Woody Allen’s ‘Coup De Chance’ Gets 5-Minute Ovation At Venice Film Festival

At this point in his career, moviegoers know Woody Allen more for his notoriety than his ability to make good films. Let’s face it: Allen’s late-career period has been waning since at least 2017’s “Wonder Wheel,” but arguably earlier than that.

Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.

It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).

Ben Croll Seated before a photo of filmmaker Sarah Moldoror, panelists at this year’s Women in Film roundtable shared strategies for greater industry parity, while reflecting on recent successes and standstills in that ongoing pursuit. Variety has been give access to the video of the panel discussion.

After just being officially confirmed for a SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement the day before, the cast of Memory hit the Venice Film Festival red carpet Friday night. Michel Franco’s movie, starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, was greeted with a seven-minute ovation during its world premiere inside the Sala Grande.

Not so much beginners as people who never get a fair go, the mixed bag of gay men and women in Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping For Beginners, showing in Venice’s Horizons section, lives on a knife’s edge. Dita (Anamaria Marinca) owns the house where they jostle along together. Her Roma partner Suada (Alina Serban) has a teenage daughter Vanesa and another daughter, Mia, who is only five. Suada is volatile, belligerent and dying of cancer. Death is focusing her mind in alarming ways. Swear to look after the children, she shouts at Dita, holding a knife over her own arm.

Woody Allen is attending the Venice International Film Festival for the premiere of his latest film, “Coup de Chance”.

Richard Linklater brought his Hit Man to the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, world premiering the comedy thriller out of competition to a six-minute ovation inside the Sala Grande.

The tears flowed for Priscilla Presley following the world premiere of Sofia Coppola’s biopic, “Priscilla”, in Venice on Monday.

“I feel like there’s a sort of mouth over the city, ready to eat us up,” says Enea, sophisticated young nightclubber, tennis champion and coke dealer; if anyone is trying to swallow the Eternal City whole, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mother hosts a television chat show about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the city’s most exclusive sports club, the city’s most exclusive parties and, even more thrillingly, rendezvous with the criminal classes, homespun proletarians to a man. “You need to marry Eva, have a child with her, make her happy. If you have no one to kiss, you go crazy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and family man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of work and with the company he keeps, Giordano isn’t going to last that long.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Neon has acquired worldwide rights to Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” ahead of its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, will also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Origin” will be released in theaters later this year.

Total admissions to theatres at this year’s Venice Film Festival have hit 114,851, up 18% on last year, according to figures published by the Biennale this week, as the film event passes the midway point. 

While promoting his 50th – and quite possibly, last — movie at the Venice Film Festival, Woody Allen weighed in cancel culture, the #MeToo Movement, and whether any woman has ever complained about his behavior on set.

Woody Allen is speaking out about cancel culture in a new interview with Variety. 

Exactly who are these people? They’re rich, obviously. They’re Parisian, which means that they are already fantasy figurines in the European curiosity shop of Woody Allen’s imagination. But does any actual modern man, no matter how rich and unfathomably French, come home from work in 2023 to request a cognac from his wife, who then calls out to the maid to bring Monsieur a cognac while she configures herself into a glamour position on the couch? Is this actually 1953? Or maybe 1923 – the Gatsby era, where Woody Allen is clearly a very enthusiastic visitor?

The devil is in the details. Pink-nailed toes scrunching on a pink carpet; a packet of false eyelashes; piles of chips in a Vegas casino; the pills. Always the pills: squeezed in a palm that opens to reveal its little white prize; lined up in bottles on the bedside table; slipped into a pocket on the way to school. “Maybe the pills are too much,” ventures Priscilla Beaulieu to her boyfriend Elvis Presley, after one of his flares of temper where she just manages to dodge his fist. “I have doctors looking after me,” he growls. “I don’t need a second opinion.”

Marta Balaga Move over, Richard Donner. In “Behind the Mountains,” premiering in Venice’s Horizons section, Mohamed Ben Attia makes sure “you’ll believe a man can fly” once again. Although it might not be as graceful.

Woody Allen was given a rapturous reception as he hit the Venice Film Festival on Monday with his 50th film the French-language thriller Coup de Chance, which premieres Out Of Competition this evening.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Woody Allen returned to the Venice Film Festival this weekend for the world premiere of “Coup de Chance,” a romantic thriller that marks his 50th, and he suggests, quite possibly his last, feature film. The French-language film, playing at one of Europe’s major festivals, represents the continued mutual embrace between the director and the continent, after controversies have limited his funding stateside. This accounts for his pondering retirement: Allen says that producing a new movie means hustling to secure backing and at 87, he’s not sure he still wants to do that kind of work.

The plan was for renowned director William Friedkin to be appearing at the Venice Film Festival presenting the out of competition World Premiere of his latest production, an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s 1954 play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Unfortunately Friedkin died August 7th, but the show goes on anyway.