Venice 2026: “Lovers in the Blue Night,” “What Belongs to Others”

The Venice Film Festival‘s Orizzonti section- which typically spotlights new voices in international cinema- has been particularly exciting this year (the delightfully quirky Diane in the Loop, which I also recently reviewed, just won the category’s prize for best film). Loneliness, whether in love or family or community, has been a common theme I’ve picked […]

Venice 2026: “One Minute to Midnight”

Sometime around Léo’s (Melvil Poupaud) third encounter with a different woman in Nicolas Pariser’s One Minute to Midnight, I asked myself a desperate question: Why should I care about this man? The French drama, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, abandons a plotty narrative in favor of the walking-and-talking structure that can be […]

Venice 2026: “No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman”

At the end of writer and director Halkawt Mustafa’s propulsive war thriller No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, Vyan (Avan Jamal), the Kurdish sniper whose harrowing journey to save her sister forms the backbone of the film, states that “Only when we face death do we understand the value of life.” It’s […]

Venice 2026: “Diane in the Loop”

Harnessing the traditionally masculine language of westerns and applying it to a fierce and funny tale of feminine rage and reckoning, writer/director duo Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni’s third feature Diane in the Loop opens with an image that feels immediately iconic: the back of their protagonist, Diane’s (Ninon Borsei), head as she dons a […]

Venice 2026: “House of the Wind”

“You know, children bring a house to life.” Josette (Josette Kwanya) utters those words to her son Benoît on one of their many Zoom calls, the only method by which she ever sees or speaks to her adult children, who long since left their native Cameroon in search of better opportunities in Western countries. House […]

Venice 2025: “Made in EU,” “Silent Rebellion,” “Songs of Forgotten Trees,” “Divine Comedy”

I’ve reached the end of my time covering the Venice Film Festival (and sitting on the beach on the Lido), my first visit not only to that event, but to Italy. As exciting as it is to experience the big, buzzy premieres at the kickoff to awards season, I tend to find discovering movies in […]

Venice 2025: “Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence”

Three complete features, two shorts, and four fragments are all that survives of the 160 movies Elvira Notari, Italy’s first female filmmaker, made between 1906 and 1930. She was incredibly prolific, even founded her own studio based out of Naples, Dora Film. And yet, you’ve likely never heard of her, the loss of nearly the […]

Venice 2025: “Kim Novak’s Vertigo”

The enigmatic black-and-white portrait of its subject that Kim Novak’s Vertigo opens with speaks louder than words. Its date is uncertain, but based on her appearance, the footage originates from somewhere in the vicinity of the peak of her success in Hollywood, the girl who made a detour to Tinsel Town for fun while touring […]

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 […]