Venice 2020: Last News

Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a directorial polyglot, no doubt about it, but he’s more fluent in some cinematic languages than others. Having more or less co-founded the J-horror wave, and with “Pulse” and “Cure,” giving it an artistic and thematic depth it only rarely attained without him, he then spent the best part of the last two decades turning in dour sci-fi (“Foreboding,” “Before We Disappear“), turgid metaphysical melodramas (“Journey to the Shore,” “Daguerrotype“), and grimly forgettable serial killer movies (“Creepy“).

How would you pick up the pieces if you lost all concept of who you are? In “Apples,” the directorial debut of the Greek filmmaker, Christos Nikou, an amnesiac pandemic sweeps the globe and forces those afflicted with the disease to a recovery program involving cassette tapes and cameras. But is that enough to recover one’s identity? READ MORE: Jessie Buckley & Riz Ahmed To Lead Christos Nikou’s Sci-Fi Romance ‘Fingernails’ Here’s the film’s official synopsis: As an unpredictable, sweeping pandemic causes people to develop sudden amnesia, a man finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help him build a new life.

How would you pick up the pieces if you lost all concept of who you are? In “Apples,” the directorial debut of the Greek filmmaker, Christos Nikou, an amnesiac pandemic sweeps the globe and forces those afflicted with the disease to a recovery program involving cassette tapes and cameras. But is that enough to recover one’s identity? READ MORE: Jessie Buckley & Riz Ahmed To Lead Christos Nikou’s Sci-Fi Romance ‘Fingernails’ Here’s the film’s official synopsis: As an unpredictable, sweeping pandemic causes people to develop sudden amnesia, a man finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help him build a new life.

Composed of a series of striking tableaux, Gianfranco Rosi’s contemplative documentary, “Notturno,” mines the intergenerational conflict on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon. Cross-cutting between a number of disparate individuals, including the military, political dissidents, and ordinary citizens, Rosi’s film eschews any type of narrative cohesion, instead, presenting a series of unnamed individuals, going about their lives surrounded by the rubble and omnipresent gunfire that still plagues the region.

Unfurling an entire life of failed artistic ambitions in the span of a two-hour film, Chaitanya Tamhane’s remarkable sophomore feature “The Disciple” is decidedly leisurely in its approach. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Tamhane’s film centralizes the world of Hindustani classical music, in which singers perform an improvised raga, modulating their voices depending on the singer’s emotional state.

Choose your fighter: Orson Welles, recently back in LA after a decade of European exile, and embarking on a project so meta he will emulate the film’s director-protagonist and die at 70 never having finished it; or Dennis Hopper, mere days after the end of an 8-day marriage, struggling to edit the metafiction that will kill his directorial career for nearly a decade? The documentary, “Hopper/Welles,” cutely credited to Welles as director, but put together by “The Other Side of the Wind” producer Filip Jan Rymsza, is a recording of a conversation between two (in)famous Hollywood game-changers at oddly analogous moments in their careers, despite their twenty-year age gap.

In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based).

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Beydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Beydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.

Serious discussions on the perpetuated correlation between race and class in Mexico have dominated the country’s collective consciousness over the last few years. Cinema has actively participated in such reckoning, but never before as boldly as in Michel Franco’s “New Order (Nuevo Orden).” Bound to be contentious at home for its brutal depiction of a not-so-implausible and not-so-distant dystopia, the auteur’s latest shocks with blistering purpose.

So somebody somewhere one day had a thought: “What if ‘Die Hard’ except a school shooting?” and not only didn’t they immediately check themselves for other symptoms of lead poisoning but thought, “Yep, that’s a winner” and went on to make the movie. Presumably, that person was Kyle Rankin, writer-director of the staggeringly misguided, deeply noxious “Run Hide Fight.” But let’s not wholly exonerate all the friends, collaborators, script-readers, caterers, mailmen, grocers, friendly passersby, and supportive family pets who may have had a hand, however slight, in helping this thing to come to pass.

Filmmakers Celine Held and Logan George have had quite the journey when it comes to the release of their first feature film. With years of research and numerous short films under their belt, “Topside” was meant to premiere at the 2020 SXSW before the pandemic caused everything to come to a screeching halt.

Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic. Taking place in 2003, the film follows aspiring journalist Han Dong (Bai-Ke), as he hustles his way into an internship at the prestigious Jingcheng Daily and eventually lands on a possible front-page story, before being torn between his loyalty between journalistic ethics and a friend whose future might be jeopardized by Dong’s reporting.

The term “predator” can mean a number of different things. Obviously, there’s the definition that relates to animals in nature, the hunter after the prey.

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

The indie drama “Topside” opens with a startling image: a five-year-old girl sleeping on the ground with a beam of light shining on her from above. She’s underground living in the tunnels of New York beneath the subway system and she’s awoken by workers with flashlights.

The early-2000s was an interesting time in the world of journalism. With the internet becoming more and more ubiquitous by the day, that era saw the beginning of the shift from traditional newspaper/magazine journalism to a younger generation of hungry writers looking to use technology to their advantage.

June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over.

There are many kinds of documentaries one might want to see from “I Am Greta,” a Hulu portrait about famous teenage Climate Change activist and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg. One might hope for something akin to “The Inconvenient Truth,” with tons of sobering statistics and easy-to-understand graphs and charts led by the passionate teenager (you won’t find that here).

For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.

The human voice is Tilda Swinton‘s, but the directorial voice is all Pedro Almodóvar in the Spanish legend’s half-hour, English-language “The Human Voice.” Freely adapting – read: ruthlessly modernizing and thoroughly Almodovarizing – the play by Jean Cocteau (material the director has circled around before, most evidently in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Law of Desire“), despite its brevity, his new film is deceptively roomy, allowing us to pace through the superbly upholstered rooms of the director’s recurrent obsessions with giddy, fluid freedom.

It’s a proper shame we’re not allowed physical contact at the moment, because Quentin Dupieux‘s “Mandibles,” among its many other silly pleasures, offers up a modified fist-bump-style handshake that could easily have swept the Venice Film Festival campus as the greeting du jour any other year. It involves both participants forming their hand into bull’s horns and then briefly interlocking their outstretched fists while saying “Toro” (because of the bull thing) preceded or followed by a description of what you’re “Toro”-ing about.