Despite Venice Film Festival’s supremely starry line-up, many of the most hotly anticipated releases failed to make a real splash: Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’s musical follow-up to his Golden Lion-winning Joker, fell a little flat; the likes of Maria and Queer proved divisive; and Wolfs, Disclaimer, and The Order drew stars to the Lido, but didn’t leave much of an impact. Yet there were also a string of films and TV shows—some of them smaller and less hyped in the run-up to the showcase—which did light up the city, sparking lengthy standing ovations and frenzied debates on the water buses home. These are the five you need to add to your watchlist.
April
I had my heart in my throat for the duration of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s extraordinary, grueling, ingeniously shot and, at times, mind-boggling drama: the portrait of a doctor (a revelatory Ia Sukhitashvili) living in rural Georgia who’s being investigated for a birth that’s gone wrong, while also continuing to perform illegal abortions on the side. It’s often a punishing watch—there are two brutal birth scenes and an extended, excruciating abortion sequence which, despite the fact that you actually see very little, gave me a minor panic attack—but it’s also a film of remarkable beauty, humanity, and dark, unexpected humor. It provoked countless walkouts and some boos at the end of the press screening I attended, but it was also, without a doubt, the most visceral and virtuosic release I caught during my week in Venice. This is exactly the kind of challenging, ambiguous, and oddly life-affirming film you go to film festivals to see.
Babygirl
In Halina Reijn’s impossibly sexy workplace thriller, a gloriously unfettered Nicole Kidman lusts after Harris Dickinson’s deliciously cocky intern, a new recruit at the robotics company she presides over. A confusing flirtation tips over into a rambunctious affair where seemingly nothing is off limits, and the threat of being discovered proves to be an irresistible turn-on. This is a juicy, discomforting, combustible romp of the highest order—a frank, uncensored, and non-judgmental examination of the contradictions and complications of female desire as well as the knottiness of sexual power dynamics which, delightfully, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It makes for a raucous big-screen experience which leaves you gasping, wincing, laughing awkwardly, and then doing everything you can to avoid eye contact with the people next to you.
The Brutalist
With a more-than-three-and-a-half-hour run time (with a built-in 15 minute intermission to boot), Brady Corbet’s ambitious epic—a decades-spanning saga outlining the life and times of a fictional Jewish-Hungarian architect (a never-better Adrien Brody) who survived the Holocaust and painstakingly constructed a new life for himself and his family in America—was perhaps always going to have trouble sustaining its momentum. The first half, which outlines our hero’s arrival on the East Coast and acceptance of an ambitious commission from a volatile benefactor (Guy Pearce), is a stone-cold masterpiece: the opening scene alone, with its spine-tingling score, breathless pace, and staggering visual style brings to mind the scope and swagger of The Godfather: Part II, a comparison no one should make lightly. In the second half, the story lurches and meanders, but the film deserves a spot on this list for the electric atmosphere during the intermission alone—think: a smoking area bursting with excited chatter, as if we were midway through a play, after which the audience rushed back inside to count down the seconds to the film’s final portion. This is bold, imperfect filmmaking which demands to be seen and dissected.
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature gets off to a rocky start, what with its overly literal script and melodramatic flashbacks, but thanks to Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore’s heartfelt turns—as friends who reconnect after the former receives a fatal cancer diagnosis—it grows into a touching exploration of mortality, the debates around euthanasia, and even the devastating impact of the climate crisis. The cherry on top is the film’s classically Almodóvarian aesthetic: all bright primary colours, enviable interiors, artful cinematography, and Bottega bags galore. It’s far from the Spanish auteur’s best work—and didn’t quite deserve that 17-minute standing ovation—but is proof that when it comes to wonderfully soapy tales of lifelong regret, lost love, estrangement, and reconciliation centered on complex female characters, no one can do it quite like he can.
Families Like Ours
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This year’s festival featured a string of buzzy TV shows alongside the usual film roster, including eagerly awaited projects from Alfonso Cuarón and Joe Wright, but I was particularly taken by this slow-burning seven-part dystopia from Another Round’s Thomas Vinterberg. It imagines a near future when rising sea levels render the director’s native Denmark uninhabitable, prompting hysteria, protests, mass evacuations, European relocation schemes, and gangs of people traffickers exploiting the vulnerable. It’s sweeping, emotional, and clear-eyed about who would be worst affected—and who may barely feel the effects of such seismic change—and forms an anguished plea for us to attempt to turn the tide while we still can. In Venice, it took on an added resonance after an unprecedented heatwave gave way to biblical thunderstorms which quickly flooded parts of St Mark’s Square in the final days of the showcase, hammering home the urgency of the situation in a way this release could never have predicted.
