Venice Film Festival — A–Z of films

The intimacies are staggering.

The story may be presented in a quirky way, with a highly distinctive visual style, but it’s well observed and relatable.

The film immerses us in the life of the city.

Darín excels in this complicated role, revealing his character layer by layer, almost in passing, as the story of the atrocities unfolds.

Banshees is lifted by good performances, particularly from Keoghan and Condon, whose major scene together has a delicacy of emotion that is sharply at odds with the brute force McDonagh more generally employs.

Iñárritu is very capable – one might even say brilliant – but has no idea how to restrain himself.

Despite the fact that no supernatural events actually occur, there’s an all-pervading air of evil, insanity and downright perversion.

This knowingly difficult, multi-layered film deserves a wide audience.

After we take aside all well-intentioned intellectualising, and all the nice-looking shots, what we have are almost three hours of over-aestheticised torture.

Everything about McEwen’s performance sings with stress, from the way she reacts to casual comments to the manner in which she lights increasing numbers of cigarettes.

Though we spend a good part of the film inside offices or private homes, there is also a lot of footage from the streets, where passions run high.

The balance of subjectivity and object status becomes important in a story whose protagonists are always potentially dangerous to one another.

At key moments, director Damian Kocur slows his camera right down. We drift through the estate, through the sort of spaces which an architect might have thought would look pretty, with no idea how disaffected young people would use them.

Mezzapesa puts quality first in every aspect.

For all the film's particularities of time and place, everything here feels essential and archetypal, as painful rites of passage are played out in the forms of mystery.

It seems appropriate that, at long last, the Patron Saint of television should be celebrated in film, and this really feels like a celebration of her struggle, of her values, rather than a bland hagiography.

Federico Di Corato's film is, as is often the case with documentary, self-reflexive.

As with Boulifa’s first film, much here is built not upon what a specific character does but on another character’s reaction to that.

The plotting is completely incoherent and balanced atop a trembling tower of absurdities.

At once overstuffed and oddly slight, it’s a restrained and sincere work.

Al Daradji has a way of making the usual meanings of things slip from their moorings.

The mixing of fiction and reality, as well as a lot of aesthetic choices, make for an interesting echo of the Yugoslav Black Wave aesthetic.

It is impossible to look at the faces of the witnesses speaking here and not see their pain, not know that what they are speaking is the truth.

The deliberate airlessness - which finds contrast in the likes of Miss Harris' joy at her first knickerbocker glory - works well initially, but as Nighy has less screen time and the film slips into considerations of the switch in Williams' life in the past tense, it drifts towards the stagey.

Earle Dresner's camerawork is as confident and uncertain as adolescence.

Luckich's love of silent comedy is everywhere.

For every shot when you wish Foy would learn melancholy doesn’t have to be meandering, there’s another of striking poignance.

Weaver...hasn’t had a role this rich for years, and is magnificent throughout.

Although it’s difficult to place much faith in what she says about herself, there are interesting insights here in terms of what she says about the experience of life within the Daesh state more generally.

Rural teaching gives us shades of Wake In Fright, the continual quest for a lack of discomfort and intermittent mobile signal an echo of Parasite.

Anyone who has cared for a loved one whose mind is disintegrating will recognise some of these feelings.

If Kaadan doesn't quite get the dramatic weight to land solidly, she nevertheless has a fine eye for a poetic image.

The second film for Halifa-Legrand, Nocomodo shows a fiery talent.

As richly drawn as it is delicately handled.

Quietly devastating.

There’s a vast amount going on in Alex Schaad’s ambitious film.

As Davka, Sukhbat Munkhbaatar is adolescent perfection, all gangle and angle.

This is a film of boundaries and barriers and attempts to overcome them.

Sustained by a bravura performance from Isabelle Huppert in a total change of register from her last comedic outing with the same director Mama Weed, the new collaboration never puts a frame out of place.

Intensity burns through almost every interaction

Phantom chimes at night produce an atmosphere that could tumble into horror movie territory, but the real damage is done during the day.

Almost every part of this slowburn road to not quite the middle of nowhere could be read either as a clue or a clever maguffin.

Blasko tells the story with a plainness which adds to its power, sometimes using news-style framing as if to remind us of the political moment which we’re living through.

Whilst it’s never intrusive, the film makes room for the personal and, perhaps more importantly, for Herzog to meander, interlinking diverse ideas in his inimitable way.

A film that often lacks subtlety in its execution despite the performances and impressive make-up craft.

The real horror of Diaz’s film lies in its recognition of how meaningless all these conflicts are.

Baumbach shoots his disaster scenes, evacuations, and poisonous cloud rife with contradictions. The purple sky of doom is beautiful and strangely soothing.

Shot in a superficially chaotic style which gradually coalesces into something meaningful, Wolf & Dog perfectly captures the haste and ambiguity of teenage life.