Last year the Venice Film Festival was impacted by the striking The Voice of Hind, which mixed fictional scenes and the real voice of a Palestinian girl to denounce the genocide in Gaza. Kaouther Ben Hania's film ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize, and it wouldn't be surprising if history repeated itself this year with Naza, the documentary in which Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor expose the war crimes committed by their country's army during the Gaza War. Although it must be said that, beyond the rigorous exploration of the methods employed by the Israel Defense Forces, Naza manages to transcend the denunciation of war barbarism, and offers a lucid and terrifying portrait of the most sinister face of the contemporary world, marked by the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the most basic notions of empathy, democracy and humanity.

Thirty-four years after presenting Jamón, jamón, by Bigas Luna, at the Venice Film Festival, the couple formed by Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz has returned to walk the red carpet of the Italian event for the premiere of Bunker, the new work by the French playwright and filmmaker Florian Zeller. This is the seventh time that the Spanish acting couple has shared the big screen. In this case, they play a married couple consisting of a successful architect and an editor. The couple lives in London, with their two daughters, in a privileged situation, a “comfort” that seems to have shattered the woman's existential well-being. This unstable situation is jolted by the appearance of a technology tycoon who offers the architect the construction of a bunker in Hawaii.

The Venice Film Festival dressed up this Saturday and enthusiastically applauded the return of Nanni Moretti, one of the great Italian filmmakers of the last few decades. It had been thirty-seven years since the director of Caro diario had stepped onto the historic stage, since 1989 when his film Palombella rossa –which offered an acidic portrait of the bewilderment of the Italian left– was excluded from the Official Selection supposedly for political reasons; the film ended up being presented in a secondary section of the festival, the Critics' Week. However, Moretti has not shown any resentment during the presentation of Succederà questa notte, which is competing for the Golden Lion this year. In fact, the filmmaker wanted to downplay his almost four-decade distancing from the festival: “It is not true that I had anything against Venice; simply, in all this time, my films were never ready in the summer, which is when the festival is held. This time, instead of filming in the spring, I did it in the autumn and, therefore, it seemed natural to present the film there”.

If there is a director who has known how to delve into the existence of the forgotten, those expelled by society, it is Werner Herzog. The Munich filmmaker has built, throughout his prodigious and eclectic career, a family of characters who, by force or by their own will, have found their place on the margins, far from customs, beyond what is accepted or tolerated. This Thursday the Venice Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Bucking bastard, a film that presents two new essential figures of the Herzog universe: Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters who speak, walk, dream, and fall in love in unison. The characters are inspired by twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin –who gained notoriety in the 1980s for their peculiar synchronicity and their problems with the law–, but in Venice, Herzog has assured that Bucking bastard “is a work of fiction”.

The Venice Film Festival has kicked off its 83rd edition with a calculated combination of glamour, authorship, entertainment, and critical spirit. The elegance and media appeal were provided by George Clooney, who received an honorary Golden Lion this Wednesday. Curiously, last year Clooney was already seen receiving an award for his career in Venice, but it was on the festival's screens, in the fiction of Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach's film. In reality, the link between the Hollywood star and the Festival dates back a long way, since 1998, when Clooney was still part of the cast of Emergencies, the actor stepped onto the festival's red carpet to present A very dangerous mess next to Jennifer Lopez. “My love story with Venice is almost thirty years old, and my most precious memory was my wedding – in 2014, with Amal Alamuddin, at the luxurious Aman Grand Canal Hotel. If I don't say this, I could get in trouble at home,” Clooney commented to the accredited press, showing off a charming and mischievous smile.

Beyond the talent for orchestrating action scenes – in the film As bestas and the series Antidisturbios–, the filmmaker from Madrid Rodrigo Sorogoyen usually builds his sharp existential odysseys around intimate sequences loaded with dramatic density and attention to detail. Following this pattern, El ser querido opens with a lengthy and vibrant encounter between a father (Javier Bardem), a successful film director, and his daughter (Victoria Luengo), whom he hasn't seen in thirteen years and who offers her the leading role in his new film. In itself, this scene, filmed in close-ups from a distance, offers everything an demanding viewer could ask for: writing of the highest precision, eloquent silences, echoes of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, and a duo of actors in a state of grace.

Although it is set in present-day New York and stars a charming young couple, Un talento único seems conceived to stir the nostalgia of veteran cinephiles, those who in the 90s enjoyed the regular release of intimate films with characters facing vital, emotional, and moral dilemmas. In this sense, the story of a meticulous piano tuner who suffers from a hearing impairment and discovers an ability to pick locks is reminiscent of the uplifting drama As Good as It Gets – the tuner finds salvation in the love of a pianist – as well as the mix of crime thriller and quirky comedy from Manhattan Murder Mystery.

In his approach to the true story of the conception and construction of the Grande Arche de la Défense – one of the architectural landmarks of 20th-century Paris –, The architect It adopts a unique perspective, far removed from the usual approaches of cinema that seeks to study artistic forms. Instead of foregrounding the emotional and sentimental drama of the protagonist—the Dane Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the unexpected winner of the competition to design the Parisian Arc—the film focuses on the artisanal dimension of the pharaonic architectural project. Thus, director and screenwriter Stéphane Demoustier manages to portray, from an almost microscopic perspective, the planning, sketching, and material selection tasks that Spreckelsen undertakes during the process of creating his magnum opus. These sources of pleasure contrast sharply with the anxiety caused to the architect by bureaucratic obstacles and the constant negotiation with political interests.

In a seminal study on romantic comedies of classic Hollywood, The search for happinessStanley Cavell proposed interpreting these films as spiritual parables about the desire for a better life. The American philosopher also maintained that the uniqueness of these films lay in their insistence on portraying the reunion of their protagonists, the possibility of "coming together." againThese precepts, defined by Cavell, emerge in the enchanting No connectionA comedy with a touch of drama, in which a couple with children decides to separate amicably and seek new horizons, while it becomes clear that they are incapable of forgetting each other.

In 1990, in an Iraq battered by UN sanctions, Lamia, a nine-year-old girl living in the wetlands, is tasked with baking a cake for her school's celebration of the anniversary of the nation's supreme leader, Saddam Hussein. Faced with food shortages, the girl, accompanied by her grandmother, travels to the city in search of ingredients. This premise allows Hasan Hadi, an Iraqi director trained in New York, to transform The president's cake in a textbook social drama; that is, a collection of episodes ranging from grim to downright sordid, illustrating a reality marked by militaristic fanaticism and a profound moral crisis.

The plot premise of Mercilessly It seems to evoke the wet dream of Donald Trump's authoritarianism. In the near future, the United States, shaken by crime and civil unrest, decides to put the judicial system in the hands of an artificial intelligence that promises efficiency and, above all, speed. Everything goes smoothly until the main promoter of this system (a police officer played by Chris Pratt) is accused of murdering his wife and has ninety minutes to convince the AI ​​(played by the infallible Rebecca Ferguson) not to execute her.

It arrived in theaters six months ago 28 years laterThe third installment in the saga with which Danny Boyle revitalized apocalyptic horror, transforming the slow, deliberate march of the undead into the galloping rampage of the infected. In this third entry, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland shifted the focus of their study, moving away from the response to the catastrophe and proposing a stimulating reflection on murder as a ritual of cohesion against an external enemy. This interest in the relationship between human beings and violence, amidst a struggle between reason and barbarity, resurfaces powerfully in 28 years later: the temple of bones, which was filmed consecutively in the previous film and will be the second part of a trilogy.

In 1960, South Korean society was shaken by the premiere of The housemaid, a masterful combination of family drama and thriller A psychological drama in which a maid disrupted the bourgeois and patriarchal order of a wealthy family. It is pure cinephile fantasy to imagine that Kim Ki-young's majestic film—considered the best in the history of South Korean cinema—is at the origin of the best-seller Freida McFadden's viral hit, which Paul Feig (director of some episodes of) is now bringing to the big screen Mad Men and of My best friend's weddingThere is a gulf between the sharp staging and twisted naturalism of the South Korean classic and the aesthetic ineffectiveness of The assistantBy blindly trusting the twists and turns of McFadden's novel, those responsible for this routine adaptation—from the director to the cast, including screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine—fail to create a visually or narratively stimulating spectacle.

Beyond its undeniable spectacular nature, Avatar: Fire and Ashes –third installment of the film saga created by James Cameron— Its appeal lies in a series of apparent contradictions. The film leverages its status as the central episode of the franchise—which is known to have five installments—to generate, for much of its runtime, that sense of unbridled vertigo and aimless adventure that made The Empire Strikes Back and Both towers the most stimulating chapters of the universes of Star Wars and The Lord of the RingsHowever, Cameron isn't satisfied with just the exciting string of twists, changes of scenery, and new characters, and the new Avatar It ends up dragging on beyond what is reasonable in order to tie together the numerous narrative threads and close some conceptual cycles. For example, after exploring the symbolic power of earth and water in the first two installments, the third episode explores aerial life forms and makes fire an emblem of destruction.

The Italian Luca Guadagnino, director of Call me by your name, has described Witch hunt as one thriller Moral. An exercise in speculative fiction built on a disturbing enigma: what happened between a Yale University philosophy professor (Andrew Garfield, temperamental) and a well-bred African-American student (Ayo Edebiri, chameleonic) who is the partner of a trans person? Was it a consensual encounter or sexual assault? And what does a professor (Julia Roberts, all-rounder) who is the main confidant of the alleged aggressor and the mentor of the complainant have to do with all this? From this extreme situation—which invokes #MeToo, cancel culture, systemic racism, and the struggle of the LGBTI community— Witch hunt X-rays an academic universe divided between professors willing to do anything for a tenured position and students on the warpath against a retrograde model.

For those of us who forged our cinephilia between the 1980s and 1990s, looking back on that past with nostalgia is an unavoidable temptation. And it is precisely this idealized vision that originates and at the same time promotes Stray bullet, the new film by Darren Aronofsky, which set the action of the film in 1998, just the year in which the Brooklyn filmmaker became known with the stylized and paranoid Pine. Now, with his new love letter to a bygone, untamed New York, Aronofsky invites the viewer to remember a Hollywood in which original stories and unpredictable characters mattered more than the sheen of digital effects, an era of films that weren't afraid to delve into the catacombs of social life and the spirit. Thus, when Aronofsky explains to Stray bullet the descent into hell of an immature and alcoholic bartender, it is difficult not to remember those golden years of American cinema in which directors like David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson took advantage of the push of the cinema of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers.

Subverting the narrative codes of cinema queer, which has historically struggled to illustrate difficult processes of liberation, Maspalomas It traces the painful path back to self-repression of an old man who, after two decades of enjoying his homosexuality (in the Canary Island town that gives the film its title), suffers a stroke and decides to come back into the closet when he is admitted to a nursing home in his native Basque Country. The exploration of the experience queer in old age – understood as a process of searching for identity – is not new to the screenwriter and director José Mari Goenaga, who in 2010 already addressed this theme in the film In 80 days, more focused on the female universe.

When the vast majority of the press and critics accredited at the Venice Film Festival expected the Golden Lion to go to Kaouther Ben Hania –The Tunisian director who shook the Mostra with her denunciation of the genocide in Gaza Voice of Hind Rajab–, the jury chaired by American Alexander Payne has decided to award the gold prize to fellow American Jim Jarmusch, a living legend of American independent cinema who presented in Venice Father mother sister brother, the best film seen on the Mostra screens during the eleven days of the festival.

Four days after a demonstration in support of the Palestinian people crossed the streets of the Lido, the Venice Film Festival hosted this Wednesday the premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, which denounces the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab at the hands of the Israeli army. The film had generated great expectations, especially due to the comments made by the Mostra's artistic director, Alberto Barbera, who, during the presentation of the program, warned of the film's dramatic force and controversial potential. This concern translated into tightened security controls at the entrances to the festival area. Thus, with a few minutes' delay, the screening of the film that has become the main contender for the Golden Lion of the Festival began.

The arrival this Sunday of the American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch at the Venice Film Festival was an injection of sensitivity and bonhomie in an official competition that, with the exception of the humanistic adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, had been marked by some thrillers full of cruelty and misanthropy, like Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos either No other choice by South Korean director Park Chan-wook. In fact, major film festivals seem allergic to the comedy genre, unless the humor is written in a sarcastic tone. In this sense, Jarmusch's new film, titled Father mother sister brother, It should be seen as a delicious oasis of delicacy and happiness in a program dominated by violence and fatalism.