Venice Review: Steve James’ ‘A Compassionate Spy’

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Gianni Amelio’s “Lord of the Ants,” a biopic of Italian poet and playwright Aldo Braibanti, who was jailed in 1968 due to a Fascist-era anti-gay law, has reached the top spot at Italy’s box office following its launch from the Venice Film Festival. “Ants” on Monday reached the numero uno position at the local box office roster with a €483,474 ($487,000) intake from more than 300 screens following its September 8 release. While far from stellar in normal times, this result is being hailed as an encouraging sign for the country’s still sagging post-pandemic theatrical sector. Amelio’s film is now ahead of Japanese anime pic “Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo,” which was released as an event on Monday for a three day run, and “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” which is at the end of its run, following it’s Aug. 18 Italian outing.

Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Blue Jean, the directorial debut of Georgia Oakley which just world-premiered in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival. Pic stars Rosy McEwen and won Venice’s Giornate degli Autori (GdA) People’s Choice award. Magnolia plans to release the film next year.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Magnolia Pictures has acquired the North American rights to Venice Film Festival sensation “Blue Jean.” The directorial debut of Georgia Oakley, which just world-premiered in the Venice Days section of the Italian festival, is set in England in 1988, where Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government is about to pass a law stigmatizing gays and lesbians. The new legislation forces Jean (Rosy McEwen), a closeted gym teacher, to live a double life. But as pressure mounts from all sides, the arrival of a new student catalyzes a crisis that will challenge Jean to her core.

Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy, debunking powerful myths along the way.

The Ukrainian cast and crew of Luxembourg, Luxembourg — premiering in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival — today used their Lido photo call as a powerful call for support of Ukraine’s families.

Following the premiere of Olivia Wilde’s new film Don’t Worry Darling at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, one piece of footage prompted fierce online debate. The clip in question, however, wasn’t from the film itself but from its screening’s aftermath, and it depicts what many are convinced is Harry Styles spitting on his co-star, American actor Chris Pine.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin-based sales outfit M-Appeal has closed distribution deals for Italy and Greece following the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Israeli-Ukrainian co-production plays in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, and will have its North American premiere on Sept. 14 at Toronto Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Rome-based P.F.A Films Srl will distribute the film in Italy, with a theatrical release planned for April 2023. The company’s recent titles include “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” by Dominik Graf, “The Audition” by Ina Weisse, and “Border” by Abbasi Ali.

Grief and guilt are the twin quiet rivers running beneath Koji Fukada’s ambiguously titled Venice competition entry Love Life, a delicately tangled story of generational conflict and the silences that, without being overtly aggressive, can drive people apart. Anyone familiar with the work of Japan’s greatest cinema maestro, Yasuhiro Ozu, will recognize the general territory. It is a space within which tectonic social shifts are disguised under layers of traditional social observance, often involving large meals, and where profound emotions may be — and often must be — contained within a glance.

As the 49th Annual Telluride Film Festival comes to a close on this Labor Day holiday, it once again could be a fest that ignites the Oscar chances of a number of films that have either had their World Premieres or North American Premieres this weekend. As part of the so-called Fall Festival Trifecta of Venice/Telluride/Toronto (the latter beginning this Thursday), this is where the six month+ awards season officially starts, even if the even longer Emmy season doesn’t conclude until a week from today.

Colin Farrell suits up sharp for the premiere of his new movie, The Banshees of Inisherin, during the 2022 Venice International Film Festival on Monday (September 5) in Venice, Italy.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge stands next to partner Martin McDonagh during the premiere of his new film, The Banshees of Inisherin, during the 2022 Venice International Film Festival on Monday (September 5) in Venice, Italy.

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.

Christopher Vourlias On the eve of the 79th Venice Film Festival, where his powerful Ukraine war documentary “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” will premiere out of competition on Sept. 7, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky was in a frantic race against time. Footage was still being shot in Ukraine into the second week of August, with Afineevsky only completing the film on Aug. 31 — the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the A-list celebrities and foreign press at the festival’s opening ceremony, urging the world not to forget the war in Ukraine with the impassioned plea: “Don’t turn your back to us.”

Lots of stars stepped out to attend the annual Miu Miu Women’s Tales photo call this year!

Forget the overly poetic title, Makbul Mubarak’s terrific Indonesian thriller Autobiography — which premieres in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section — is a genuine discovery here, a taut and elegantly staged two-hander that transcends regional politics to make a profound comment on the state of the world today.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Venice Film Festival title “Music for Black Pigeons,” directed by Danish filmmakers Jørgen Leth, best known for “The Five Obstructions,” and “The Lost Leonardo” helmer Andreas Koefoed, has debuted its trailer with Variety. The documentary, which premieres on Tuesday in Venice’s Out of Competition section, explores the lives and processes of some of the world’s most renowned and prolific jazz musicians, including Jakob Bro, Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Paul Motian and Midori Takada. Leth, who has directed more than 40 films including landmark works such as “A Sunday in Hell” (1977) and the surrealist short “The Perfect Human” (1968), returns to Venice after his feature documentary “The Five Obstructions,” which he co-directed with Lars von Trier, screened on the Lido in 2003.

The beginning of Bones and All is genuinely the stuff of nightmares and could easily stand alone as a short, tapping into the American tradition of the urban myth while at the same time laying down a deceptively sophisticated narrative. The rest of Luca Guadagnino’s latest doesn’t quite maintain this level of mastery and tension, which is in some ways a blessing, but that’s possibly because Bones and All isn’t really a horror movie. After the shocking opening salvo, the film sheds its genre skin to become an almost anthropological study of outsiderdom, using the false dawn of the American 1980s as a sort of petri dish for a new kind of conformity that has led us where we are today.

To love is to want to consume someone whole, to pick their skin and sinews out of the gaps between your teeth, to swallow their pancreas and wash it all down with gulps of throat-fizzing stomach acid. Take the age-old question that dominates the Grindr lexicon: do you want to be someone, be with them, or be inside them? “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s typically sumptuous, deeply romantic American parable — about a pair of teen cannibals, coming of age against the backdrop of ‘80s Reaganism — literalizes this allure, as any great anthropophagist love story should.

Manori Ravindran International Editor It’s Timothée Chalamet Day in Venice. This isn’t a national holiday, but perhaps it should be. It’s just past 1:30 p.m. outside the Venice Film Festival’s Sala Casino, and a crowd of youth have set aside work and school commitments to travel into the Lido to catch a glimpse of the American superstar arriving for a press conference. Every generation has their movie star heartthrob — from Jonathan Taylor Thomas to Brad Pitt in the ’90s and Robert Pattison at the dawn of the Twilight movies. For many young women, Chalamet represents the pinnacle of Gen Z cool. The Chalamet stans arrived as early as 7 a.m. on Friday to catch a glance of Timothée. They are, not surprisingly, mostly female. They describe their favorite performances as “Call Me By Your Name” and “The King” but are mostly drawn to Chalamet because of his kind and friendly nature.

Alpha Violet founding co-heads Virginie Devesa and Keiko Funato are in Venice this year with Indonesian filmmaker Makbul Mubarak’s first film Autobiography, which plays in Horizons ahead of trips to TIFF and London BFI  among other festivals.