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.

Eight years after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Shape of WaterGuillermo del Toro returned to the show today, ready to repeat the success with his version of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. And, from the outset, it must be said that these two sinister fables directed by the Mexican share a gothic aura, the Shakespearean reference of Romeo and Juliet and a Christian background. "For me, the story of Frankenstein "It's been like a religion," Del Toro confessed at the film's press conference. "I was raised Catholic, but as a kid, I didn't really understand what a saint was. But then I discovered Boris Karloff playing the monster, and I understood what a messiah was." Del Toro had been trying to make his version of that horror myth for more than two decades, and he directed it when he had "the means to make it on the scale I wanted to make," "and now that it's finished, it's my turn."Pan's Labyrinth.

It seems impossible to believe, but this Friday Julia Roberts visited the Venice Film Festival for the first time. The 57-year-old actress, a true icon of Hollywood cinema, winner of an Oscar for Erin Brockovich, has stepped onto the red carpet at the Mostra for the first time thanks to his participation in the film After the hunt, directed by Italian Luca Guadagnino and presented out of competition at Venice. In the film, Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a Yale University professor whose ethical convictions and emotional ties are compromised when she discovers that her best friend and closest confidant (Andrew Garfield) may have sexually assaulted his favorite student, an African-American and Latinx girl. the series The bear.

The Venice Film Festival brings back fond memories for the artistic duo of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and American actress Emma Stone. It was in the 2018 Exhibition that premiered The favorite, the film that inaugurated a long and fertile collaboration that, until now, has as its high point the Golden Lion that it took home Poor creatures in 2023. This Thursday the 82nd edition of the Italian competition hosted the world premiere of Bugonia, the fourth project shared by the director of Lobster and the protagonist of La La Land, which is actually a remake from the South Korean film Save the green planet! (2003). Jang Joon-hwan's film was a crazy, surreal pop delirium that played with the theory that the director of a large company could be the emissary of an alien race determined to eliminate the Earth. Now it is reinterpreted, urgently and in a refined way, by a Lanthimos who finds an ideal receptacle for his misanthropic gaze, his mastery of the scene and his taste for brutality.

One of the main objectives of the 82nd Venice Film Festival is to establish itself as a privileged showcase for the best Italian cinema. Accustomed to seeing the country's great filmmakers, such as Nanni Moretti and Alice Rohrwacher, present their works at Cannes, this year the veteran Italian festival is betting on local talent, starting with Paolo Sorrentino. Despite being a regular presence at the French event, the director of The great beauty has opened this year's Mostra with The grace, a film that broadens Sorrentino's approach to the universe of politics, a territory he already satirized in Il divo (2008) and in Silvio (and the others) (2018), two parody portraits of Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi. At the press conference for the presentation of The grace In Venice, Sorrentino has expressed his interest in making a political film "at a historical moment in which ethics seems optional, elusive, opaque, or invoked only for instrumental reasons."

While movie theaters are expected to be filled with epic and floods of spectators during the summer of 2026 thanks to the version ofOdyssey directed by Christopher Nolan, the public can calm their impatience by going to see The Return of Ulysses, an intimate portrait of the return to Ithaca of the Homeric hero, who, despite the film's Spanish title, is called Odysseus in the film, following the Greek tradition. Director Uberto Pasolini, best known for producing the British comedy The Full Monty, pulls a promising cinephile lure out of his sleeve: to see again Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche starring in a romantic drama three decades after Wuthering Heights (1992) and The English patient (1997). In the film, Penelope has been waiting for Odysseus for 20 years and, despite remaining faithful to her husband, a growing resentment and the decline of Ithaca have tarnished the queen's marital devotion.

In a new and disturbing milestone of capitalist voracity, DreamWorks can boast of having surpassed Disney in its urgency to bring one of its golden goose to the realm of live action. If it has taken twenty-three years to see the characters of Lilo & Stitch turned into creatures of flesh, bones and pixels, we only had to wait fifteen minutes to see Hiccup and Esdentegat –the heroes of How to train a dragon– a stream and a flyer through the lush natural landscapes of Northern Ireland. The new adaptation of Cressida Cowell's book of the same name, directed again by Dean DeBlois (one of the authors of Lilo & Stitch!), looks like an effective cultural updating and financial calculation. Racial. Vikings of Polynesian and African origin? Why not? How to train a dragon thrills again with the epic tale of friendship between a young Viking who is too ñicris and a feline-looking dragon who wants to be a pet. Fans of the animated series may miss the dynamism and conciseness of the 2010 film – which was almost half an hour shorter than the original. remake–, but the relationship between the real Hiccup and the digital Esdentegat is charged with emotion and tenderness. And of course, the film's anti-war and anti-intolerance message is just as relevant today, if not more so, than it was fifteen years ago.

After making a name for herself in European art-house cinema with the colorful and electric Sweat, which exposed the miseries of the world of influencers digital, the Swede Magnus von Horn now looks back on the past with lingering in the gloomy The Girl with the Needle, nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film for its portrayal of the moral darkness that spread through Denmark after the First World War. Marked by a precious scenic quality, the film finds its raison d'être in the rawness of its historical portrait, which encapsulates the emotional wounds of an entire continent in the disfigured faces of war veterans and in the study of the emergence of a network of clandestine adoptions.