For all the talk about this year’s Venice Film Festival being relatively thin on the Oscarbaition front, it ended up providing a rather strong lineup of movies. Some major directors delivered career-best work (Possible Love, Ink), while others premiered remarkably important documentaries, ranging from Musk to My Undesirable Friends: Part II to Special Jury Prize winner Naza. Festival head Alberto Barbera teased this as the most political Venice lineup in years, and he wasn’t exaggerating. It was also a grand showcase for some terrific performances with career-defining work from Volpi Cup winner John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine), Robert Pattinson (Primetime), and relative newcomer Mathilde Arcel (Woman Unknown), winner of the festival’s Best Actress award. What kind of impact these titles will have on awards season remains to be seen, but we’re leaving happy.
Photo: Venice Film Festival
Before walking into the Korean Oscar entry, I’d wondered if it would be Lee Chang-dong’s version of The Invite. (The official summary mentioned two couples facing “different lives and hidden desires,” which sure sounded like festival-ese for “foursome.”) Instead, it’s more like a version of Parasite directed by Mike Leigh. The film, Lee’s first since Burning, follows the intersection of two families — one working class, the other rich. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) lives in an alcoholic haze, still traumatized by a strike the Korean government violently broke. His wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), sees therapeutic possibility in a labor documentary being directed by Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), who is herself married to wealthy private-equity honcho Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). While Ho-seok resists taking part in the movie, it’s Mi-ok who comes alive in front of the camera, just as Ye-ji is invigorated by telling the story of the strike. Both women feel the thrill of transgressing class boundaries: The poor one gets to experience the ease and informality of the upper-class; the rich one gets to feel connected to a more authentic experience. (The film is gentle with Ye-ji while also painting her as a well-intentioned dilettante.) It’s a slow burn watching these families become enmeshed in each other’s lives — the film is only slightly shorter than The Odyssey — and while some detractors may bemoan the lack of fireworks, Lee’s touch is so well observed, so attuned to the nuances of human behavior, that when things come to a head, they do so in the jagged rhythms of real life. Possible Love is slyly funny and emotionally devastating, and yet it finds its way to a place of hope at the end. Bilge Ebiri’s review called it the best thing he saw at Venice this year, and I would agree.
Photo: Venice Film Festival
This year’s winner of the Golden Lion, Venice’s top prize, was May el-Toukhy’s postwar drama, one of only two female-helmed films in competition. It’s set in Denmark shortly after the end of Nazi occupation, and like Possible Love, it follows a woman attempting to transcend the bounds of class. Marie (Mathilde Arcel) is a maid working in the home of wealthy widower Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), but her days of employment are numbered: She and Christian are engaged, and soon, she will make the grand leap from domestic help to lady of the manor. But not just yet. Danish society’s method of dealing with the guilt and shame of the occupation is to process it through public punishment of women: Those who had sex with Nazi soldiers, “horizontal collaborators,” are shaved, stripped naked, and blazoned with swastikas. (Needless to say, men who collaborated get off easier.) In the run-up to the wedding, a figure from the past threatens to expose Marie’s own secret, and every move she makes to evade suspicion only draws her further into a moral quagmire. El-Toukhy astutely tracks the precarity of Marie’s position, the way her class status is utterly dependent on Christian’s good graces; Arcel, who resembles a particularly beleaguered Saoirse Ronan, spends nearly the entire film in a coiled grimace. (She won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.) Marie’s compromises feel like a metaphor for those employed by Western Europe as a whole, as entire nations likewise found it convenient to obscure unpleasant truths in the name of becoming rich.
Photo: The Guardian
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about the systems Israel’s intelligence services use to target Palestinians sent shock waves through Venice. The film featured 24 Israeli officers and soldiers effectively confessing to war crimes with one even conceding that what was being done to the Palestinians was a genocide. Understandably, the film’s revelations were the real focus of the discussion, which eventually became a global event (with all the expected differing opinions, many from people who hadn’t seen the film). But amid the controversy, let’s not ignore the fact that Naza is also a superbly made film, its nocturnal austerity serving as a haunting correlative for its journalistic content. The interviews all happen along Tel Aviv’s rooftops with the interviewees shrouded in darkness. Though an occasional air-raid warning disrupts the proceedings, life goes on in the capital: We glimpse people in their kitchens, their living rooms, their bedrooms quietly going about their business. The defining absence of Palestinian slaughter thus looms over the film. Abraham and Szor were two of the directors (along with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that captured several years of life in Masafer Yatta, a West Bank community under siege by the IDF and Israeli settlers. That film showed the constant turmoil and terror of life in Palestine. In many ways, Naza is its sobering and devastating flip side.
Photo: Venice Film Festival
Lance Oppenheim’s wiry thriller about Chris Hansen and NBC’s notoriously popular reality series To Catch a Predator is itself shot like a TV show gone horribly wrong, all sickly saturated pixels and fragile analog video. At the center of it all is an electrifying performance by Robert Pattinson as Hansen, a man who aspires to powerful anchor machismo but is slowly falling apart. Sometimes sweaty, sometimes sneering, often grandiose, and always conflicted, this Hansen presents the actor with a marvelous opportunity to demonstrate his stupefying range. But Oppenheim wants to do more than just rivet us with a portrait of Hansen. Framing the show’s production against constant news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, the film also presents Predator, one of the most popular shows of the George W. Bush era, as representative of our not-so-slow march toward a hypermilitarized and sensationalized surveillance state. It feels minor, but it’s major.
Photo: MUBI
Julia Loktev’s continuing chronicle of a group of independent Russian journalists working for the now-rogue news channel TV Rain closes an important emotional loop with its second part, which is even longer than the five-plus-hour first part. In the first film, we watched these young reporters as the oppressive vise of Vladimir Putin’s Russia closed around them. Now, they’ve been scattered across Europe and elsewhere, trying to regain their footing. The ecstatic journalistic bustle and gallows humor of part one has been replaced by despair, self-reflection, and a hushed sense of loss; Loktev’s doggedness in following these people effectively turns her camera into a secret sharer as they confess their fears and anxieties. These people understand that even after all they’ve suffered, they are privileged: They get to live their lives while Ukrainians are bombed and killed by the Russian army. But it’s also extraordinarily moving watching them pick themselves up and find a renewed sense of purpose. TV Rain reestablishes itself abroad, then has to move again — and again. Some of these journalists, many of whom are still incredibly young, get new degrees and fellowships. One of them even joins the Ukrainian army. Watching it all, we sense a generational drive to roll with the punches and keep changing the world. It’s extraordinarily moving and, for all the film’s despair, inspiring.
Photo: Phenomenon Berlin
There’s no quick way to describe the Dau project. Its life began more than 20 years ago when Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky attempted to make a fictionalized biopic about the Soviet physicist Lev Landau (nicknamed Dau). In his obsessive quest for authenticity, however, Khrzhanovsky pulled a Synecdoche, New York: He built a giant studio in Ukraine that effectively became a functioning Soviet state — an exhaustive period recreation in which thousands of people lived and worked and were effectively forbidden from acknowledging the modern world. Meanwhile, the director and his team shot just about anything and everything they could, and multiple films have been released over the years as part of the project, following different characters from this world. But Dau, the actual movie about the actual physicist, finally premiered at Venice, and it’s a masterpiece. Unfolding across three and a half hours, the story is a kind of Russian answer to Oppenheimer. The title character and his fellow physicists spend much of their early years refusing to work for the Soviet military machine; building bombs would corrupt the purity and beauty of their science. But as the years roll by and the secret police get to them, compromises are made, friendships are betrayed, and the world becomes a grim, fallen place — which Khrzhanovsky makes sure to depict with all sorts of stunning imagery and unhinged symbolism. This sprawling biopic is all the more powerful for its many narrative and cinematic curlicues: The director’s obsessive quest for realism has resulted in the opposite, a movie that regularly dips into the surreal and the impossible, making its portrait of a world of dreadful choices that much more compelling.
Photo: Venice Film Festival
Robert Greene’s raucous documentary was made in collaboration with Ryan Holliger, a carpenter, fighter, and father of six whose dreams of making a movie about his life become a freewheeling omnibus of movies by his whole family and his friends, each given a chance to make their own dream film. Greene, who loves to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, uses this premise as a way to tenderly explore these people’s lives. Each of Holliger’s kids has their own ideas about what kind of movie they’d want to make, as do his girlfriend, his mom, and his best friend. The stories they want to tell are quite revealing — about their hopes, their fantasies, their regrets, their fears. The result is a delirious work in which we can’t always tell what we’re watching: someone’s movie, the making of someone’s movie, or something else entirely. Too Much Sugar is often hilarious and just as often devastating.
Photo: Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle is one of our most energetic directors, and he brings every technique in his bag of tricks to adapting James Graham’s 2017 play for the screen: fantasy sequences, fractured timelines, hypercaffeinated montages. It’s the story of Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a veteran editor who in 1969 joined forces with Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) to take over the tabloid The Sun. For both men, it’s the chance to get one over on a paternalistic Establishment that expects the news to serve a social purpose. (Boring!) You might expect this to be a story of a noble journalist corrupted by the malign influence of wealth but not quite. Lamb is the devil on his own shoulder; it’s Murdoch who occasionally turns up his nose at the sleazy, salacious rag they’ve created. Ink has great fun dramatizing how the staid postwar consensus — a world of snobbery, dignity, and unions — was eclipsed by The Sun’s muscular populism. You can draw a direct line from Lamb’s takeover to the election of Margaret Thatcher ten years later … and Boyle does, as well as to Brexit, Donald Trump, and a whole lot else. If he overeggs the pudding a bit, he’s only being true to the tone of the source material.
Photo: Lightborn Films
Ink shows how Thatcher’s right-wing populism originated in the permissive society of the late ’60s. Theo Rollason’s documentary revisits the moment her movement eventually attempted to roll back the progress of that decade entirely. (At least for other people.) Filmmaker Derek Jarman embarked on an explicitly gay adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II in 1991, a few short years after Britain’s Conservative government passed a law outlawing the “promotion” of homosexuality. Assembled from never-before-seen BTS footage shot by future Oscar nominee Seamus McGarvey, as well as archival material tracing Jarman’s efforts in the gay-rights movement, Queer Edward II is a time capsule of the pre–Cool Britannia ’90s, a fertile time for art and activism that was nevertheless a Major bummer politically. There’s much discussion over the ethics of outing, especially after activists appearing in the film as extras harass the singer Cliff Richard (recording next door) over his purported failure to come out, a tabloid kerfuffle that only adds to the crew’s stress. Besides being an opportunity to spend more time with Jarman — despite living with the AIDS that would eventually kill him, he remains wry company — the film illustrates how political militancy is usually downstream of existential threat and offers a model for how to live with joy and integrity even in reactionary times.
Photo: Harriet T K Bols
If Ink presented the thesis of Thatcherism and Queer Edward II the antithesis, the synthesis came in the form of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, an unexpectedly moving documentary about the Gallagher brothers’ 2025 reunion tour. From one perspective — particularly that of Blur and Pulp fans — Oasis’s loutish laddishness represented all the worst bits of modern Britain. And yet, as The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone once wrote, it’s also possible to see the Oasis phenomenon as a counter to Thatcher’s “ethos that there was no such thing as society. For the Gallaghers, it was obvious what society was … their mates determined to have a good time despite everything.” That’s the argument put forth by this officially sanctioned doc, which spotlights the unifying, community-led power of the band’s music while also following the slow thaw of the brothers’ relationship. We meet people from all over the world who have found meaning in Oasis’s music. As one Korean fan notes, if you fall down, other bands try to pick you up; Oasis falls down with you, and you get up together. And we also see how, once the concert starts, these individuals become a collective — thousands of strangers all having the same experience of potent meaning. In an interview, the brothers are adamant Oasis has never been “a right-wing thing,” that it’s about how “all are welcome.” Propaganda, sure, but married to a story of two middle-aged men learning how to navigate complicated emotional terrain, it’s undeniably affecting stuff.
