Venice International Film Festival

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Beetlejuice’ Sequel With Jenna Ortega Premieres at Venice Film Festival

      by

      After the actors’ strike muted the 2023 edition, this year’s event is being powered by stars like the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” actress and her castmates.On Wednesday morning, several hours before Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened the Venice Film Festival, dozens of young people were already camped out by the Palazzo del Cinema in the hopes of seeing one of the film’s stars.As I surveyed the scene, a teenage boy pulled up on a bicycle, accompanied by his parents. All three craned their necks to check out the still-empty red carpet. “Jenna Ortega is going to be here?” asked his father.The boy nodded shyly and his parents exchanged grins. “That’s his great love, you know,” the father said.Just as casting Ortega, the popular star of “Wednesday,” helped juice interest in Burton’s sequel, so too do glamorous movie stars turbocharge a film festival. Last year, Venice had to make do with precious few A-listers since the actors’ strike barred anyone who had appeared in a big-studio film from doing press for it.That meant the Zendaya tennis romance “Challengers,” planned as the glamorous opening salvo for last year’s festival, was yanked from the lineup and replaced by the Italian war drama “Comandante.” While that movie had its scattered highlights, it didn’t exactly have teenagers lining up for it at 11 in the morning.At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera recalled experiencing “this terrible feeling — this bereavement, if you like” when the strike sapped his event of its opening film and most of its stars.“It was a great blow we were dealt,” he said. “There was a lot of concern, of course, that the lack of the talent may somehow undermine the efficacy of the machinery of this festival, which is also associated with strong promotion.”In other words, while cinema is the lifeblood of any film festival, celebrity is what really sells it. Barbera asserted that this year’s starry schedule will be the exact opposite of the previous edition: “We have the longest list of talent attending, who will actually walk along our red carpet, in years.”The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” news conference provided a fitting sneak preview of what’s to come: When Ortega, 21, took the dais alongside Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and the rest of the cast, she said it was she who felt intimidated by the others’ combined star power.“I just kind of tried to mind my business in the corner,” Ortega said, “making sure I didn’t rip off the lovely Winona’s work from back in the day.”The sequel needed more than 35 years to mount in part because of the busy schedules of Burton and his big stars. Knowing that, would the director ever consider a third installment?“Let’s do the math,” he said wryly. “It took 35 years to do this one, so I’ll be 100. I guess it’s possible, with medical science these days, but I don’t think so.” More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Venice Film Festival 2024: What to Watch For

      by

      “Joker: Folie à Deux,” with Joaquin Phoenix, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature are on tap. Here are the questions we hope to answer.The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival kicks off Wednesday with the premiere of Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and starry fare will follow, like the sexually provocative Nicole Kidman film “Babygirl” and the George Clooney-Brad Pitt team-up “Wolfs.”Here are four big questions we expect to be answered at the festival, which has long been considered the unofficial kickoff of Oscar season.Will Joaquin Phoenix face the music?A Venice debut for “Joker: Folie à Deux” has been presumed ever since the first “Joker” won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award five years ago. Can the sequel match that film’s success, which made more than a billion dollars at the box office and landed a best-actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix? The new film adds song-and-dance sequences and a potent co-star in Lady Gaga, so it’s clear that some big swings have been taken.But the “Joker: Folie à Deux” news conference at Venice may be even more keenly awaited than the movie itself now that Phoenix has made headlines for dropping out of a Todd Haynes film just as it was about to start shooting. With the actor potentially facing legal action, will he be willing to take questions about the controversy from reporters? Or will he skip the conference altogether and call to mind Florence Pugh, who famously ditched her Venice press duties for “Don’t Worry Darling” two years ago amid a rumored feud with her director, Olivia Wilde?Can ‘Queer’ and ‘Maria’ make a mark?Two of Venice’s most anticipated titles are still looking for buyers: Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel starring Daniel Craig, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” featuring Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas.After the writers’ and actors’ strikes left many studios’ year-end slates looking awfully barren, you might have expected a bidding frenzy for two prestige films with major stars, but potential distributors that have screened the movies are taking a wait-and-see approach. Splashy premieres at Venice and almost-certain Oscar buzz could help make the sale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Venice Film Festival: Marina Cicogna’s Glamorous Legacy

      by

      Cicogna, who died in November, was the face of the Venice Film Festival for decades and a pioneer for women in the Italian film industry. She also knew how to throw a party.She threw at least one party that would have made Bacchus envious, photographed Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe (both friends), co-produced the Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and distributed films by the directors Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. If a person can personify a global film festival, Marina Cicogna was for decades the face of the Venice Film Festival.Born in 1934, two years after her maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi (who was one of Benito Mussolini’s finance ministers), helped found the festival, Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) helped transform it into a global event. She also championed Italian cinema as a producer and distributor, and she pushed the boundaries of what women could achieve in a male-dominated industry.For those who knew Cicogna, who died in November at 89, she was not only a striking and glamorous figure but a generous and endlessly curious filmmaker. In addition to her grandfather’s enormous legacy — not to mention the family’s tremendous wealth — her mother, Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, owned Euro International Films, which laid the groundwork for Cicogna’s immersion into Italian cinema.“When Marina appeared as a distributor and producer in the second part of the ’60s, she was a new and important presence,” said Gian Piero Brunetta, a historian of Italian cinema who wrote “The Venice International Film Festival, 1932-2022.” “Marina was in the perfect moment to interpret the change happening in Italian cinema. Movies at this time were able to open a dialogue with the intelligence of the audience and address present problems. Marina was a protagonist in all of this.”Cicogna at the Venice Film Festival in 1957. She was a fixture at the festival, which her family helped create. Mario De BiasiArchivio Mario De BiasiMondadori, via Getty ImagesThat individualism was evident to those around her, from the world’s biggest stars to writers, directors and those who benefited from her commitment to the festival and the burgeoning Italian film industry after its post-World War II neorealism stage. (A festival spokeswoman confirmed that there were no official plans to honor Cicogna at this year’s festival, which runs Wednesday through Sept. 7.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Venice Film Festival: How It Became an ‘Oscar Launchpad’

      by

      For the past decade, not a year has gone by without major awards-season contenders bowing at the festival.These days the race for the Oscars starts in Venice. Of the past 10 best picture winners, four have premiered on the lagoon, including, most recently, Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” in 2020. That film also took the festival’s main prize, the Golden Lion, making it the second film after Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (2017) to claim that double distinction.This is a remarkable turnaround for a film festival, which opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 7, whose international standing was slipping in the early aughts. Much of the credit for this reversal of fortune goes to the festival’s leader, Alberto Barbera. When Barbera’s current term as artistic director began in 2012, the festival was struggling to attract films by Hollywood studios.“It was much easier to go to Toronto to spend less money and to make a proper promotion for the domestic market,” Barbera said, referring to the Toronto International Film Festival, which is held in early September. “But losing the presence of Hollywood studios was a big risk for Venice,” he continued, adding that he feared a disastrous chain effect if major American studios turned their backs on his festival.After Alberto Barbera became the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival in 2012, he went to Los Angeles twice a year to court Hollywood executives.Yara Nardi/ReutersBarbera convinced the Venice Biennale, which runs the festival, to renovate screening rooms and facilities that had not been updated in decades. He also flew to Los Angeles twice a year to meet with the heads of studios and independent film companies to court them.In his second summer on the job, Barbera’s efforts bore fruit when the festival opened with Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,” which starred George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Venice Film Festival: Filmmakers Race to Finish Their Movies

      by

      With the Venice Film Festival beginning, filmmakers are racing to the finish line to have their work ready for screening.When a movie is selected to premiere at a festival, it’s a time of celebration for the filmmakers. But it’s not an end to their labors.Very often, there’s work left to be done on the movie before it’s unveiled to the world. While fans excitedly scroll through the latest showcase at an upcoming festival, some of the filmmakers might still be sweating over making their movies look and sound exactly as intended.It’s all a normal part of the process when postproduction and festival calendars overlap, whether at the Venice Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 7, or at Cannes or Sundance.After Venice announced its latest lineup, many filmmakers were still polishing the sound mixing, color correction and visual effects of their movies. In late July, Dea Kulumbegashvili, the Georgian director of the competition title “April,” was still completing aspects of her film about an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions.A still from the film “April.” Memo FilmReached at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, she said she was waiting on around 10 shots with visual effects that needed to be finalized. She described the nature of the effects somewhat enigmatically as “a character” in the film that required a careful eye across many long-sequence shots.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Isabelle Huppert on the Importance of the Venice Film Festival

      by

      The veteran French actress of stage and screen is the jury president of this year’s Venice Film Festival.Actors often have more than one project on the boil. The French actress Isabelle Huppert takes multitasking to the next level.For the next 11 days (Wednesday through Sept. 7), Huppert is heading up the jury of the Venice Film Festival, watching nearly two dozen movies (together with the other jurors) and handing out awards, including the coveted Golden Lion.In the days and weeks leading up to the festival, Huppert has been working nonstop.Earlier this week, for two nights in a row, Huppert performed alone onstage at the Ruhrtriennale festival of the arts in Germany, delivering the 100-minute monologue “Bérénice” (an adaptation by Romeo Castellucci of the 17th-century French tragedy by Jean Racine).Days before that, she was on a film set in Belgium, playing a fictionalized version of Liliane Bettencourt — the billionaire heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune — in “La Femme la plus riche du monde” (“The World’s Richest Woman”).Huppert’s résumé is correspondingly impressive. She has more than 120 films to her name, as well as an Academy Award nomination (best actress in 2017 for “Elle”) and quite a few theater productions. She manages to toggle between film and stage acting, appearing regularly in cinemas and theaters around the world.Fresh off the set in Belgium, and busy relearning her lines for “Bérénice,” Huppert discussed film festivals, the future of cinema and the American stage director Robert Wilson in a recent phone interview. This interview was conducted in French and has been edited and condensed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ to Compete at Venice Film Festival

      by

      Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and new movies from Luca Guadagnino and Pablo Larraín will also debut at this year’s event.“Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’s comic-book sequel starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, will compete for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.The movie’s participation, which festival organizers announced during a news conference on Tuesday to reveal the lineup, comes five years after Phillips’s “Joker” — which told the Batman villain’s origin story — won the same prize at Venice’s 76th edition, paving the way for its two Oscar wins.Phillips’s movie will face starry competition for the Golden Lion, including from Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” a biopic of the opera singer Maria Callas with Angelina Jolie in the lead.Also in competition will be Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of a short novel by William S. Burroughs that follows a drug addict (Daniel Craig) as he undergoes withdrawal in Mexico City and becomes infatuated with an American drifter (Drew Starkey); Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl” starring Nicole Kidman as a manager who starts an affair; and Justin Kurzel’s “The Order,” with Jude Law as an F.B.I. agent investigating a white supremacist terrorist organization.Altogether, 21 movies will compete for the top prize at Venice’s 81st edition, which is scheduled to run Aug. 28 through Sep. 7. A nine-person jury led by Isabelle Huppert, the French actor, will choose the Golden Lion winner, which is announced on the festival’s final day.This year’s competition will include, from top left, “The Room Next Door,” “Maria,” “The Order,” and “Queer.”Iglesias Más; Michelle Faye; Yannis DrakoulidisThis year’s star-studded lineup suggests the impact of last year’s Hollywood strikes on the movie industry’s schedules is waning. Those strikes wrought havoc at last year’s festival, with the MGM studio pulling Guadagnino’s tennis drama “Challengers” from the lineup, and many actors and directors staying away to avoid breaking strike terms.At Tuesday’s news conference, Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, said that “Joker: Folie à Deux” showed Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s characters stuck in an asylum awaiting trial.“Nobody can imagine what Todd and his screenwriters have imagined,” Barbera said, adding that Phoenix’s performance was “incredible.”Venice’s organizers had announced some of this year’s lineup before Tuesday’s news conference, including this year’s opening movie, which won’t compete for the Golden Lion: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 comedy horror. The new movie has Michael Keaton return to play the title role, and also stars Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.Another high-profile movie appearing out of competition is Jon Watts’s comedic thriller “Wolfs,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as professional fixers who are hired to cover up the same crime. There are also movies by directors less familiar to Western audiences, including the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, with “Cloud,” and the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who is showing “April.”In recent years, the Venice Film Festival has gained a reputation for debuting Oscar contenders. Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone, won the Golden Lion for best film and Stone went on to win best actress at this year’s Academy Awards. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Seven Samurai’: Masterless Warriors in a Cinematic Masterpiece

      by

      Akira Kurosawa’s epic has always been known for its action-film artistry, but there is emotional heft and nuance as well.Few movies have been more influential than “Seven Samurai,” an existential action film directed by Akira Kurosawa that, at longer than three hours, seemingly muscled its way into existence.“Seven Samurai,” made in Japan in the early 1950s, was by far the most expensive film then made in the country. And it required the longest shoot, in part because the exhausted director needed hospitalization. Trimmed by nearly one-third, it was introduced to the world at the 1954 Venice International Film Festival, sharing the Silver Lion award with three other movies.The abridged version opened in the United States in 1956 as “The Magnificent Seven,” a title soon to be appropriated by Hollywood. The full version did not arrive until 1982.Rarely screened since, Kurosawa’s masterpiece is showing — complete with intermission — for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration. Its power is undiminished.The U.S. occupation of Japan ended only months before Kurosawa and his team began planning a film that, however ambiguously, would reassert Japan’s martial spirit. Production of “Seven Samurai” coincided with an equally elemental movie, allegorizing Japan’s nuclear martyrdom, “Godzilla” — both at the same studio, Toho.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More