Venice Review: Paul Schrader’s ‘Master Gardener’

Mavi has shared the second single from his forthcoming sophomore LP. Laughing so Hard, It Hurts is due out October 14, and today’s track, “Doves,” is the record’s second offering, arriving two behind its lead single, “Baking Soda.” On the new song, the North Carolina-born emcee and current Howard University neuroscience major gets cerebral, his mind-bending flow completely at ease over a Dylvinci beat that feels both tranquil and anxious, due to the dissidence between its rushed drum line and its relaxed, aqueous synths.

Whoopi Goldberg is opening up about her role in the upcoming movie Till and she’s also responding to a critic who claimed she was wearing a fat suit in the film.

Halsey has been in attendance at several shows during Paris Fashion Week and she was spotted in an edgy look for the Enfants Riches Deprimes event!

Charli D'Amelio is a front runner on this season of, but that doesn't mean she's not feeling the pressure. Especially when some of her famous friends come out to show their support.The TikTok superstar and her pro partner, Mark Ballas, became the first couple to earn a '9' this season during Monday's James Bond Night, and were cheered on from the audience by Kourtney Kardashian and husband Travis Barker, as well as Barker's son — and her boyfriend — Landon Barker.D'Amelio — who is also competing against her mom, Heidi D'Amelio, this season — and Ballas spoke with ET's Matt Cohen after the show, and opened up about their Rumba, set to Billie Eilish's «No Time to Die,» and how it felt to earn their impressive score.«I mean, it feels great! I was definitely getting very nervous right before,» D'Amelio shared, adding that most of her nerves were due to «just going first.»OH MY GODDD #dwts@charlidameliopic.twitter.com/QaNwYzoeHV«I was a little scared for that, but our dance, and everything that I was nervous about, went smoothly! So I was very happy with it,» she added.As for getting some love from Kardashian and Barker, who were on the sidelines of the dance floor celebrating her success, D'Amelio shared, «I think it's so nice to have my friends and family here to support me.

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.

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 Armani-clad Richard Gere cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway in a black Mercedes-Benz as Blondie’s “Call Me” blares, sets the tone not only for Paul Schrader’s classic neo-noir “American Gigolo,” but also, as Karina Longworth posits in the latest season of her podcast You Must Remember This, the erotic ’80s. So, of course, this deep into the era of reboots, the film was ripe for a television re-imagining.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic With its pulsing burble of Blondie music and its chilly aesthetic, the 1980 Paul Schrader film “American Gigolo” is a showpiece of what would soon be the Reagan decade. Some 42 years later, a TV adaptation feels lost in time, and searching for an argument for its existence. Starring Jon Bernthal and with a pilot written and directed by “Ray Donovan’s” David Hollander (whose ties to Paramount Television Studios were severed during production), “American Gigolo” is lead-footed, and prurient rather than hot. And Bernthal seems at sea here, an unusual look for a star whose coiled charisma has elsewhere served him well. His Julian Kaye — whose name is shared with Richard Gere’s character in Schrader’s movie — emerges from a 15-year sentence we’re told happened about a decade and a half ago, but nothing about Julian’s world feels of the present day, or of Earth. Julian, we understand, was wrongfully convicted; Rosie O’Donnell’s Detective Sunday is attempting to crack the case of what really happenned, while a swirling remembered attraction between Julian and Gretchen Mol’s Michelle threatens Julian’s chances at finding a post-prison equilibrium.

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.

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.

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.

At 80 years old, Walter Hill shows no signs of slowing down. The veteran director of influential action thrillers like “The Warriors,” “48 Hrs.,” and “Streets of Fire” has reinvented himself in recent years as a reliable gun-for-hire on prestige TV Westerns (“Deadwood,” “Broken Trail”) and crime movies like “Bullet to the Head” and “The Assignment” that fall somewhere between VOD schlock and ‘70s grindhouse revivalism.

Naman Ramachandran Revered writer-director Paul Schrader is enjoying a late career renaissance, with “Master Gardener” being his third successive film to premiere at Venice after “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter.” The film follows Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), the conscientious horticulturist of the historic Gracewood Gardens estate, which is owned by wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). When she demands that he take on her troubled biracial great-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, Roth’s spartan existence turns chaotic. Schrader made Roth, a man with a past, a gardener because he felt that the profession is a “rich metaphor” for both good and evil. “On one hand, a white supremacist can say ‘We’re the gardeners, we pull out the weeds.’ On the other hand a humanist can say, ‘We’re gardeners, we help things grow.’ And both are using the gardening metaphor — one is evil and one is good,” Schrader told Variety.