A love letter to minimalism built on a maximalist scale, a paean to mid-century modernism dressed in old-school blockbuster biopic clothes, American auteur director Brady Corbet’s third feature is certainly a monumentally ambitious passion project. Spanning close to four hours, including an overture, an epilogue and a 15-minute intermission midway through, The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.

The Brutalist world premieres in Venice competition this week, shortly followed by a North American launch in Toronto. It has strong prize potential on the Lido, where both of Corbet’s previous features enjoyed positive receptions, but is likely to earn polarised reviews. By wearing its self-conscious “masterpiece” signifiers so overtly, it becomes a less interesting, more conventional film than it might have been. It is certainly Corbet’s most ponderous and least playful work to date, following his striking proto-fascist allegory The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and his inventive post-modern pop-diva meta-comedy Vox Lux (2018).

Like those earlier films, The Brutalist was shot on classic 70mm celluloid, this time in the antique VistaVision format, the high-resolution widescreen system that paved the way for IMAX. Having the industry clout to work with these expensive analogue formats is certainly impressive, putting Corbet in the same rarefied league as Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan. Painted in the gorgeous, grainy, painterly tones of vintage colourised postcards, it certainly looks magnificent, even if the wordy screenplay sometimes hits the same laborious, humourless low notes as Nolan and Anderson at their worst. There are distant echoes here of Anderson’s risibly hammy There Will Be Blood (2007).

But in fairness, Corbet’s film is still a richly layered and impressively singular statement for such a young, relatively inexperienced director. Despite superficial parallels with Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly scaled architectural epic Megalopolis (2024), this palatial period piece is more sprawling neo-baroque mansion than towering grand folly. Focus Features have already signed up international rights.

Drawing on his own Hungarian heritage, Adrien Brody gives a riveting, haunted, multi-lingual, full-spectrum lead performance as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish exile who washes up in late 1940s New York City on the great wave of displacements that followed the vast geopolitical ruptures of World War II. A much-feted, Bauhaus-trained modernist architect back home in Budapest, Laszlo has now fallen on hard times as a penniless refugee. He survived terrible oppression under the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and continues to suffer, as he was forced to leave his wife and niece behind in Hungary when he fled Europe for America.

László’s bruising travails as a newly arrived immigrant in America have a raw John Steinbeck feel, with periods living on Skid Row, eating at soup kitchens and even developing a mild heroin habit. But his fortunes initially seem sunny when he joins his prosperous cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in small-town Pennsylvania. Attila, who has Americanised his Hungarian name and notionally traded Judaism for his wife’s Catholicism, puts Laszlo’s world-class design skills to humble use in his furniture shop, This leads to a more prestigious commission, remodelling the library in the nearby mansion of business tycoon, Van Buren (Guy Pearce in compelling, grandstanding mode).

A Howard Hughes-style blow-hard with loud opinions and a fiery temper, Van Buren initially rejects the library, but later comes to appreciate its forward-thinking beauty. He then enlists László for a much larger personal project, to design and build a huge community centre on the grounds of his estate, a memorial to his late mother. After agreeing on a boldly modern concrete palace incorporating a chapel and theatre, Van Buren also offers László a new home on his sprawling property, plus legal help in bringing his sickly wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, piercingly good) and mute niece Zsofia (Corbet regular Raffey Cassidy) to America.

This emotionally charged family reunion signals a shift in the story’s fragile power balances, with sexual and ethnic tensions increasingly part of the picture, especially when a major train accident puts the building project on indefinite hold. Years later, when the team finally begin breaking ground and pouring concrete, László’s megalomaniac side comes to the fore, stubbornly resisting all attempts to cut costs on his uncompromising design. “Everything that is ugly, cruel and stupid,” he tells one of his rival project managers, “is your fault.”

The Brutalist takes an indulgently long time to make some fairly banal points about clashing male egos, wealth as power, commerce versus art, and latent antisemitism in post-war America. A good 30 to 40 minutes of talk-heavy scenes featuring dry construction detail and minor dinner-party chit-chat could have been safely excised. Some plot details, notably László’s on-off heroin addiction and Zsofia’s poorly explained selective mutism, are forgotten for long periods before Corbet summons them again for dramatic convenience.

The film’s wildly swerving final act features a beautifully shot, dreamlike sequence set in an Italian alpine marble quarry. But it also includes a bizarre out-of-nowhere rape scene, too much histrionic family soap opera, and a clunky epilogue set in Venice in 1980, finally making explicit the Holocaust back story which has been oddly overlooked for most of the film’s marathon runtime. These sudden melodramatic additions almost feel like afterthoughts designed to add emotional force and sharper meaning to an otherwise opaque, undisciplined narrative.

Brilliant in parts, cumbersome in others, The Brutalist is easy to admire but hard to love. Dramatically, it veers perilously close to ponderous, preposterous and pretentious at times. But aesthetically, it scores highly, from its ravishing 70mm panoramas of Hungary (standing in for rural Pennsylvania) to Corbet’s meticulously crafted opening and closing credits sequences, which pay eye-catching homage to 20th century avant-garde graphic design.

Sound design and music are also a hugely important element here, with ambient noise woven seamlessly into an ever-present audio mix, including a score than swings fluidly between vintage be-bop jazz and contemporary classical music. A touching final dedication to the late Scott Walker, who scored Corbet’s previous films, strikes a bittersweet note. Walker began his career as a traditional pop balladeer but became an increasingly experimental modernist composer in later life, a creatively daring trajectory that might give Corbet pause for thought as he edges closer towards the middlebrow cinematic mainstream.

Director: Brady Corbet
Screenwriters: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Cast:Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
Cinematography: Lol Crawley
Editing: David Jancso
Production Designer: Judy Becker
Costume Designer: Kate Forbes
Music: Daniel Blumberg
Sound: Steve Single, Szabolcs Gáspár
Producers: Trevor Matthews, Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren, D.J. Gugenheim
Production companies: Brookstreet Pictures (UK), Kaplan Morrison (US), Andrew Lauren Productions (US
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian
215 minutes

Given the many acclaimed films about the 1964 military coup in Brazil have poured out of Latin America (among them, Baptism of Blood about the Dominican friars who resisted the military dictatorship and Camilo Galli Tavares’ documentary The Day that Lasted 21 Years), Walter Salles’ new drama I’m Still Here (Ainda estou aqui), bowing in Venice competition, may initially seem like a late-comer in recounting the tragedy of a “missing man” (desaparecido) who is taken from his home by armed men and never seen again.

But passing time is at the heart of the story: the importance of preserving a historical memory of what really happened, who was arrested, who disappeared, who really died. And it is done exceedingly well in Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega’s screenplay by focusing on the figure of the disappeared man’s wife, portrayed with towering aplomb and iron determination by Fernanda Torres, the star of Salles’s 1995 drama Foreign Land.

This harrowing story really happened and is based on the memoir of Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who appears in the film as a young boy. Salles, who grew up in Rio at the same time, knew Marcelo and his four sisters and their happy, middle-class family living in a big house with a view of the beach.

But tension is in the air, foreshadowed with growing menace in the long first sequence that establishes how loving and united the Paiva family is. In the paradise of 1970s Rio de Janeiro, the military coup literally casts a shadow over normal life with its convoys of black-clad assault troops and dark symbols: in the opening shot, a helicopter flies sinisterly over Eunice Paiva, the mother of the family, as she floats peacefully in the water while her kids play on the beach.

Her jovial husband Rubens Pavia (a warm and lovable Selton Mello) is a former congressman for the left-wing Labor Party and sprinkles his current career as an engineer with small acts of resistance against the military, like covertly delivering letters about missing people’s whereabouts. Some of his friends are hurriedly moving to Europe, but the Paivas delay making a decision about leaving. They just send their eldest daughter Vera to London, a rebellious soul who has already had a run-in with the police.

Then one day, their carefree lives are torn apart when Rubens is pulled in for questioning by armed men who won’t identify themselves. In a crescendo of fright, the Paivas discover that they are prisoners in their own house. Keeping her cool, Eunice offers food to the occupiers and treats them like guests. To no avail. They won’t tell her where Rubens is, and the next day she and her young daughter Eliana are driven to a military prison with hoods over their heads and harshly questioned by interrogators, who demand they identify terrorists in a photo album.

Rubens’ picture is there.

Eunice is held for 12 long, grueling days. When she is released, the story takes a new turn as she learns to survive without access to her missing husband’s bank account. The air of danger is palpable, but Eunice digs in and fights back, struggling to prove Rubens was arrested by the military (which they deny).

The last half-hour contains a number of surprises that follow on each other, showing what an extraordinary woman Eunice Pavia was. Above all, it affirms the strength of the family to find closure, reorganize itself and survive, blossoming into future generations who know the truth about Rubens and will hopefully not repeat the mistake of a military coup. Though as Salles remarks in his director’s statement at Venice, where the film premiered in competition, during the seven years he was preparing the film, “life in Brazil veered dangerously close to the dystopia of the 1970s.” The film is a mirror and a warning.

Playing the elegantly dressed mother of five who turns social activist, getting her law degree at age 48, Torres makes a fascinating transformation that turns the story around and should earn her awards at festivals. In a coda, Eunice’s elderly self, when her life’s work is done and she is overcome with disease, is beautifully sketched by the great Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, now 94, who starred in Salles’ first film Central Station (1998), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress.

Director: Walter Salles
Screenplay: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva
Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
Producers: Maria Carlota Bruno, Rodrigo Teixeira, Martine de Clermont-Tonnerre
Cinematography: Adrian Teijido
Editing: Afflonso Goncalves
Production design: Carlos Conti
Costume design: Claudia Kopke
Music: Warren Ellis
Production companies: VideoFilmes, RT Features, MACT Productions
World Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Portuguese
135 minutes

Inspired by a walk around a small Turkish town and made on a budget of just over $55,000 – with part of that coming from bank loans and the sale of his sister’s jewelry – One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is a visually arresting and delicately written piece that rivals any of the hothouse-grown directorial debuts bowing at festivals these days. Proving himself an auteur in the making, Firatoglu — who is a lawyer by profession — has already chalked up a series of award-winning festival appearances at Venice, Sao Paulo, Almaty and now Singapore.

Like the self-taught Korean filmmaker Park Jung-bum, who trained as a physical education teacher in university but pivoted to making visually idiosyncratic, social-realist films, Firatoglu also produces and stars in his own work. Audaciously, One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is miles away from the usual Istanbul-based cineaste universe. Here he plays Eyüp, a rugged, debt-ridden labourer who earns his living transporting and salting tomatoes on a farm in the sun-drenched southwestern plains of Turkey.

After a violent fracas with a foreman (the Hemme in the title) over his much-delayed pay, Eyüp storms off and hatches a plan to murder his foe. From there, he embarks on a journey in which his furious desire for vengeance recedes as he meanders down country roads, small town back alleys, lush gardens and barren grocery shops.

The gradual transformation of Eyüp’s demeanour is signposted in the film’s tonal shift. While things kick off as though in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie – albeit one that’s unfolding in broad daylight – the story is slowly taken over by the kind of humour and humanism inherent in the work of Abbas Kiarostami. It’s hard not to laugh at the many instances in which Eyüp is detained by his new acquaintances and subjected to a rambling monologue, and equally difficult not to be moved by the awkward silences punctuating his reunion with a woman who was probably a teenage lover from his past.

Working with the cinematographic trio of Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz and Abdurrahman Öncu, Firatoglu conjures striking visual beauty out of the most mundane of activities (like sequences of back-breaking tomato picking in the fields that seem taken from real life) and the most banal of landscapes (as when Eyüp is slowly reduced to a small dot as he rides away on his rickety red motorcycle, or marches down passageways).

Eyüp’s own problems become less and less of an issue for him and the viewer as the film proceeds. As many a theorist has said about road movies, it’s always less about the traveller than the landscape he travels through. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal Hemme doesn’t die, because that’s a red herring anyway. This is a film about one of those dog days in the life of an unlucky fellow, and the redemption and epiphany he – and we – get to experience as time passes. It describes how life must go on, with people standing side by side, as in the curiously framed wedding dances that bookend the film.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Murat Firatoglu
Cast: Murat Firatoglu, Sefer Firatiglu, Salih Tasci
Cinematography: Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz, Abdurrahman Öncu
Editor: Eyyup Zana Ekinci
Sound designer: Emir Mugra Kazak
Production company: Nefes Film
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Competition)
In Turkish
81 minutes

The return of A-list stars after the SAG-Aftra strikes depleted guest lists last year was perhaps the most noticeable change. Nicole Kidman (who won the best actress award), Lady Gaga, Angelina Jolie, Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, Daniel Craig, Adrien Brody, Antonio Banderas, Joaquin Phoenix, George Clooney and Europeans like jury president Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Lindon (winner of the best actor award) were among the celebrities present. Another was Brad Pitt, who was all over the program, not just co-starring and co-producing Wolfs; his production company Plan B also had a stake in three other films: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, One to One: John & Yoko and Apocalypse in the Tropics.

Yet despite this cornucopia of talent and abundance, not all the media benefited. More than 50 international members of the press signed a protest over their lack of access to major talent at this year’s festival. They pointed out that the tireless work of freelance journalists, in particular, was jeopardized by the fact that several different films premiering at Venice gave no press interviews at all. Considering the high cost of attending the Lido event, it is no small matter for the journalists concerned and an urgent problem for the festival, too.

Perhaps Venice, much like Cannes, has started to become too big for its own good. Consider the decision to screen series in their entirety. With the exception of the Alfonso Cuarón-helmed series Disclaimer, which received the honor of the Sala Grande gala slot, all the titles in that sidebar had their premiere screenings in the small and uncomfortable Sala Casinò, which feels like a disservice to everyone involved. Similarly, the late addition of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 to the already complete program led to the film’s single public showing taking place in the Sala Giardino, a venue where “sitting comfortably” is an oxymoron for screenings lasting over two hours.

But there was also good news regarding logistics. Even before the festival began, accredited press realized something had gotten fixed at Vivaticket, the big event ticketing system which for years had seemed unable to distinguish between a football match and a film festival. For the first time, booking tickets was fast and efficient, even if irrevocable because, thanks to the enormous number of accreditations issued, screenings got fully booked up in a very short space of time. Secondly, tickets were uploaded to the press badge this year, making it unnecessary to show one’s cell phone to prove the ticket existed or find an (unnecessarily) numbered seat. With this streamlining, Venice zoomed forward from one of the most retrograde festivals vis-à-vis ticketing to the very best on the circuit.

Even the police checkpoints were generally on low alert, winning points for a fast and easy transition into the festival area that was in marked contrast to past years.

The competition 

The films in the main competition ranged from small and provincial to epic Hollywood, from experimental audience challenges to glorious looking modernism. Pedro Almodovar’s modestly scaled euthanasia drama The Room Next Door fell in the last category; it was hardly his most transgressive and iconoclastic work, but a generally well-liked winner of the festival’s main prize, the Golden Lion. Co-starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, the first-ever English-language feature by the 74-year-old Spanish maestro is an argument for assisted suicide couched in great performances, fabulous outfits and impeccably styled hair. Almodovar was previously awarded an honorary Golden Lion in 2019, but this was his first for a film in competition. He can now add it to his collection of Oscars, Golden Globes, Goyas, Cesars, Baftas and countless other festival prizes.

It was a bumper year for monumental movies about uncompromising, visionary architects made by uncompromising, visionary directors. Thankfully, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist met with a warmer reception in Venice than Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis did in Cannes. Built around a richly textured lead performance from Adrien Brody as a Jewish-Hungarian architect struggling to make his mark in post-war America, this sprawling modernist symphony earned Corbet the Silver Lion for Best Director. In a tearful speech, he stressed the film’s pro-immigrant message, wishing for “a better world for my beautiful daughter and each and every one of your beautiful children, irrespective of their fucking passports.”

Some of the Venice program’s most splashy, starry, newsworthy world premieres left the Lido empty-handed. Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous William Burroughs adaptation Queer seemed tailor-made for awards, especially its lead performance by Daniel Craig, very much flexing his post-Bond Serious Actor muscles rather than his star status. But Isabel Huppert’s jury, much like the critics, were left lukewarm.

Similar reactions greeted Angelina Jolie’s high-camp turn as Maria Callas in Pablo Larrain’s latest diva-worship biopic Maria. Meanwhile the all-singing, all-dancing double act of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Todd Phillips’ outlandish music-heavy supervillain sequel Joker: Folie à Deux fell short of expectations. It earned mixed reviews and no prizes, in stark contrast to its 2019 predecessor, which wowed the critics and won the Golden Lion.

Meanwhile, the timeless, highly original reflection on the origins of land ownership Harvest starring Caleb Landry Jones by Greek New Wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, who has also produced for Yorgos Lanthimos, was a noteworthy omission when awards were handed out, while actress Fernanda Torres, the heroic protag of Walter Salles’ much-admired I’m Still Here, was a critics’ choice for her stunning performance as the wife of a desaparecidos following Brazil’s ferocious military coup. She lost to Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, one of the only films that was really worthy of festival director Alberto Barbera’s promise about a “return to eroticism” after a period of “prudishness”. In comparison, the sex scenes in Queer were pretty tasteful and the Italian porn saga that wandered into the main competition, Diva Futura, was positively bland.

Festival director Alberto Barbera underlined “the importance of the presence of 12 debuting directors in the Competition section out of 21 titles.” Happily, several of these newcomers were noticed by the critics and some won awards, like Dea Kulumbegashvili, for her rigorous and thought-provoking second feature April. Telling the story of a courageous country OB-GYN in film language as austere as her protagonist, the Georgian director was awarded a well-deserved the Special Jury Award.

As everyone knows by now, the habit of programming five films from the festival country in the main competition is at least one too many. On the Italian front, three of the five slots went to directors who had never been in Venice before, all of them vying for the Golden Lion with their second or third feature. And it was young Maura Delpero who earned the Silver Lion  – Grand Jury Prize with Vermiglio, her visually striking tale of a small Alpine village and women’s changing role after the Second World War. A notable absence was Francesca Comencini’s Il tempo che ci vuole, which was relegated to an out-of-competition slot. This tribute to her father, the great Luigi Comencini, felt especially relevant for its inclusion of archive material taken from the collections of the Cineteca di Milano, which he co-founded.

Orizzonti

In the festival’s second official section, which is now also competitive, a clear winner emerged early in the awards ceremony. The feature debut of director Sarah Friedland, Familiar Touch, brought her to the stage twice as winner of the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best First Feature — one of the festival’s most significant prizes — and then as Best Director in the Orizzonti section. Moving and never rhetorical or conventional, the film about an 80-year-old woman learning to live with Alzheimer’s also won the Orizzonti Best Actress award for Kathleen Chalfant. Another winner was Scandar Copti’s much-admired Happy Holidays, the intersecting stories of a big Palestinian family caught in an anguishing spiral of social norms that particularly punish young women. In a side-section mysteriously called Orizzonti Extra, a small film from Naples had critics and programmers talking. Vittoria directed by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman is a reenactment of a working class couple’s difficult decision to adopt a fourth child, after the mother has a recurrent dream. It unfolds with plenty of surprises and an extremely touching ending.

The short films that stood out

Non-fiction also did well in the Orizzonti short film competition. Arshia Shakiba’s Who Loves the Sun, about the rise in improvised oil refining during the Syrian civil war, took the top prize. Meanwhile Luca Ferri, Morgan Menegazzo and Mariachiara Pernisa’s innocent René va alla guerra became the festival’s short nominee to the European Film Awards. Over in Settimana internazionale della critica, Marta Innocenti’s Things That My Best Friend Lost won the award for best film. Another festival highlight appeared in the same section: Andrea Gatopoulos’ The Eggregores’ Theory – a dystopian science fiction told through strange monochrome AI-generated images. Elsewhere, other standouts that will hopefully travel well were Claudia Varejao’s experimental documentary about female refugees in Portugal, Kora, which screened in Giornate degli autori, and Tian Guan’s playfully rebellious Orizzonti contender, The Poison Cat.

Alex is sitting in the Excelsior Hotel beach restaurant with her PR team when we meet on the Venice Lido. Judging by the number of empty water bottles on the table, they have been filling them with ideas for some time in the 90-degree heat. Alex is in Venice with two of her newest features. One is Happyend, which has already screened in the Orizzonti section. Director Neo Sora’s fiction debut tells the story of students living in a near-future Japan, who take a stand against the country’s surveillance culture. After Venice, it will appear in Toronto’s Centerpiece section and the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate. Magnify is releasing world-wide and in the U.S.

Alex’s other Venice film is Stranger Eyes, which is about to play in the festival’s main competition; it also has its roots in Asian surveillance society. This kidnap thriller is the third feature directed by Yeo Siew Hua, whose A Land Imagined won the Golden Leopard at Locarno; Stranger Eyes is the first-ever Singaporean film to compete for the Golden Lion. It will continue its showcase exposure at the New York and BFI London film festivals.

These are prestigious venues, but the young Taiwan-born producer, who these days is more often found in Tokyo or New York, where she earned her M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is no stranger to red carpets. She has walked many of them since the company opened in 2021, from Cannes and Berlin to Sundance, Toronto and Busan.

When asked what attracts her to a new project, Lo points to originality, working with women, and her focus on artist-driven films with under-represented perspectives, like that of LGBTQ. Most of the films she has worked on since Cinema Inutile began producing have been international co-productions between Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S.

Things seem to be coming together nicely for the company: Alex had three films in this year’s Cannes festival – Viet and Nam, Being Maria and An Unfinished Film.

Other recent producing credits include Some Rain Must Fall (2024), which premiered in the Encounters competition at Berlinale and won the Special Jury Award. Girls Will Be Girls (2024) bowed at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award and Special Jury Award for Acting. The Settlers (2023) was first seen in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and was selected as Chile’s submission to the Academy Awards, and Club Zero (2023) starring Mia Wasikowska premiered in competition at Cannes.

Each film in the trilogy focuses on its own story in a completely standalone manner, something the movie highlights in the opening credits, with the titles of all three appearing on the screen before Sex and Dreams (the heretofore unreleased second episode) disappear to leave just Love. And it is indeed a film about love, even though the opening scene makes it clear the physical angle will also be explored, as a doctor explains to a cancer patient that the impending treatment – removal of the prostate – will entail infertility and erectile dysfunction.

The doctor is Marianne, one of the two main characters. The other is the young gay nurse Tor, who commutes to work every day with the ferry. Part of his daily (or rather, nightly) routine includes checking out Grindr while on the ferry, although not necessarily for a quick hookup: intimacy and conversations have their importance. Impressed by his worldview, Marianne – who is tentatively interested in a divorced father of two she’s been set up with – ponders her own thoughts on the nature of relationships. Meanwhile, Tor finds himself in a bit of a bind when the personal and the professional start intersecting in an ethically questionable manner.

Marianne is the kind of role likely to raise the international profile of actress and singer Andrea Braein Hovig, a regular collaborator of the director who also appeared in the Cannes hit Sick of Myself, and who really gets to showcase her range as the character arc becomes an emotional whirlwind. Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, who also was in Haugerud’s 2019 film Beware of Children, is revelatory as Tor, exploring the gamut of nuances that come with his perception of societal and interpersonal norms, with a performance that gains potency when the relationship with the older man Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm, who reunites with Haugerud after acting in his 2012 feature debut I Belong).

Equally important, basically a character in its own right, is the city of Oslo, warmly framed images of which accompany the opening and closing credits. In fact, the intermingling of the human protagonists revolves partly around the imminent celebrations of the Norwegian capital’s centenary (although founded circa 1000 A.D., it was called Kristiania from 1877 until January 1, 1925), and Tor’s introduction highlights how the city brings together people from all parts of the country (an early conversation topic between the two leads concerns their differing dialects).

The story unfolds over the course of a few weeks in the month of August (the movie basically ends, in-universe, a week or so before its real-world premiere took place), with the summery vibe feeding the energy of the storytelling and the vitality of the performances. The script is verbose in places, but body language is just as fundamental as the correlation between physical attraction and emotional attachment, and the various mixtures thereof, creates an increasingly affecting crescendo about the intricacies of contemporary connections. It may not solve the mysteries of the heart, but, much like Oslo’s rebranding a century ago, it puts a relatively new and riveting spin on something that’s been around for eons.

Director & Screenwriter: Dag Johan Haugerud
Cast: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Marte Engebrigtsen, Lars Jacob Holm, Thomas Gullestad, Marian Saastad Ottesen, Morten Svartveit
Producers: Yngve Sæther, Hege Hauff Hvattum
Cinematography: Frédéric Noirhomme
Production design: Tuva Hølmebakk
Costume design: Julia Dunoyer
Music: Peder Kjellsby
Sound: Yvonne Stenberg, Gisle Tveito
Production companies: Motlys
World sales: m-appeal
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Norwegian
119 minutes

Then again, this is something the filmmaker himself has taken into account, openly acknowledging that a project like his is unlikely to get eyeballs in a context that isn’t tied to hardcore cinephilia, not least because of the combined running time of the three films. He has stated he tried to keep the trilogy’s overall duration at ten hours or less, a feat he has (just about) achieved: with its 152 minutes, Homecoming – the shortest installment – brings the total to 591, just nine minutes shy of the self-imposed maximum.

Whether one connects with this final visit to the factories in Zhili hinges largely on their familiarity with the previous two movies, although Homecoming does have an arc of its own: as per the title, this film deals with the young workers’ attempts to go back home for New Year’s, a goal that is not easily attainable since many of them are still waiting for the salary payment that would allow them to make the trip. For some of them, this is also the opportunity to get married. But is starting a new family compatible with the working and living conditions shown across the trilogy?

With entirely European backing (the film is a co-production of France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Wang Bing spent years following his subjects, effectively moving to the region in 2014 and staying there until 2019, while also working on other projects in the meantime (the closing moments of Homecoming hint at the then imminent pandemic). The trilogy is inextricably tied to its production history, as the director has used his international clout to shine a spotlight on aspects of Chinese living that he wouldn’t be allowed to film under the auspices of his own government (in 2010, his fiction film The Ditch, about Mao-era labor camps, screened in Venice as a surprise film to avoid political repercussions).

As he silently observes the frustrations of young people who have come to Zhili for the sole purpose of making money, and tacitly accepted the dehumanizing conditions that entails, the filmmaker almost becomes one of them, consumed by a region that occupied a large chunk of his waking moments for years. The end credits for all three films include an acknowledgement of all the people who allowed him to enter their lives, effectively accepting him as one of them as their daily struggles to reconcile youthful ambitions and the stark, exploitative reality of their situation were laid bare on camera.

There is, in fact, a bitter irony hidden within the film’s subtitle: as the vacation period inevitably comes to an end and everyone must eventually make their way back to the factories (assuming their finances allowed them to leave in the first place), one wonders if the workplace has become the real home for these people, including the film crew. And at the same time, even though it’s been five years since the end of filming, it’s also as if Wang Bing were finally allowed to close the book on the experience, condensing ten years total of work in just under ten, excruciatingly compelling hours.

Director: Wang Bing
Producers: Nicolas R. de la Mothe, Vincent Wang, Hui Mao, Gilles Chanial
Cinematography: Liu Xianhui, Song Yang, Ding Bihan, Shan Xiaohui, Maeda Yoshitaka, Wang Bing
Sound: Ranko Paukovic
Production companies: Gladys Glover Films, House On Fire, CS Production,
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin
152 minutes

There are stylistic and thematic echoes here of some vintage screen classics, from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) to Michael Haneke’s Hidden (2005), with an added frisson of culturally specific paranoia about Singapore becoming a lightly dystopian police state. Atmospheric and twist-heavy, this solidly crafted nerve-jangler should travel widely after Venice, its prospects boosted by genre-adjacent crime-thriller trappings. Yeo’s previous feature, A Land Imagined (2018), earned the top prize in Locarno and sold to Netflix.

Fittingly, we first see twentysomething couple Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Annica Panna) on a scratchy home video clip, playing with their baby daughter Little Bo on a carefree family picnic, with Junyang’s elegant fortysomething mother Shuping (Vera Chen) behind the camera. Peiying’s top is emblazoned with the slogan “I’m Watching You”, an incidental detail that takes on a more sinister resonance as events unfold.

Jumping forward in time, we find the couple now drained and devastated. Months before this scene, Little Bo was abducted from a playground by an unseen kidnapper while Junyang was distracted by his phone. The bereft parents are now poring over old footage, desperately seeking clues that will help them find the culprit. When they ask neighbours for help, they mostly encounter compassion fatigue and suspicion. “Even kindness has an expiry date,” Peiying observes bitterly.

Out of the blue, an unsettling series of DVDs begin arriving at the apartment that the couple share with Shupin, slipped under the door by an unseen stranger. The discs contain video footage of the couple going back years, obsessively filmed by their stalker, including close-up material shot on the day that Bo was abducted. Sensing a breakthrough in the case, gruff detective Zheng (Pete Teo) has a camera fitted outside the apartment. The culprit is soon arrested: Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), an impassive, sullen, middle-aged supermarket manager living in the residential block opposite, where he shares an apartment with his elderly mother.

A more conventional crime thriller would have concluded with this unmasking, but Yeo is clearly playing a more subtle game of bait and switch here. His non-linear narrative shifts midway through to Lao Wu’s viewpoint, tracking his long history of video-stalking Peiying and Junyang, an obsession seemingly piqued by irritation over their self-absorbed lifestyles and careless disregard for Little Bo. His private investigations expose some uncomfortable home truths for the pair, notably Junyang’s serial flirtation and infidelity, which extends to bisexual threesomes. Meanwhile, when the police find no evidence that Lao Wu abducted Bo, they reluctantly set him free. A devastated Peiying resorts to desperate measures, exploiting her neighbour’s creepy fixation on her hobby as an online techno DJ, setting a trap that begins with sexual temptation and ends in violence.

Spoiler alert: the red-herring kidnap plot that initially drives Stranger Eyes is eventually resolved, by which point it has become incidental to the emotional and mental havoc it has wrought ion the film’s protagonists. Yeo is far more interested in questions of voyeurism and privacy, the deep human need to feel seen, the alienating effect of technology and the dangerous power of secrets. One of his most striking motifs is the forest of cameras spread across every corner of Singapore, a blanket surveillance culture where everything is visible but darker undercurrents go unseen. Seeing too much, knowing too much about friends, lovers and family members is not always a healthy way to live. Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

Stranger Eyes meanders a little in its overlong final act, circling around a psychological “explanation” for Lau Wu’s obsessive stalking that feels strained and simplistic. More investigation of the thinly drawn Junyang and Peiying, their thwarted desires and secret ambitions, might have helped deepen the psychodrama and smooth some of the film’s more jarring plot twists. Yeo Siew Hua’s cautionary message about surveillance technology is also a little opaque, notionally critical but lacking any deeper sociopolitical analysis.

But despite a few clumsy touches and offbeat choices, Stranger Eyes is a satisfying and classy piece of work overall, throbbing with slow-burn dread and digital paranoia. Yeo’s use of CCTV, low-res video footage and vast mosaics of surveillance screens underscores a strong aesthetic package. Likewise his spare but striking deployment of diegetic music, from thumping techno beats to haunting romantic ballads.

Director, screenwriter: Yeo Siew Hua
Cast: Wu Chien-ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-yew
Cinematography: Hideho Urata
Editing: Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Music: Thomas Foguenne
Producers: Fran Borgia, Stefano Centini, Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Alex C. Lo
Production companies: Akanga Film Asia (Singapore), Volos Films (Taiwan), Films de Force Majeure (France), Cinema Inutile (US)
World sales: Playtime, Paris
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin, English
125 minutes

Mistress Dispeller offers an intimate fly-on-the-wall look at a fairly new growth industry born from China’s recent economic boom. A “dispeller” is a specialist troubleshooter who intervenes to break up extramarital affairs, gaining the trust of the mistress, usually under false pretenses, then gradually working to separate her from her married lover. According to Lo, there are hundreds of these semi-clandestine passion killers currently working in China. Typically hired for two to three months by the wife of an unfaithful husband, for a hefty price, they are equal parts relationship counsellor, psychologist, private detective and hostage negotiator.

The dispeller at the heart of Lo’s film is Wang Zhenxi, who proved instrumental not just in proposing various clients as potential subjects, but also in persuading them to share their sensitive marital problems on camera, no mean feat in a socially conservative, status-driven culture that puts a premium on saving face. The duo who ended up stars of the film are Mrs and Mrs Li, an ordinary middle-aged couple living in a provincial Chinese city. Despite a residual shared interest in playing badminton, their relationship appears to have run out of spark, sex and even conversation. “We used to be so close,” Mrs Li laments. “It feels like there’s an inviable sheet of paper between us.”

Mrs Li has engaged the dispeller after finding intimate text messages on her husband’s phone, unknown to him, correctly surmising that his regular absences and late-night social events with work colleagues are cover for an affair with a younger woman, Fei Fei. Wang deftly manages to insinuate herself into the family home by posing as a friend of Mrs Li’s brother. Soon she is coaxing on-camera confessions from Mr Li, and even gatecrashing his dates with Fei Fei, gently chipping away at their trust in each other while painting herself as everybody’s best friend. Wang’s diplomatic skills are impressive here. She even organises an emotionally charged meeting between wife and mistress, where they couch their rivalry in formally courteous compliments, united by their shared disillusionment with love’s crooked promises.

Much of the close-up observational footage that Lo includes in Mistress Dispeller almost looks too good to be true. But in her Venice press notes, the director stresses the painstaking negotiations that made the film happen, from personal to ethical to legal. While only Wang knew Lo’s intentions in advance, the other key players initially gave consent to be filmed for a more general documentary about love habits in contemporary China. The team then began shooting several possible troubled couples, but some dropped out during the lengthy process. After narrowing their focus down to just the core trio, the film-makers revealed their true motivation late in the shoot, and asked for renewed consent. All agreed to endorse the project. Indeed, both Mrs Li and Fei Fei supply supportive quotes in the Venice festival press kit.

In structural terms, Lo likens Mistress Dispeller to Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon (1950), with its shifting viewpoints between multiple protagonists. The film certainly becomes more lyrical and expansive in its latter scenes, its main trio no longer just looking inwards at their own messy entanglements but musing on more universal themes of long-term romance, family bonds, ephemeral beauty, forgiveness and redemption. Lo’s non-judgemental gaze makes Fei Fei as much vulnerable victim as marriage-wrecking temptress here, a lonely woman with limited options looking for love in all the wrong places. “It’s the movement of love,” she sighs as the affair fizzles out. “He gave his love to me, and later I returned that love to his wife.”

Formally, Mistress Dispeller is pretty conventional, but its talk-heavy interior scenes are couched in handsome stylistic trimmings, from swooping aerial drone shots of glistening city vistas to a heart-tugging soundtrack that includes soaringly dramatic pieces by Puccini, Saint-Saëns and more. Some wider context about the work of other dispellers would have been welcome, as would more case studies with deeper conflict and complexity than this relatively smooth cautionary tale. But as a modestly scaled investigation of love, marriage and infidelity in contemporary China, Lo’s film is engaging, informative and heartfelt.

Director, cinematography: Elizabeth Lo
Screenwriters, editing: Elizabeth Lo, Charlotte Munch Bengtsen
Music: Brian McOmber
Producers: Emma D. Miller, Elizabeth Lo, Maggie Li
Production companies: After Argos Films, Anonymous Content, Impact Partners, Marcona Media
World sales: The Party, Paris (North American Sales: Anonymous Content / Submarine Entertainment)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In Mandarin
94 minutes

The story takes place “somewhere in Sicily, in the early 2000s”. Catello Palumbo (Toni Servillo) has just been released from prison after serving a six-year sentence, and his prospects are not encouraging. Then he gets approached by the Italian Secret Service, who suggest he help them bring down his godson Matteo, the last major Mafia boss still at large. Using their personal connection, Catello communicates with Matteo via letters (pizzini in gangster jargon), but one may wonder if he won’t try to upend the whole operation, given his track record.

Though his last name is never used in the film, Matteo (nicknamed Iddu, which is “he” in Sicilian) is clearly meant to be Matteo Messina Denaro, the Cosa Nostra boss who spent three decades in hiding before his arrest in 2023 (he died of cancer shortly after). Assuming he’s meant to be the same age as Germano in the movie, these events take place circa 2005, even though exact chronology is largely irrelevant, as is any specific adherence to what actually happened. This is something Grassadonia and Piazza have done before (their previous film Sicilian Ghost Story was also loosely based on a true story), and explicitly state with the opening title card: “Reality is a point of departure, not a destination.”

The vagueness is reflected in the refusal to pinpoint a clear location, with principal photography having taken place in multiple cities in order to paint a general picture of Sicily. In fact, the regional feel is primarily evoked through the correspondence between Matteo and Catello, an exercise in eloquence – as Palumbo explains, mobsters on the run are among the most well-read people in the world – that allows Germano and Servillo to sink their teeth into the filmmakers’ elegant, literate writing, creating a microcosm through words rather than bullets.

These exchanges also highlight the two actors’ contrasting and complementary styles: Servillo, whose Neapolitan background is worked into Catello’s speech patterns, gives more of a performance, embracing the character’s dual allegiance, while the Rome-born Germano, who handles the Sicilian accent with gusto, is all understated menace and boiling resentment, with the occasional flashback emphasizing just how different his life used to be before he went into hiding. Such scenes add to Grassadonia and Piazza’s fascination with the dreamlike, and they find a perfect ally in cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, whose rendition of the scorching hot landscape walks the fine line between layers of reality.

The film stumbles on occasion, when it briefly focuses on situations not directly tied to the two protagonists (one scene between two members of the Secret Service is particularly jarring), but these minor hiccups are ably compensated by the overall confidence that traverses the whole picture, securely guiding the viewer inside a world which is not that far removed from Sicilian everyday life, and yet sufficiently removed to be its own, subtly spellbinding universe.

Directors, screenplay: Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza
Cast: Toni Servillo, Elio Germano, Daniela Marra, Barbora Bobulova, Giuseppe Tantillo, Fausto Russo Alesi, Antonia Truppo, Tommaso Ragno, Betti Pedrazzi, Filippo Luna, Rosario Palazzolo, Roberto De Francesco, Vincenzo Ferrera, Maurizio Marchetti, Gianluca Zaccaria, Lucio Patanè
Producers: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Carlotta Calori, Viola Prestieri, Alexis Dantec
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Production design: Gaspare De Pascali
Costume design: Andrea Cavalletto
Music: Colapesce
Sound: Stefano Campus, Mirko Perri, Giulio Previ
Production companies: Indigo Film, Rai Cinema, Les Films du Losange
World sales: Les Films du Losange
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian, Sicilian dialect
122 minutes

She is a young woman growing into adulthood in a country that is not her own, living in a pokey apartment in a run-down Istanbul neighbourhood, trying to care for her pre-adolescent brother. She is evidently not someone who has been given the luxury of a childhood filled with freedom and wonder. Forced into a position beyond her tender years, one of carer and provider in a land far away, she is also trying to come to terms with herself and her position in the wider world.

Such intersections are key to what Cansu Baydar is doing with this film. It is a narrative portrait of an individual, but she is one at various crossroads and being pulled in different directions. While she may dream of what it would take to make her way to Europe, she must also face the reality of learning her trade in a nail salon so that they can make ends meet. While she might want to go out partying and to clubs, and bring back handsome boys, she also has her brother next door in their tiny home. While she might be a beautiful young woman who enjoys the attention of men, she is also the target of racist ire if she steps out of line with them.

Baydar has evidently drawn on her own experiences of growing up in an immigrant family to construct this nuanced and complex picture, but that is no guarantee of its impact. Fortunately, between director and star they manage to make each of these elements feel important and discrete while also presenting their naturally entangled nature. And in fleeting moments of sibling silliness, the world feels simple for a second, before the demands of the outside come flooding back in.

Director, screenplay: Cansu Baydar
Main Cast: Rahaf Armanazi, Isa Karatas, Ferhat Akgun, Busra Albayrak, Ubey Gul
Producers: Ulay Tuna Astepe, Sinan Yusufoglu, Cansu Baydar, Izlem Genc, Ali Farkhonde, Ceyda Yuceer
Cinematography: Baris Ozbicer
Editing: Doruk Kaya, Cisem Baydar
Sound: Neset Ufuk Demir, Yalin Ozgencil
Production design: Gorkem Canbolat
Costume design: Ceyda Yuceer
Production companies: Ekho Film, Nana Film, Fok Project (Turkey)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti Short Films Competition)
In Turkish, Arabic
20 minutes

Peacock works as both nimble farce and broader satirical allegory, highlighting the performative fakery that underpins bourgeois good manners in all societies, and the constructed personas that many of us present in an image-driven consumerist society. At times it comes close to the withering critical tone of more acerbic directors like Ruben Östlund, but Wenger is more empathetic and merciful than that. His intent is to gently mock his flawed characters and their superficial values, not to burn the whole rotten system to the ground. The sardonic social snapshot he presents could almost be a 21st century update of fellow Austrian Robert Musil’s classic modernist novel A Man Without Qualities, but with better jokes, and more dogs.

Conveying a faint edge of existential panic behind his permanently bemused expression, Shuch gives a magnetic, tightly controlled, balletic performance as Matthias, the co-founder and chief asset of a Vienna-based friend-for-hire company. Well-mannered, blandly handsome and immaculately groomed, with a comically neat Ned Flanders moustache, Matthias plays a versatile range of fantasy companions for paying customers: attentive (but strictly platonic) date for older women, boyfriend of a man hoping to rent a fancy apartment available to couples only, impressive air-pilot father for a schoolboy whose real dad is absent, adoring son to an odious businessman who needs to score social leverage at his lavish 60th birthday party.

Throughout all these assignments, Matthias smiles politely, sticks to his script and makes the client look good. He’s a smooth operator and earns consistently excellent reviews. Below the surface, however, all this slick fakery is taking a psychological toll on the real Matthias, assuming his true self still exists. His girlfriend Sophie (Julia Franz Richter) has begin to see him as is a hollow man, too passive and pliant, devoid of firm values or personality. When she walks out, leaving Matthias alone in their clinically beautiful modernist house, his brittle self-image starts to crack. A flirtatious encounter with a Norwegian woman, Ina (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø), seems to promise a fresh start, but it falls apart when neither can fully trust the other’s public facade. Is everybody acting? Is every friendship transactional?

Meanwhile at work, Matthias is starting to learn that even his most positive interactions can have negative real-world consequences. After one of his clients leaves her bullying husband following a paid role-playing session, the husband begins stalking Matthias, angrily demanding to know how and why he destroyed their marriage. These sequences darken the film from absurdist comedy to psychological thriller, with jump scares and threats of violence hanging in the air.

With Matthias heading for some kind of breakdown, Wenger amplifies his deepening despair with sharp visual gags and surreal twists: a duck breaks into his car, a paint-splattering performance art show disrupted by an apparent poisoning, a comically inept street mugging with a shameful twist, plus recurring jokes about plumbing problems and rented dogs. Albin Wildner’s crisp, chilly, precisely composed cinematography is an asset here, its cool detachment serving the deadpan humour.

By the time its high-stakes finale looms, Peacock feels like it could explode in multiple directions: blistering political satire, horror movie, nightmarish psychodrama. Disappointingly, Wenger settles for a fairly traditional social farce that relies a little too heavily on the stuffy clients who have hired Matthias being priggish, pompous snobs. A perfectly sensible resolution for a light comedy, but it sidelines the film’s deeper class critique, shutting down its weirder undercurrents of Kafka-esque absurdism and Kaufman-esque surrealism. It is hard to imagine a prickly provocateur like Östlund settling for such a tastefully restrained pay-off. Even so, this rare comic gem is consistently good fun from start to finish, all dancing along on Schuch’s graceful, spring-heeled performance.

Director, screenwriter: Bernhard Wenger
Cast: Albrecht Schuch, Julia Franz Richter, Anton Noori, Theresa Frostad Eggesbø, Salka Weber, Maria Hofstätter, Branko Samarovski, Tilo Nest, Christopher Schärf, Marlene Hauser
Cinematography: Albin Wildner
Editing: Rupert Höller
Music: Lorenz Dangel
Production designer: Katharina Haring
Producers: Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Markus Glaser, Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Production companies: NGF Geyrhalterfilm (Austria), CALA Filmproduktion (Germany)
World sales: MK2
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In German, English
102 minutes

Her new story once more begins with a shock, when Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an experienced obstetrician in a provincial hospital, delivers a baby who dies right after its bloody onscreen birth. Under close scrutiny from her colleagues and the police, she courageously weathers the unfolding human and legal fallout and sticks to her guns, insisting she made no mistake. But she has other secrets that the hospital wants to remain hidden, and this incident could be a good excuse to fire her. As we soon discover, she has quietly been performing illegal, unregistered abortions on poor patients living in remote rural areas.

Using a relentless series of long-held, fixed-frame tableaux to shake up narrative normality, Kulumbehashvili brings disorientation and intensity to her portrait of this bold, single-minded medic, ready to sacrifice her job and reputation and maybe her freedom to perform these abortions on desperate country women who have to hide the fact they’re pregnant from their families and community. As Nina speeds down lonely country roads and highways, making her rounds, she seems like a solitary, heroic knight fighting for her patients’ dignity. But the personal price she pays, unflinchingly, is high.

With the camera fixed on an oblong room with a long table in the middle distance, we see Nina visiting a young deaf-mute woman who lives with her married sister and large family. This is not the first time the sister has begged Doctor Nina to end a pregnancy for the mentally fragile girl. When asked about the baby’s father, she pretends not to have any idea how her sister “got out” and became pregnant again, but it’s pretty obvious there is only one man in the house. Later Nina returns to this house and this room to perform the abortion in one long, uncomfortable shot that will have the audience squirming. With the camera carefully cutting off the heads of the girl and her sister, it is as though they were the anonymous subjects of a documentary, and not actors.

In a rather brilliant move, Kulumbehashvili foregoes repeating herself by showing another visit to another patient, and opts for a third trip to the oddly-shaped room dominated by its prominent table. On her way home, Nina has driven into a thunderstorm and her car is stuck on a muddy road. It echoes a horrific story she has told earlier about how, as a child, her sister got stuck in a muddy lake and nearly drowned, while Nina sat on the bank and cried, too terrified to jump in the water and help her. Now she walks through the downpour to the house of her two patients. Eerily, only the older sister is there, serving her husband food on the long table.

Besides her fervent dedication to work as an OB-GYN and abortionist – and inextricable from it – is Nina’s unbalanced emotional makeup. When asked by a married colleague (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who years before was her lover, why she didn’t marry him, she affirms without evidence that their relationship would never have worked out. She also claims she hasn’t had a relationship in the eight intervening years. What she doesn’t say is she seeks sexual gratification, and perhaps humiliation, at the hands of strangers: a hitchhiker she picks up to whom she offers oral sex; a young car wash attendant on a lonely road. The danger of these casual trysts is perhaps what excites her, but their neurotic component is a sad fixture in Nina’s truncated emotional existence.

This incomplete human being could be represented by a recurring figure who appears in various unreal landscapes, often sloshing hesitantly through a viscous liquid like the amniotic fluid surrounding an unborn baby. Adult-size but with a clay-like texture and cocooned features, audibly wheezing and gasping for life, this figure is deliberately puzzling and more than a little repulsive, but stirs some sympathy in its blind stumbling and fear that it will never be an independent, self-sufficient creature.

Although the film’s rigorous insistence on holding shots for minutes on end without moving the camera will not win it wide audiences (there were numerous walk-outs even at the press screening in Venice, where it premiered in the main competition), it does give it a very distinctive look. The cinematography is pleasingly sophisticated, with powerful straight-on shots of one character — or in some cases like driving a car, no character at all. There are some beautiful exteriors from D.P. Arseni Khachaturan, like the ominous movement of a storm cloud over plowed fields with its portent of a tempest. The visuals work hand-in-glove with a constant biologically-themed soundscape of breathing, wheezing and heartbeats, which blend into Matthew Herbert’s mysterious musical compositions.

Director, screenplay: Dea Kulumbegashvili
Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze
Producers: Ilan Amouyal, David Zerat, Luca Guadagnino, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Gabriele Moratti, Alexandra Rossi, Archil Gelovani
Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan
Editing: Jacopo Ramella Pajrin
Production design: Beka Tabukashvili
Costume design: Tornike Kirtadze, Nikolozi Guraspashvili
Music: Matthew Herbert
Sound: Lars Ginzel, Tina Laschke, Zezva Pochkhidze
Production companies: First Picture, Frenesy, Memo Films, Independent Film Project
World Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Georgian
134 minutes

The film is set against the backdrop of a working class neighborhood in Cairo, where Hassan (Essam Omar), a 30-year old security guard, lives with his mother Altaf (Samaa Ibrahim) in an old flat accompanied by a rescued mixed breed Baladi dog. (Baladi if Arabic for local. Stray dogs in Egypt are usually a mix of six breeds, some of them going back to ancient Egypt.)

Hassan and his mother have lived in their flat for years, but are now threatened by the son of the late landlord, Karam (Ahmed Bahaa), a car mechanic and a bully who wants to tear down the house and build a bigger workshop. The plot intensifies when Karam intimidates Hassan in the street, leading Rambo to storm out of the house to defend his best friend and bite Karam in the crotch.

Mansour’s script, co-written with Mohamed El-Hossieny, does not see many differences between Hassan and Rambo; both are stray beings in the harsh streets of Cairo, fighting for survival and for a place in society.

Hassan was abandoned by his father, forced to become the breadwinner from an early age; stuck in a dead-end job at 30, he lost his girlfriend. His only capital are the few people he loves and cares about, his house, and his dog. Meanwhile, Rambo is a Baladi dog, widely regarded in Egypt as unclean and dangerous and so subjected to violence and haphazard animal-control poisoning campaigns, and with even some radical suggestions of “exporting them” to South Korea as food.

Hassan’s character is brilliantly written to symbolize a defeated generation. They grew up trying to find some margin of freedom, emancipation and social justice, but  ended up alienated from society amid Egypt’s rapid changes and reforms, governmental or personal, which crush anyone and anything.

This melancholy leads to the second half of the film, where Hassan passionately embarks on a mission to safeguard Rambo, fearing Karam’s deadly vengeance. Despite all the threats, the bond between Hassan and Rambo remains tight. This leads Hassan deep into Cairo’s underworld to find a safe haven for the canine outlaw. Saving Rambo, even if flying him out of the country, means much more than just saving a pet; it opens the door for Hassan to confront the ghosts of his past and the fears of the future.

Any Egyptian watching Seeking Haven for Mr Rambo will feel at home inside Hassan’s middle class house or in outdoors shots of Cairo’s rusty and underdeveloped districts. They are not poverty porn. The house has real warmth and comfort, the busy streets a kind realism lost in many contemporary Egyptian productions. This familiarity can also be seen in the exceptional performances of Essam Omar in the lead role and Samaa Ibrahim as his mother, in their cheerful scenes together.

It’s a bold claim to make, but Cairo is one of the main characters in Mansour’s film. Cinematographer Ahmed Tarek Bayoumi provides non-romanticised wide shots of the city.  Wearing a cute little helmet, dog and master navigate the heavy traffic of the vibrant streets on an old Soviet-era motorbike, with Rambo riding in the sidecar, in a scene saluting a peaceful if dysphoric city.

In 1982, veteran Egyptian filmmaker Atef Al-Tayed, a leading figure in the 1980’s neorealist movement, made his masterpiece The Bus Driver, a film that mourned the broken dreams of a generation of middle-class Egyptians, who spent years enduring the austerity of wars in the 1960’s and 1970’s including economic “reforms”. They came back from the front to find all their sacrifices useless, handed on a silver platter to a new wave of nouveau riche, capitalists and opportunists.

Forty years on, Mr. Rambo gently and without too much ado sends a love-hate letter to Cairo, poetically acknowledging the harsh reality of being a middle-class Egyptian, but also portraying the braves souls who are willing to sacrifice to save their loved ones.

Director: Khaled Mansour
Screenplay: Khaled Mansour, Mohamed El-Hossieny
Cast: Essam Omar, Rakeen Saad, Ahmed Bahaa, Samaa Ibrahim
Producers: Rasha Hosny, Mohamed Hefzy
Cinematography: Ahmed Tarek Bayoumi
Editing: Yasser Azmy
Sound: Mohamed Salah, Yahia Mahmoud Elmotnaby
Music: Ahmad Mostafa Zaky
Costume design: Nardine Ihab
Visual Effects: Ayman Al Refaee, Mohamed Omar, Amr Abdallah
World sales: Film Clinic Indie Distribution
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti Extra)
In Arabic
102 minutes

By re-imagining one of Batman’s most iconic foes as a psychologically damaged anti-hero driven to violence by mental illness, emotional abuse and social inequality, Joker became a huge critical and commercial hit. It earned 11 Oscar nominations and won two, one for an extraordinary shape-shifting star turn by Phoenix, plus box office returns north of a billion dollars. Five years ago, director and star insisted there were no sequel plans but, perhaps inevitably, here they are again. They look at clowns from both sides now.

Joined here by Lady Gaga, Phoenix gives another deeply committed performance, having once again starved himself to scarily thin scarecrow dimensions. The song-and-dance numbers are mostly glorious, sumptuously staged and frequently hilarious. But the rest of the movie feels scrappy and disjointed by comparison, like background scenes in some deranged jukebox musical. The film world premieres in Venice this week, the same festival where Joker began its meteoric rise five years ago by winning the prestigious main prize, The Golden Lion. Warner Brothers are lining up worldwide release in October.

Folie à Deux begins strongly, with an usually sweet-voiced Nick Cave crooning Bacharach and David’s “What The World Needs Now” as a Looney Tunes-style cartoon dances across the screen featuring Joker as an animated character. Created by Sylvain Chomet, the prize-winning director of The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010), this lively opening vignette is a promising blast of left-field mischief.

The action takes place two years after the events in the first film. We are back in Gotham City, once again a grungy, run-down, funhouse-mirror version of early 1980s New York. Failed comedian turned serial killer Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, is now detained in the city’s Arkham State Hospital for the criminally insane after shooting talk show host Murray Franklin dead on live television, on top of five more murders, as depicted in Joker.

Waiting to hear if he is deemed fit to stand trial, Arthur is a broken, withdrawn husk of a man, no longer the demonically cackling supervillain hailed as a folk hero two years before. But a meeting with fellow inmate Harley Quinn (Gaga) during a music therapy class rekindles some of his old anarchic spark. She dreams of being Cher to his Sonny, Bonnie to his Clyde, nitro to his glycerine. The volatile sexual chemistry between the pair soon becomes a disruptive force across the jail, unsettling guards and prisoners.

Having built up all this potential, like a rumbling volcano, Folie à Deux never delivers the eruption it seems to promise. Instead, the second half gets bogged down in prosaic courtroom drama, spending too long re-litigating the events of the first film, and whether Arthur can be spared the death penalty due to his dissociative mental disorder. Meanwhile, Harley watches from the gallery, the ultimate groupie, relishing her lover’s deepening notoriety and escalating insanity. There are still enjoyable flourishes here, but dramatic momentum slows down significantly as the plot plods through too much procedural detail.

An explosive climax to the court case feels like an exciting breakthrough, but Phillips abruptly puts a lid on it, pushing an underwritten Harley to the margins and downplaying Arthur’s combustible status as a rebel icon for the disaffected masses. A jarringly dark final twist comes out of the blue, unrelated to the main plot, and thus lacks the emotional punch it should have had. Compared to the sustained operatic crescendo that rounded off the original Joker, this rushed wrap-up feels oddly clumsy and conventional, with very little of that film’s psychological complexity or sociopolitical critique. A sprinkle of superfluous cameos, notably Steve Coogan as a TV interviewer, feel more like window dressing than vital dramatic texture.

That said, Folie à Deux has its saving graces, notably its head-spinning detours into old-school Hollywood musical terrain. The soundtrack is rammed to bursting with classics from the great American songbook, vintage Broadway showtunes, easy-listening pop gems and more. Singing live and raw on set, Gaga and Phoenix share the vocal performances, solo and together. They often break into song mid-scene, moving from low-key naturalism to heavily stylised big-production numbers, with the shift usually framed as fantasy, dream or hallucination.

Among many superbly staged musical highlights is a duet version of the Bee Gees-penned “To Love Somebody” which features the pair as a kind of homicidal folk-pop duo, Gaga’s rollicking rock’n’soul take on “Gonna Build a Mountain”, originally written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1961 stage musical Stop The World – I Want to Get Off, and Phoenix’s heart-tugging rendition of “If You Go Away”, the English translation of Jacques Brel’s classic tearjerking chanson “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. First heard in the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon (1953), jaunty toe-tapper “That’s Entertainment!” also serves as a recurring motif, its lyric increasingly curdled and ironic. Joker: Folie à Deux is never boring, but it plays like great overstuffed triple album with a muddled hot mess of a movie attached.

Director: Todd Phillips
Screenwriters: Scott Silver, Todd Phillips
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan
Cinematography: Lawrence Sher
Editing: Jeff Groth
Production Designer: Mark Friedberg
Costume Designer: Arianne Phillips
Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir
Visual Effects: Brendon O’Dell
Producers: Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Joseph Garner
Production company: Joint Effort (US), Warner Brothers (US), DC Studios (US)
World sales: Warner Brothers
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English
138 minutes

“Keening” is tradition in Gaelic culture in which a form of vocal lamentation is undertaken by people unconnected to the deceased. In this film, they are a group of actors who arrive at funerals by minibus with a variety of different routines in which they wail for the passing of someone while their actual family watch on in stunned silence. In theory, it is about people unencumbered by actual grief who have the freedom to openly express it where the genuine mourners may not –McGoldrick turns the tables, depicting someone who loudly weeps for work while trying to keep his own emotions at bay.

The film is set against the landscapes of rural Northern Ireland, where Ian (Seamus O’Hara) is one of the supporting players in this troupe of travelling players. They go from funeral to funeral, never having any attachment to the real emotions of the people observing them, out-performing them without a thought. It may have its roots in more communal tradition, but this is keening as cynicism and commerce. It’s about convincing the boss you have what it takes to understudy for a colleague and dismissing the confusion of young boy at the people faking grief at his father’s passing.

However, for McGoldrick, Ian’s routine is multi-layered. He is not only projecting grief for his work but projecting a lack of it in his life. As the reality of his own family situation becomes evident, the audience begins to wonder what exactly is re-enactment and what is not – and do not all public displays of emotion come laden with some level of performativity. O’Hara brilliantly bristles as Ian, his real-life act not as convincing as the one on the clock. Here the acting of mourning becomes entwined with the act of mourning, and perhaps allows some level of the real self to be laid bare by performance.

Director, screenplay: Oliver McGoldrick
Cast: Seamus O’Hara, Sean Kearns, Carol Moore, Caitriona Hinds, Niall Cusack
Producers: Oliver McGoldrick, Natalie Remplakowski, Cade Featherstone, Chloe Langton
Cinematography: Gianna Badiali
Editing: Oliver McGoldrick, Reuben Hamlyn
Sound: Matteo Di Cugno, Ines Adriana
Music: Alex Gray
Production design: Marianne Auvinet-Gould, Myles Thompson
Costume design: Katie Ireland
World sales: Ouat Media (Canada)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti Short Films Competition)
In English
10 minutes

The story takes place in present day Villerupt, in the Grand Est region of France (the same general area as another Gallic comp entry in this year’s Venice, And Their Children After Them), near the border with Luxembourg and Germany. Pierre, a middle-aged widower, has two sons: Félix, known as Fus (from the German Fussball, soccer, a sport he used to be particularly good at), and Louis, nicknamed Loulou. The former is an unemployed metal worker, the latter a high school senior with his sights set on the Sorbonne.

Tensions rise within the family when Fus, under the guise of reconnecting with former schoolmates, starts hanging out with a group whose political leanings are explicitly, unequivocally far-right (one picture shows them wearing sweaters with the slogan “Fascists do it better”). And as per the English title, this leads to increasingly awkward silences between father and son.

With his distinctive sad and weary facial features, which make him a live-action Droopy and the living emblem of socially conscious French cinema, Vincent Lindon is perfectly cast as Pierre, a part he wears as though it were an extension of the roles he played in Stéphane Brizé’s triptych about workers’ rights. Benjamin Voisin, who gained international attention thanks to François Ozon’s Summer 85 and Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions, adds intensity as Fus, but the stealth MVP is Stefan Crapon, another Ozon veteran (Peter Von Kant) and Voisin’s former roommate, in the seemingly thankless part of Loulou, who is caught in the verbal crossfire and disagrees with his brother’s ideological transformation while also berating his father for being too domineering.

Having first made a name for themselves with the female-centric 17 Girls, the Coulin sisters change gears with a story, based on a novel by Laurent Petitmangin, that is very much about a masculine world, as a result of Pierre’s decision to essentially build a microcosm around his two sons. The domestic walls are a prison of the soul, an aspect cinematographer Frédéric Noirhomme captures especially well in night-time scenes where the youths, both passably athletic, silently climb from one floor to another, rather than going up or down the stairs, in order to sneak around.

As the familial bond cools, the tone also gets increasingly bleak (one of the rare touches of understated humor is when Loulou has to explain to Pierre how Instagram comments work), with a very in-your-face approach that perhaps derives its urgency from the real-world context the film alludes to via news reports about right-wing re-emergence on a global level.

In that sense, it is particularly commendable that the bulk of the movie is set away from Paris, with the French capital treated as an alien entity compared to the blue-collar Grand Est environment that is more vulnerable to such political turmoil, adding a layer of factual honesty that would perhaps have rung hollow had the filmmakers stuck to what some of their peers have termed the “Parisianism” of French cinema. In fact, while the Sorbonne is brought up as a safety net for Louis, the third act comes as a stark reminder of how it may be too late for the whole family, the unspoken struggles serving as a tacit indictment of a certain socio-political apathy.

Directors & Screenwriters: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Benjamin Voisin, Stefan Crepon
Producers: Marie Guillaumond, Olivier Delbosc, Bastien Sirodot
Cinematography: Frédéric Noirhomme
Production design: Yves Fournier
Costume design: Julia Dunoyer
Music: Pawel Mykietyn
Sound: Emmanuelle Villard, Titouan Dumesnil, Olivier Goinard, Lucien Richardson
Production companies: Felicita, Curiosa Films, France 3 Cinéma, Umedia
World sales: Playtime
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In French
110 minutes

Split into five chapters, the film presents the stories of five different women – a diverse group with regards to their original home countries, their backgrounds, their situations. They are united, however, by their current lives in contemporary Portugal, and by the ways in which photographs analogue and digital offer them a connective line back to the life and world they have, sadly, been forced to leave behind. Receiving its world premiere as part of the Giornate degli autori in Venice, this is a film very much of the present, and about the ways people become rent from and tied to their past.

In the supporting blurb for the film on the Terratreme website, Kora is described as accessing the “gaze of those who reconstruct (their) present.” It is perhaps an innocuous phrase on some publicity material, but it gets to the heart of one of things that Varejao’s film quietly, but somewhat radically, does. It repositions the plight of the refugee by allowing us to see that the painful lack of agency that led to them fleeing their homes can be transformed, in asylum, into self-determination. Whether these women were escaping the patriarchal oppression of the Taliban or the anti-queer rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s government, their new lives have been self-created.

In part, that also applies to their relationships to their own pasts. Each of these women has images that represent what they have left behind – from a mug with a family photo, to a snapshot of a son, to a passport photo of themselves before gender reassignment. They tell their stories in voiceover, accompanied by monochrome images that revolve around these photos more than moving portraiture, before their chapter concludes in a colour, in a photo booth in Portugal. Photos provide them with a line to before and an object of the now. Kora allows each woman control over their own narrative.

Director, cinematography, editing: Claudia Varejao
Cast: Inna Klochko, Lana Alkouse, Margarita Sharapova, Norina Sohail, Zohra Ghadr Alzaman
Producers: Joao Matos, Leonor Noivo, Luisa Homem, Susana Nobre, Pedro Pinho, Tiago Hespanha
Sound: Adriana Bolito
Music: Joana Gama
Production company: Terratreme Filmes (Portugal)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli autori)
In Arabic, Ukranian, Russian
28 minutes

Queer has a troubled history, including at least one failed attempt to bring it to the big screen, with Steve Buscemi directing. Burroughs wrote it in the early 1950s as a semi-sequel to his first published novel, Junkie (1953), but he was unhappy with the result, leaving it unfinished for more than 30 years. Finally released in incomplete form in 1985, it remains a minor work in the author’s canon, but it has arguably gained significance over the years as one of his most personal, least stylised explorations of his own emotional vulnerability and uneasy relationship with his own sexuality. Guadagnino certainly approaches these themes with tenderness and empathy, gently interrogating the self-loathing that afflicted some gay men in a closeted era long before pride marches and rainbow flags.

Craig stars as Bill Lee, a regular autobiographical avatar for Burroughs. Living in rented rooms and stylishly crumpled suits, Bill belongs to a demi-monde of hedonistic exiles in late 1940s Mexico City, mostly queer men on the run from repressive anti-gay laws in the US. Blessed with private family wealth, just like Burroughs, he spends his days boozing and cruising, trying to kick his heroin habit, and fixating on beautiful younger men, most of whom ignore his yearning gaze. His latest crush is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a handsome war veteran who is teasingly vague about his sexuality, presenting as straight but curious enough to keep Bill’s hopes simmering. Gradually, despite Gene’s cool ambiguity, their encounters becomes sexual.

Around the film’s midway point, Bill resigns himself to reality, recognising his relationship with Gene is a casual affair, essentially more transactional than romantic. In response, he proposes a joint trip across South America, including a mission to track down the fabled psychoactive substance yage, aka ayahuasca, a plant-based drink that he believes will give him telepathic powers. Lured by assurances that he only needs to “be nice” to Bill a maximum of twice a week, Gene consents to the trip. But travelling with an on-off junkie inevitably brings dramas and complications.

As Queer was published in unfinished form, Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzes have added their own final act, extending and reworking the original text. In their version, Bill and Gene’s pilgrimage to the jungle culminates in them successfully locating the mind-bending yage, assisted by the plainly unhinged Doctor Cotter, played by Lesley Manville in a deliciously deranged comic turn. This drug-fuelled climax abandons realism for surrealism: a powerful fever-dream featuring the vomiting up of organs, flesh-melting embraces and bodies fading into invisibility. This elegantly choreographed sequence has some of the nightmarish beauty of Jonathan Glazer’s work, though it adds little to the film’s central love story.

The film’s impressionistic patchwork finale also draws on other Burroughsian literary motifs, such as the fictional authoritarian state of Annexia, plus incidents borrowed from the author’s own life, notably the notorious fatal shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer 1951 during a drunken “William Tell act”. This tragic accident was previously recreated by director David Cronenberg in his own meta-fictional Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch (1991), so it feels slightly second-hand and superfluous here, perhaps even a little exploitative.

In terms of its LGBT politics, Queer feels very much in fruitful dialogue with 21st century attitudes. Guadagnino makes a point of showing Bill’s disdain towards more effeminate gay men, agonising about whether to accept his destiny as a “fag” and a “pervert”. These slurs jar with modern liberal sensibilities, of course, but they are softer than many of the real contrary statements that Burroughs made about his own conflicted sexuality. Bill is presented very sympathetically here, a lost soul seeking love and sex, companionship and connection in an era where such desires were fraught with risk.

Craig gives a nuanced, quietly anguished, emotionally brittle performance, perhaps his best post-Bond work to date, with a manicured American accent that never slips into directly mimicking Burroughs, despite the autobiographical parallels. But relative screen novice Starkey is too bland as Gene, undeniably a beauty but too flavourless to convince as an obscure object of desire. His handful of sex scenes with Craig are tastefully graphic, more balletic than erotic.

Bill’s Mexico City entourage of fellow queer exiles also includes the perennially unlucky Joe, played by a bearded, paunchy, barely recognisable Jason Schwartzman. Seemingly modelled on Allen Ginsberg, a long-time collaborator and sometime lover of Burroughs, Schwartzman’s droll performance is a joy. The film’s slow-burn opening act could have benefited from more of his antic energy.

After veering from bluesy ballad to wild jungle adventure, semi-requited love story to meandering road movie, Queer concludes more with a whimper than a bang. The final fireworks display of trippy delirium is certainly impressive, and a knowing nod to the more hallucinatory style of later Burroughs novels, but the loose ends of the original text are never really resolved. Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.

That said, typically for Guadagnino, Queer is still a visually sumptuous, impeccably crafted affair. Blending physical sets with digital effects, the gorgeously retro Mexican cityscapes were mostly created at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà studios, with Sicily and Ecuador providing handsome second-unit locations. A rich score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross leans heavily into mournful jazz and moody electronica, and features a collaborative track with Brazilian icon Caetano Veloso. The boldly anachronistic soundtrack also includes Sinead O’Connor’s tremulously lovely version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” alongside classic tunes from Nirvana themselves, Prince, New Order and more. Wider cultural homages fill the screen too, from John O’Hara’s scandalous 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra to Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), with a playful nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) also in the mix.

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Andra Ursuta, Michael Borremans, David Lowery
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Editinf: Marco Costa
Costumes: Jonathan Anderson
Production designer: Stefano Baisi
Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Producers: Lorenzo Mieli, Luca Guadagnino
Production companies: The Apartment, Fremantle Company, Frenesy Film
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Spanish
135 minutes