremacist (played by Joel Edgerton) and his attempts at redemption. “This one is going to piss people off,” Schrader told IndieWire of the film, which premiered out of competition this weekend at the Venice Film Festival, where the auteur is also being given a lifetime achievement award.

“The Kingdom: Exodus,” lurching unnaturally back to life nearly twenty years since Lars von Trier first plumbed the depths of madness contained within Copenhagen’s Rigethospitalet, has returned, and it is swarming with ghosts. The five new episodes serve as a continuation of the auteur’s ‘90s-era surreal gallows comedy while looking inward, making conversation with its own past as well as the sinister penumbra of history itself.

Joel Edgerton has the support of his partner Christine Centenera at his big premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival!

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

Gene Maddaus Senior Media Writer A man who met writer-director Paul Schrader at a campus event at their Michigan alma mater has filed a lawsuit alleging that Schrader later stole his ideas and used them in the film “The Card Counter.” Mark Vanden Berge alleges in the suit that he met Schrader after a screening of “First Reformed” at Calvin University, a Christian college in Grand Rapids, in February 2018. He says he told Schrader about a treatment he was working on for a film called “Blown Odds,” about a gambler’s search for redemption, and asked Schrader for help developing it into a marketable screenplay. According to the suit, Schrader told him to email him the treatment. Vanden Berge sent it to him, according to the suit, but never heard back from Schrader directly, though he says he was told that Schrader had received it.

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.

Naman Ramachandran Leads Sigourney Weaver, Joel Edgerton and Quintessa Swindell were thankful for the opportunity to work with revered writer-director Paul Schrader on his latest film “Master Gardener,” showing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. In a lively press conference on Saturday attended by the leads and Schrader, the filmmaker referred to the “lonely man in the room” archetype that he’s returned to in film after film beginning with “Taxi Driver.” “Hopefully, I’m done with him,” Schrader said. “I’ve always admired Paul’s work; never dreamed of working with him, because I’m not a lonely man in the room – I’m the lusty woman in the house,” Weaver said, adding that the “Master Gardener” role was one of the best she’s ever had. Weaver also thanked Schrader for writing two great parts for women in the film.