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      At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

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      This year’s lineup includes films from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Bradley Cooper in which female characters squirm under the thumbs of egocentric men.The press room at the Venice Film Festival has to be the most beautiful film festival press room in the world. Taking over the third floor of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the main atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height space carpeted in soft cream, with columns clad in marble extending up past Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving way to a sparkling blue sea. On a clear day — which it almost always is — you imagine that, were it not for the curvature of the earth, you could see forever. Or at least to Croatia.It is an eternal contradiction that this lofty space should be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings against the bars of a particularly gilded cage. Or maybe such dark thoughts in a such a light-filled structure — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a festival lineup that, this year, features a profusion of stories about women similarly chafing against the restrictive, but often luxurious, enclosures built by controlling men.Some of these men were towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns in the standout performance in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” as the long-suffering wife of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does much the same as Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In both these cases — and arguably to the detriment of both well-made but strangely evanescent films — the portrayal of genius pales in comparison to the portrait of a woman who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her. in “Ferrari,” Penélope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari, the wife of the Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari.Lorenzo SistiOf two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” only one — Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The other is a lacerating domestic argument in the couple’s bedroom, during which, in every shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a bright, ambitious woman whose devotion to and indulgence of her famous spouse has cost her so much of herself.The life-draining capacity of egocentric men is even more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” in which the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate history, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his death to evade justice. And Pinochet’s wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, or even his better, in sheer perversity; much of the misery the terrorized nation experienced under the dictator is suggested to have been at her behest.But although that gives Lucía, who constantly petitions her husband to bite her so that she too can live out her depravities forever, a degree of apparent agency, that is robbed from her in one brief scene where “The Count,” as he likes to be called, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, including fantasy play that involves her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessed with the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of the film’s most provocatively gruesome early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)Marie Antoinette is perhaps the ultimate emblem of decorative married womanhood. And of course, she was the title star of a previous film from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is yet another tale of a woman’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the influence of a dominant man.Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as Elvis and Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla.”Philippe Le SourdBased on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the film follows the famous couple’s relationship, from their first meeting when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was just 14 years old and living on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the moment, almost a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove through the gates of Graceland for the last time as the house’s mistress.This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola movie, in its luxuriant feel for fabrics and facades, but as in “Marie Antoinette,” here the surfaces become the substance. It is a story about how, especially to a naïve teenager, the trappings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle can be sprung upon you like a trap.During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner film investigating the icky desire on the part of some men to keep their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The biggest hit of Venice so far, it is deeply — if twistedly, and often hilariously — concerned with the idea of female emancipation, as Bella, played by a riveting, inventive and highly physical Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) and then of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).Even the film’s hyperreal aesthetic, in which Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid computer generated skies and seas, reinforce the concept: The film’s self-consciously airless and artificial universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in sex and self-discovery all the more striking.In “Poor Things,” Emma Stone plays Bella, a woman trying to unburden herself from both her adoptive father and her vain lover.Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesThere are still more women trapped under the thumbs of domineering men dotted throughout the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that both feature contract killers (another feature of Venice 2023, if you also take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into further account).Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap up to major-league stardom on the back of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a fake hit man, finds love getting in the way of his mission when an abused wife, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his services. She is driven to it as a means to escape. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is far less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and again, a loss of control, as the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his young, vivacious wife (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to form for Allen, even if one suspects that some of its breeziness is down to the attractive cast compensating for the staleness of Allen’s recent English-language quippery by mercifully speaking in French. (Native French speakers of my acquaintance tell me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds similarly unnatural.)But it does feel more current than most of Allen’s recent output, not least in how it syncs up neatly with this Venice edition’s chief preoccupations: hit men and trapped women, and all the poor things who find themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris apartments, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon hotels, surrounded by luxury, but longing to be free. More

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      ‘The First Year’ Review: Allende’s Rule in Chile

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      The French-language version of a 1971 documentary by Patricio Guzmán is an extraordinary document of a nation in transition.A few years before Patricio Guzmán directed his tripartite masterpiece, “The Battle of Chile,” about the events leading to the C.I.A.-backed military coup that toppled the socialist government of President Salvador Allende in 1973, the Chilean filmmaker made “The First Year”: an account of the inaugural 12 months of Allende’s rule. Guzmán traveled through Chile, interviewing the working class about Allende’s socialist policies and accumulating a crackling portrait of hope and incipient change.The French filmmaker Chris Marker saw the documentary in 1971 and decided to help show it in France, enlisting numerous actors, including Delphine Seyrig, to dub the Spanish dialogue in French. That version, arriving this week in a sparkling restoration at Anthology Film Archives, is a remarkable document not only of a fleeting moment of historical promise, but also of an earnest gesture of international solidarity.Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition. He talks to Indigenous peasants about Allende’s land-redistribution programs, miners and factory workers about the nationalization of resources that were being exploited by American business, fishermen about policies designed to liberate them from predatory middlemen. Guzmán’s camera is dynamic, probing faces and gazes with curiosity, and his interviewees are forthright. The film throbs with jubilant energy, culminating with Fidel Castro’s visit to Chile in 1971.To this capsule of a time and place, Marker adds framing context for a French audience, summarizing the colonial history of Chile in a pithy prologue. This sense of a dual perspective permeates the film: The faint audio of the Spanish interviews mingles with the French dub, like a whispered dialogue, simultaneously local and global in its address.The First YearNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ Review: What’s She Thinking?

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      This generic documentary, subtitled “A Body in the Service of Mind,” is so fixated on canonizing its subject that it skirts around what makes her so intriguing: her peculiar and provocative ideas.It’s a modern-day tragedy that some people may know the writer Joyce Carol Oates primarily for her online presence — on social media, she has posted a picture of her foot oozing with blisters, and regularly voiced inflammatory opinions. It’s odd — and oddly fascinating — behavior for such a literary heavyweight, one whose six decades of novels, short stories, essays and more have triggered fascinating debates about the intersection of violence, sexuality, race and womanhood (among other dark, distinctly American subjects).There’s much to chew on about the writer, now 85. Too bad the documentary “Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind” only nibbles. Directed by Stig Björkman and narrated by Laura Dern, this documentary is so fixated on enshrining Oates within the canon of American literary giants that it skirts around the peculiarity and provocation of her ideas.Björkman offers something like a glorified Wikipedia article. He identifies key moments in Oates’s life (her marriages, her upbringing in rural New York) and too cleanly links them to the books that came out of them. For instance, “Them,” Oates’s 1969 masterwork, is explained as merely a reaction to the 1967 riots in Detroit. What’s more, Björkman is uninterested in showcasing the beauty of Oates’s prose or her often risqué interests — Oates’s Marilyn Monroe novel, “Blonde,” becomes a neutered feminist statement piece rather than the abject tale of mythmaking that it is.An extended interview with Oates is woven throughout, though the tight-lipped writer doesn’t care for confessions. If Björkman’s breakdown is annoyingly textbook, he at least allows us to bask in the writer’s uncanny presence. We look at Oates, her pursed lips and slightly dazed eyes, and can’t help but ask: What is she thinking?Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of MindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Amerikatsi’ Review: From America to Soviet Armenia

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      The actor-director Michael Goorjian explores the urge to reconnect with one’s roots in this movie about an American who moves to Soviet Armenia.In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union invited Armenians living abroad to resettle in Soviet Armenia. In “Amerikatsi,” the actor-director Michael Goorjian imagines one such journey and finds an unusual way to express the aching urge to reconnect with one’s roots.Goorjian plays Charlie, a naïve, bumbling American who returns to Armenia years after being spirited away as a boy during the genocide. Despite befriending a Soviet official’s wife (Nelli Uvarova), he gets thrown in jail as a suspicious interloper. Charlie languishes behind prison walls, and is mocked and beaten by guards. As awful as that sounds, the film’s tone stays on the light side, even hokey, warmed by Charlie’s hopes.Charlie finds an escape from despair by gazing into an apartment visible from his barred windows. He realizes that the man he’s watching, a bearish, temperamental painter named Tigran (Hovik Keuchkerian), is a guard in the prison’s watchtower and turns out to be Armenian. So Charlie takes to eating his meager meals at his window, following along with Tigran’s marital woes, dinner toasts, and attempts at painting.The setup eloquently symbolizes the predicament of many who, like Charlie, left their homelands very young. His heart beats Armenian even if he speaks English, yet a nagging distance wards off total belonging. But he schemes indirect ways to communicate with the guard and finds a kindred spirit.It’s an intriguing scenario, though not always played out skillfully. For better and worse, we feel Charlie’s confinement fully, as he watches another’s life go by and yearns for a proper home of his own.AmerikatsiNot rated. In Armenian, English and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rotting in the Sun’ Review: Instagram, Real

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      Sebastián Silva’s satirical thriller blurs the line between reality and illusion that fuels social media.In his new movie, the Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva plays a version of himself locked in a self-loathing spiral. Mired in a creative pit, Sebastián is snorting drugs in his Mexico City apartment, reading E.M. Cioran’s “The Trouble With Being Born” and doing web searches for “suicide by Pentobarbital.” In need of a change, he travels to a bacchanalian gay beach, where he meets the writer and Instagram influencer Jordan Firstman (also playing a refracted version of himself). It’s not long before the ebulliently opportunistic Jordan pitches a show: “‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ but positive.” Eventually, Sebastián invites him to his place in the city for some writing sessions.The movie’s title works in both a literal and a metaphorical way. The first involves a spoiler, so let’s just say that a major twist redirects the story just before the halfway mark.The metaphorical interpretation captures — often graphically — mechanically hedonistic lives dominated by an insatiable need for instant gratification and almost entirely filtered through social media. “Rotting in the Sun” is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself. Reflecting that push-pull, he invites Sebastián to “come meet my friends — you’ll hate them.”But the movie loses both focus and edge when it switches to a low-boil showdown between Jordan and Sebastián’s housekeeper, Señora Vero (a great turn from the Silva regular Catalina Saavedra, who starred in his breakout film, “The Maid”). By the end, it’s the film’s point that has turned murky.Rotting in the SunNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’ Review

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      The film “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe,” a gay teen romance set in 1980s Texas and adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s novel, is tenderhearted but meandering.In the 1980s, it was nothing to wander the mall, from Spencer’s to Waldenbooks, with no direction. Alas, similar ambling takes place in the screenwriter-director Aitch Alberto’s sweet-at-heart but lukewarm indie drama about two Mexican American high schoolers coming-of-age in 1987 El Paso.Based on Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s eponymous YA novel, the film tracks the friendship between Aristotle, or Ari (Max Pelayo), and Dante (Reese Gonzales), who meet on a hot day at a swimming pool. Ari is drawn to Dante’s curiosity about the world, the byproduct of Dante’s art-loving parents (Kevin Alejandro and Eva Longoria). It’s worlds away from Ari’s solemn but loving mother and father (Eugenio Derbez and Veronica Falcón), who know something’s up when their kind son befriends Dante, who favors mesh tank tops and yearns to visit the Louvre.As Ari and Dante tiptoe into boyfriend-ish territory, Alberto takes disruptive detours, including a car accident, a brother we don’t talk about and, most strangely, having an unseen Dante narrate letters to Ari when Dante’s family relocates to Chicago. (AIDS is a blip, glimpsed only on a newscast.) Dante’s return sets in motion the forecast feel-good finale.Pelayo’s naturalistic easy-breeziness is a convincing contrast to Gonazles’s self-aware performance as a more worldly city-seeker who’s a bus ticket away from becoming a club kid. A less sentimental, wish-fulfilling approach to Mexican American identity, gay self-discovery and Reagan-era Texas will wait for another day. Until then, fans of “Heartstopper”-style slow-burn romance will eat up this tender film’s subtle charms.Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the UniverseRated PG-13 for anti-gay violence and cussin’ like they do in Texas. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hello Dankness’ Review: Through the Looking Glass

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      The video artists known as Soda Jerk explore life in the United States from 2016 onward with an oddball assemblage of pop culture clips.In the pop-culture universe deconstructed — and reconstructed — in “Hello Dankness,” the Ninja Turtles parse the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has lost sleep over the end of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and a “Home Alone”-era Macaulay Culkin spends his pandemic watching “Tiger King.”Written and edited (though not, strictly speaking, directed) by Soda Jerk — the name adopted by Dan and Dominique Angeloro, sibling video artists from Australia who live in New York — the whole movie consists of repurposed visual and audio clips, digitally tweaked and deftly edited to interact with one another, and to present a chain of associations about the United States from 2016 through the start of Joe Biden’s presidency.Even before its title card, “Hello Dankness” opens with a full airing of the Kendall Jenner ad that Pepsi pulled because of complaints it trivialized Black Lives Matter. If you think what follows is outlandish — well, just look at that commercial, which could easily have run before the movie in a conventional theater and plays as if that were happening. In the funniest interlude, the Trump administration’s first three years are reduced, in their entirety, to the deliberately slapdash, meme-inspiring YouTube “Garfield” parody “Garfielf,” with Trump’s pompadour pasted on top of the fat feline’s head.Covid-induced stir craziness and the spread of misinformation on social media are shown as contributing factors to what the movie portrays as a national mental breakdown. You don’t have to agree with all of Soda Jerk’s diagnoses to admire their ingenuity. “Hello Dankness” belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.Hello DanknessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What Would Strikes Do to Oscar Season?

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      The delay of some big titles, like “Dune: Part Two,” has ramifications for coming releases like “May December” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Three years after the pandemic forced the majority of Oscar season to take place on Zoom, Hollywood may be facing another circumscribed awards circuit.Dual strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America have already had a significant effect on this year’s movie calendar: Studios have opted to push several big theatrical releases like “Dune: Part Two” to 2024, since SAG-AFTRA is prohibiting its members from promoting major-studio films amid the walkout. That same ban could radically reshape the Oscar season landscape, since awards shows and the media-blitz ecosystem built around them depend on star wattage to survive. (The strikes have already prompted the Emmys to move from September to January, and other ceremonies could be delayed, too.)So what will the season look like if the strikes continue into late fall or winter? Expect these four predictions to come to pass.Streamers will be at a major advantage.The post-pandemic theatrical landscape is already difficult enough for prestige titles: Last year, best-picture nominees “The Fabelmans,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Tár” and “Women Talking” all struggled to break out at the box office. Subtract the months of press that the stars of contending films are called upon to do, and the financial forecast for specialty films grows even more dire. If striking actors aren’t available to promote this season’s year-end titles, many studios will think twice about releasing them.Streamers don’t have the same problem, since they worry more about clicks than box office numbers. So far, Netflix, Apple and Amazon have been proceeding full speed ahead with their awards-season slates: Though the actors in streaming films like “Nyad” (with Annette Bening as the long-distance swimmer); “Saltburn” (a thriller about obsession); and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (a historical drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio) may not be free to do much press, there’s ultimately no more effective advertisement for a streamer than simply throwing big pictures of a movie star on the app’s home page.Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Because of the strike, they can’t promote the film.Apple TV+, via Associated PressDirectors are the new stars.The monthslong awards circuit can raise a filmmaker’s profile considerably: Near the end of their seasons, auteurs like Bong Joon Ho (“Parasite”) and Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) were as recognizable as movie stars, and often just as mobbed at awards shows. Still, if the actors strike continues for several more months, studios will need to rely even more on their directors, since they may be the sole representatives of their films who are available for big profiles, audience Q. and A.s and ceremonies.Well-established auteurs like Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”) will be at a particular advantage here, as will new-school academy favorites like Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”) and Emerald Fennell (“Saltburn”). The latter two have a significant side hustle as actors, which may prove appealing in a season that will lack thespian faces, though their fellow actor-turned-director Bradley Cooper will be in a bit of a bind: How can he promote “Maestro,” his forthcoming Leonard Bernstein movie, if he also stars in it?‘Barbenheimer’ could rule again.The dual release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” proved to be the cinematic event of the summer, as Gerwig’s doll comedy broke box-office records and Nolan’s biopic defied the doldrums that have recently plagued prestige dramas. Both films were already poised to be major awards contenders, but the decimation of the year-end theatrical calendar will only reinforce their dominance.For old-school voters who still prefer to support theatrical releases instead of streaming films, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” might as well be running unopposed. The punt of “Dune: Part Two” to 2024 will only further help those two films’ awards cases, as the craft categories where the first “Dune” dominated — like production design, sound, editing and visual effects — are now decidedly up for grabs.“Barbie” may have an advantage with Oscar voters who prefer to support films released in theaters.Warner Bros.Up-and-coming actors may miss out on breakthroughs.Awards season can sometimes feel like a glamorous grind, requiring stars to commit to months of near-constant interviews, actor round tables, audience Q. and A.s, and hotel-ballroom hobnobs. Still, the season is invaluable when it comes to raising an actor’s profile. Up-and-comers become A-listers through their sheer ubiquity, and some of this season’s rising stars will miss out on the career glow-up that’s possible from a prolonged awards press tour: I’m thinking of people like “May December” actor Charles Melton, who nearly steals the movie from its leading ladies, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (who play an actress and a Mary Kay Letourneau-like teacher, respectively).Though it would be a fine line to walk, it’s possible that some of the smaller studios may seek interim agreements with SAG-AFTRA that would allow actors to do Oscar-season press. For example, A24 has secured interim agreements with SAG-AFTRA to continue shooting films since it is not among the studios the guilds are striking against. Could the company secure a similar carve-out that would allow the cast of its summer hit “Past Lives” to become awards-show fixtures? If the strikes continue and no such arrangements are possible, Oscar voters may be forced into an unprecedented position: Without all the usual noise that surrounds an awards contender, they’ll simply have to decide whether to nominate a performance based on its merit alone. What a concept! More