Venice Film Festival

After debuting his Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 in Cannes last May, Kevin Costner is on the Lido today for the world premiere of the second installment in the Manifest Destiny epic. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, directed by and starring Costner alongside Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington…

Sex is never just sex, says Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a middle-aged psychologist Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) meets on the ferry between central Oslo and Nakholmen, the island where they happen to have neighboring houses. Tor, a nurse who works with cancer patients, looks sceptical. Tor has had a…

EXCLUSIVE: When Cate Blanchett received an "urgent, must watch" email with short film Marion by writer-directors Joe Weiland and Finn Constantine attached, she didn't know quite what to expect. But Blanchett gave it a go and, she told Deadline here in Venice, ended up "literally flown back in my…

Walter Salles' drama I'm Still Here enjoyed a buzzy world premiere in competition at Venice, with Fernanda Torres’ lead performance putting her among the hot contenders for the best actress prize, and now arrives in Toronto for its North American debut before heading to San Sebastian. Torres plays…

Fiercely independent Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing spent five years filming young workers in Zhili, an industrial region near Shanghai where around 18,000 garment workshops churn out cheap clothes for the domestic market. The workshops run on cheap labor from the provinces; around 200,000 make the long trek…

Afternoon Insiders, here we are once again, another week and another busy one in the world of international film and TV. Sign up to the newsletter here. Or read on. Splashy Last Week On The Lido Uncharacteristically buzzy: The Venice Film…

'Alpha' Wins Europa Cinema Prize At Giornate Degli Autori Dutch director Jan-Willem van Ewijk's Alps-set father and son survival drama Alpha has won the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film in parallel Venice section Giornate degli Autori. The award comes with promotional and exhibition…

Full of false leads and meandering shifts of focus, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's story of a missing child initially appears to be a straight-up thriller. Here is a young couple with their child Little Bo, being filmed in the park by Bo's overbearing grandmother. Here they are at home, miserable…

There is a disconcertingly ambivalent tone to Sicilian Letters, a very handsomely presented game of cop cats and mafioso mice flying the RAI quality-drama banner. On the one hand, there is the mob movie's requisite number of murders, betrayals, overnight widows and irredeemably corrupt public officials…

It was Adolf Hitler's name that became synonymous with evil, but his Italian counterpart — Benito Mussolini, named for a Mexican revolutionary leader by his staunchly Socialist father — was arguably the more enduring brand. Any populist politician today owes a good deal to the Mussolini playbook, brought…

The Russian-Canadian director of documentary Russians At War, which is screening Out of Competition in Venice, has pushed back against suggestions that the film is an attempt to whitewash war crimes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Anastasia Trofimova spent seven months embedded under the radar with a…

Filmmaker Joe Wright takes a 180 in the portrayal of World War II prime ministers, pivoting from the wise and measured Winston Churchill in 2017’s Darkest Hour (which delivered a Best Actor Oscar win to Gary Oldman) to the spontaneous, hot blooded and short-fused Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini in the…