Venice Film Festival: Last News

A fascinating but imperfect exploration of the “truth” and how certainties and facts have been radically altered and evolved in the 21st Century during the age of social media, its weaponization, bad faith actors, eroding public trust in the media, cancel culture, and more, Alfonso Cuarón’s new seven-part limited series, “Disclaimer,” is a captivating, but not always convincing change of pace for the Academy Award-winning writer/director.

Why must talented women die of a broken heart? The myth goes that it was heartbreak that killed Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, and countless more women who once vibrated with rare genius but whose emotional ache led to lonely, tragic deaths. Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” does very little to dispel this myth.

had been revealed about Tim Burton’s latest movie “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in the lead-up to its Venice Film Festival on Wednesday night. But one long-assumed rumor has been confirmed by reports out of the Lido after its red-carpet debut: Baldwin and Davis, who played the deceased Maitlands in the 1988 horror-comedy, do not make so much as an apparition — sorry, appearance — in the follow-up.A review from the Hollywood Reporter said that “Barbara and Adam Maitland, the sweet prematurely deceased couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, are gone, however, having found a loophole according to Lydia.” In the first film, the pair spooked the Deetz family (Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones).But it was always unlikely that the fictional ghost duo would be back to haunt another Day-O.“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” was in production while Baldwin, 66, was on trial for involuntary manslaughter after the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the Santa Fe set of “Rust.” The case was tossed out by the judge in July.And it also doesn’t come as a shock that Jones, whose character Charles is said to be killed off in the sequel, doesn’t make a cameo either.

Tim Burton could have easily fallen into the trap of making yet another Hollywood “legacyquel” by reviving his 1988 breakout hit “Beetlejuice.” He’s not entirely immune from providing fan service in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a proclivity demonstrated as early on as the opening credits that mimic the helicopter tracking shot of the original … just with darker color grading now. But overall, Burton grasps the need not merely to resurrect the beloved characters—he must also revivify them.

BBC wrote that a movie “needs to have a plot, a bit of credible characterization, and a structure that preferably includes a beginning, middle and end. ‘Horizon’ doesn’t have any of those.”Variety slammed Costner’s film as “meandering,” and said it “seldom seems to aim in a clear direction,” while IndieWire said, “These aren’t characters so much as the spokes of a plot in human form, each of their storylines moving as if being pulled by horses across the entire span of the American West.”The Post movie critic Johnny Oleksinski wrote, “I could not fathom committing another 540 minutes of my time to this bloated ego trip,” referring to how “Horizon” was planned to be four parts.

If you’re reading this, you probably are pretty well aware of the story behind Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon: An American Saga.’ After quite a bit of hype, the first chapter of the film saga was released a little over a month ago and bombed. From there, the sequel—already filmed and ready to release—was pulled from the release schedule.

If it’s the last week in July it’s time for the Venice International Film Festival to announce its selections. This morning, La Biennale di Venezia did just that officially revealing the already known inclusion of two Warner Bros.

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).

fired back at an unnamed reporter at the Venice Film Festival on Friday over a question regarding cast diversity in their new film, “The Promised Land.”The movie is set in 1750’s Denmark. Mikkelsen, 57, stars as an army captain struggling to raise his social status and maintain his values in an increasingly hostile climate.

It’s hard to encapsulate the cinema of a particular filmmaker in just one word, but if one were to try their hand at it with Mexican maverick Michel Franco, a word that’d come to mind is violence. The filmmaker’s work is built upon the looming expectation of violent transgression, society standing flimsy atop the fragile idea of cordiality.

Todd Haynes’ biopic “I’m Not There” famously featured several actors in the role of Bob Dylan, each embodying the artist in one era of his varied musical career. The idea, of course, was to acknowledge Dylan’s shapeshifting nature as well as the fact that his work can mean different things to different people — some may find one actor’s interpretation more convincing and accurate than that of another.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) first conceived of the multifaceted premise that would eventually become the lauded non-fiction book “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents,” her editors were concerned about whether she would manage to cohesively merge her personal experiences with all the moving parts of her research across cultures and continents to prove that it all interconnects.   Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch That’s in turn the same task that writer-director Ava DuVernay faced to convey the big-picture ideas and Wilkerson’s revelatory odyssey to put them on the page in an enticingly cinematic manner.

The Huston dynasty has produced so many raw, undeniable talents that its younger members are undoubtedly among the very few “nepo babies” who can still come out of that exhausting discourse unscathed. We may even feel pity for them, sometimes, living as they do in the shadows of so many brilliant relatives.

That Glen Powell is a gem of an actor is nothing new, but twenty years into his career, and after stealing the show in a bunch of films and series, we can all finally stop praying for him to get a leading role worthy of his talents. In “Hit Man,” Powell reunites with his “Everybody Wants Some!!” director Richard Linklater for a part that allows him to be by turns nerdy, sexy, and funny, but at all times almost unbearably charming.

after being dogged by decades-old sex abuse allegations from his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow.The 87-year-old filmmaker made the statement Sunday in an interview with Variety at the Venice Film Festival, where he is promoting his new movie, “Coup de Chance.”“I feel if you’re going to be canceled, this is the culture to be canceled by. I just find that all so silly,” Allen told the outlet, after the interviewer asked if he felt like he had been “canceled.” “I don’t think about it,” he added.

1985 memoir “Elvis and Me.”In video obtained by TMZ, Presley admits that her parents had a hard time understanding why Elvis would be interested in her. But she said she was a “listener,” and the megastar would “pour his heart out” to her. “I was the person who really sat there to listen and to comfort him,” she explains.

I remember reading years ago that whenever the time comes for Woody Allen to make a new film, he opens a drawer in his desk and picks at random from the piles of scripts he has written over the years.

You don’t need to know much about the criminal justice system to understand its broken, biased, and grim nightmare— unfair, unjust, unforgiving, a bureaucratic Kafka-esque hellscape you never want to be trapped within. Turkish filmmaker Selman Nacar (“Between Two Dawns”) understands this all too well—he was a law student for several years before switching to filmmaking and saw all the flaws in the legal justice system firsthand.

The most powerful aspect of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” premiering in Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is in the title: to focus on Priscilla Presley, née Wagner, formerly Beaulieu, is to show a side of a marriage and of the King himself less familiar than and in some ways different from the romantic popular legend. But Coppola’s film does much more than simply show us the facts of how a fourteen-year-old girl gets to become the girlfriend and then wife of one of the biggest artists of all time.

A quote by William Friedkin himself opens “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” describing the film, as well as all the filmmaker’s other works, as being about “the thin line between good and evil.” This line is all the thinner here, in the American director’s final feature, for it is entirely a matter of opinion. We are not given to see the facts of this story as they unfolded; we cannot watch and make up our own minds as to whether the people involved were right or wrong to act the way they did.

The question of whether or not technology has killed the classic crime thriller has popped in and out of the discourse as the years saw pocket watches morph into sci-fi-looking gadgets capable of getting one both dinner and a first-class ticket to Dubai in the space of a couple of minutes.