Venice 2025: “The Smashing Machine”

In Benny Sadfie’s anti-sports biopic The Smashing Machine, Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is always fighting, whether he’s inside the ring or outside it. Inside, the battle is simpler to define. The one-on-one combats are rough and bloody, knees jamming into heads and fists smushing into faces; participants often walk away with concussions or wounds that […]

Venice 2025: “Ghost Elephants,” “Nuestra Tierra,” “Cover-Up”

In this dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, I’m looking at three terrific documentaries from established auteurs that premiered out-of-competition at the fest: Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants (which the director received a lifetime achievement award in conjunction with), Lucretia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra, and Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ Cover-Up. On a remote plateau in the […]

Venice 2025: “The Tale of Silyan”

In Macedonia, there’s an ancient folk story about a rural farm boy named Silyan. Sick to devoting his life to strenuous farm work, he decides he wants to leave and go elsewhere, but his father, displeased, casts a spell that turns him into a stork. No longer human, and not accepted by the other storks, […]

Venice 2025: “Frankenstein” (2025)

Rarely does anyone, when discussing Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, refer to it by its unabbreviated title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan sent to Earth early in its creation to help humanity. But he gives them fire, a tool that begets knowledge, more civilized technology— and destruction. His defiance […]

Venice 2025: “Mother,” “Hijira,” “Milk Teeth”

The Venice Film Festival may be a beacon for its buzzy premieres and starry red carpets, but there are plenty of other intriguing projects making their world premieres here that could easily be overlooked. The three films I’m highlighting in this dispatch involve crisis of family and faith: Mother and Milk Teeth, which both premiered […]

Venice 2025: “Calle Malaga”

There’s a stigma around growing old, isn’t there? A perception that the elderly lack purpose in the absence of a job, lack their full cognitive abilities, lack physicality, lack sensuality. It’s such ageist notions that writer/director Maryam Touzani’s Calle Malaga— both a warm hug and a sorrowful reflection on the passing of time— seeks to […]

Venice 2025: “The Kidnapping of Arabella”

The Kidnapping of Arabella isn’t about a kidnapping— at least, not in the usual sense. For one, the parties involved have their roles reversed. Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino, a great find with her crooked smile and discerning squint), the little girl who’s supposedly captured, not only willingly goes with her captor— she begs her to take […]

Venice 2025: “Bugonia”

A banal chamber-piece whose broad critiques of corporate greed, tech-based paranoia, ecological disaster, and humanity’s overall uselessness as a species feel tired and dated on arrival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia sits in some gray middle zone of his filmography, merging the uncomfortable humor, off-kilter realities, and distressing violence of his early films (Dogtooth, The Lobster) with […]

Venice 2025: “La Grazia”

Who owns our days? That question is posed by Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) to her father, Mariano De Santis, the President of the Italian Republic (Toni Servillo), about a quarter of the way through Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, and— following the Italian filmmaker’s established pattern— is repeated several more times throughout the film’s runtime. Sorrentino has […]

Review: “Highest 2 Lowest”

It begins with a sweeping shots of the New York City skyline, just as that magic hour when the sun begins to peak over the horizon hits. The light dazzlingly reflects off the buildings, the water and windows of icons tall and small appearing gloriously warm as the strains of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” […]