Latest in Venice Film Festival

Bleecker Street has acquired North American rights to Sundown, the latest film from Mexican writer-director Michel Franco that world premiered this fall at the Venice Film Festival. A 2022 theatrical release in the U.S. is in the works for the tense family drama. Tim Roth reunites with Franco (he starred in Franco’s…

The Venice Film Festival, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, and exhibitor Curzon are tying up on London screening series From Venice To London (18 – 22 November). Seven films from Venezia 78 have been chosen to be shown in London with appearances by filmmakers and cast. The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie…

Keep telling yourself, “It’s just a movie.” That is, unless it’s David Gordon Green’s run on the Halloween franchise, according to Jamie Lee Curtis. She says the spark that brought her back to the iconic slasher series was precisely that Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride tapped into a changing world to add new…

It's Oct. 1. Give it a week. Check the headlines, message boards, and online gossip. If the film awards and festival circuit hasn't run smack into a Covid cluster by then, we can all breathe easier. Hollywood will have blazed a trail past the pandemic. Unintentionally—because, let's face it, show business has never…

Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures' sci-fi epic Dune is starting early rollout this weekend, looking to capitalize on momentum coming off of its star-packed world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which was followed by an event at Paris' Grand Rex cinema and screenings in Deauville and Toronto — all in just the past…

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed French filmmaker and novelist Audrey Diwan. Her second film, L’Evenement (Happening), won the Golden Lion on Saturday, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. The picture immediately becomes a hot awards-season title, and domestic distribution is being sorted by CAA Media Finance and Wild…

Even if you have trouble with the idea of God, says veteran producer David Puttnam in Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore's rapturous paean to his late collaborator Ennio Morricone, when you hear his music, "you can hear that there is something out there." By the standards of Ennio, the suggestion that God dwells in Morricone's…

EXCLUSIVE: The Venice Film Festival, which wrapped last night, carried out 4,500 total Covid tests in 11 days, returning only three positive results, organizers have told us. That’s a reassuringly low number for such a large international event (with around 10,500 accredited guests), but testament to the festival’s…

In Annus Mirabilis, the English poet Philip Larkin wrote that sexual intercourse was invented in 1963. Life was thus never better, he concluded, than in that year. Those lines strayed into my mind watching L'Événement (Happening), about a student in provincial France named Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) who realizes she…

UPDATED with full winners list: French-Lebanese filmmaker Audrey Diwan has become the sixth female director to win the Venice Film Festival's top prize, the Golden Lion, with her 1963-set abortion drama L'Evénement (Happening). She's also the second in a row after Chloé Zhao took last year's Lion with Nomadland. An…

Work eats our lives. For nine, 10 hours a day — often more — we are either at work, traveling to work or catching up on work at home. Yet, for whatever reason, the process and patina of working life is rarely the subject of cinema. Except in the films of Stéphane Brizé, the French director who has made the workplace…

A criminal seeks redemption in Oleh Sentsov's Rhino, showing in the Venice Film Festival's Horizons section. Played by newcomer Serhii Filimonov, Rhino is a delinquent in 1990s Ukraine who is easily drawn into the criminal underworld. His intimidatingly bulky stature makes him a natural fit for collecting money for…