With all due respect to TIFF and Telluride—one stuffed with films and film writers, the other a low-key delight—the oldest film festival in the world has emerged as the destination when it comes to Oscar. The Venice Film Festival, now entering its 73rd year, began way back in August 1932 with a screening of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and under the guidance of artistic director Alberto Barbera now serves as the unofficial kickoff to awards season. For the past two year, the eventual Best Picture winner—Birdman and Spotlight—has premiered at the fest, and this year’s edition boasts an embarrassment of riches, from Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to Whiplash, the Ryan Gosling- and Emma Stone-starring musical La La Land, to Tom Ford’s long-awaited follow-up to 2009’s A Single Man: the Jake Gyllenhaal/Amy Adams film Nocturnal Animals. So without further ado, here’s what Venice has to offer us this year.
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Whiplash, the debut feature from writer-director Damien Chazelle, was a bona fide phenomenon, grossing $47 million against a $3.3 budget and earning five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture (winning three). Chazelle’s follow-up, the musical La La Land, originally intended to star Whiplash’s stormy percussionist Miles Teller and Emma Watson, but they eventually landed on the chemistry-rich Crazy, Stupid, Love. duo of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. She stars as Mia, an aspiring actress serving coffee, and he is Sebastian, a jazz pianist playing to empty, caliginous bars. They both hope to hit the big time, but as they inch closer and closer to breaking through, come face-to-face with the ugly trappings of fame. The film also stars Whiplash Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, Finn Witrock, Rosemarie DeWitt, and the inimitable crooner John Legend in his most substantial film role to date.
Tom Ford’s creativity knows no bounds. Some rolled their eyes when the fashion designer extraordinaire announced he’d be helming his first feature film. Then they saw 2009’s A Single Man, a beautifully tender and heartbreaking tale of a gay English professor (Colin Firth) coping with the death of his long-term partner in the 1960s, and realized he was the real deal. His much-anticipated follow-up is Nocturnal Animals—a tale of an art gallery owner (Amy Adams) who receives a manuscript of her ex-husband’s (Armie Hammer) novel and feels her life is in danger. The film also stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a character from the novel who also feels under attack, as well as Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, and Isla Fisher. The film was purchased for a whopping $20 million at the Cannes Film Market—making it the largest purchase in many years.
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Ever since exploding onto the scene with his Oscar-nominated 2011 film Incendies, Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has been churning out impressive pictures at an alarming rate: Prisoners, Enemy, and last year’s Sicario. He’s also currently filming the Blade Runner sequel starring Ryan Gosling. But before that, he’ll dip his toe into the sci-fi genre with Arrival, a film about several alien spacecraft landing on planet Earth, and the team of experts tasked with making first contact—including linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), math whiz Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and U.S. Army Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker). Of course the film couldn’t be timelier, given the recent (probably bogus) news of a mysterious radio signal from a star 94 light years from Earth.
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Mel Gibson is a problematic dude who’s said some problematic things. He’s also an incredibly gifted filmmaker, having helmed the likes of Braveheart and Apocalypto. His latest—and first film as a director since 2006’s Apocalypto—is this $55 million based-on-a-true-story war epic about Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), a U.S. Army medic and Seventh-day Adventist who refused to bear arms, yet was awarded the Medal of Honor for saving 75 of his fellow troops during WWII’s Battle of Okinawa. In addition to the gifted Garfield, the film stars Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, and Rachel Griffiths.
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For those of you who haven’t seen A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the feature directorial debut of Ana Lily Amirpour, GO SEE IT. It is, with the exception of Let the Right One In, the best vampire film of the last 20 years. Unlike that Persian-language flick, Amirpour’s next film is in English and features several big names. It’s called The Bad Batch, and precious little is known about it other than that it depicts several interconnected love stories involving cannibals in a Texas wasteland. Amirpour has described it as “Road Warrior meets Pretty in Pink with a dope soundtrack,” which sounds insane in the best way possible, and the film stars future Aquaman Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse, and Diego Luna.
Produced by Black Swan’s Darren Aronofsky and directed by the talented Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, this biopic stars Oscar winner Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, chronicling her life from her time as first lady to after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. The film also stars Greta Gerwig as Pamela Turnure—Jackie O’s press secretary who allegedly had an affair with JFK; Peter Sarsgaard as Robert F. Kennedy; and Max Casella as reporter Jack Valenti. Could this mean Oscar No. 2 for Portman? We’ll see.
You might be asking yourself whether the world really needs a remake of a remake of the Kurosawa classic Seven Samurai, but then you’d be overthinking it. It’s Antoine Fuqua directing his Training Day star Denzel Washington as the leader of a gang of outlaws who band together to save a town from a deranged industrialist, played by Peter Sarsgaard. The other outlaws are played by the likes of Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, and others. So yes, there’s plenty of gunplay, Denzel being a bad motherfucker, and Chris Pratt cracking one-liners. If that isn’t worth the price of admission, I don’t know what is.
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On the heels of the BBC recently listing his 2011 epic The Tree of Life as its No. 7 movie of the 21st century (the list was pretty bonkers, however) comes this documentary from visionary filmmaker Terrence Malick, who’s proven so influential that the term “Malick-esque” is now used to describe virtually any filmmaker who shoots close-ups of nature. Malick has been working on this documentary—narrated by Cate Blanchett in 35mm, and Brad Pitt in IMAX—for the better part of 40 years, and it is said to trace the birth of the universe all the way to its projected death. Malick has described the project as “one of my greatest dreams,” and he shot footage in Hawaii, Iceland, Papua New Guinea, and Chile, among other places.
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To prepare for their role in his second feature, Blue Valentine, filmmaker Derek Cianfrance made stars Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play house for several months, acting like a real-life couple—and it paid off, with the pair delivering outstanding, lived-in performances as long-term partners in a disintegrating relationship. Now he’s recruited two of the other most gifted actors around, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, to play a couple in post-World War I Australia who rescue a baby girl and raise her as their own, only to have the birth mother (Rachel Weisz) emerge years later to try and claim her. Cianfrance, apparently, has a special gift for chemistry: Gosling and Eva Mendes met on his Place Beyond the Pines and fell in love, as did Fassbender and Vikander on Light Between Oceans.
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Directed by Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhoven, the man behind the excellent 2008 drama Winter in Wartime, this Crucible-esque thriller centers on Liz (Dakota Fanning), a young woman who’s accused of a crime she didn’t commit by the fanatical new Reverend (Guy Pearce) and must fight like hell to save herself and her daughter. The film also features Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Carice van Houten, aka Jon Snow and Melisandre, and led to the making of real-life couple Pearce and van Houten, with the Dutch actress recently giving birth to the pair’s baby boy.
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In recent years, film festivals have become valuable launching pads for television series, and this year’s Venice Film Festival will bring us the premiere of the HBO miniseries The Young Pope. Created by Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), it chronicles the life of the first American pope, Pope Pius XIII (Jude Law), and his ambitious rise to that station. The series, which will premiere stateside in January, also features Diane Keaton as Sister Mary, an American nun who helps guide the man formerly known as Lenny Belardo to the papacy; James Cromwell as Cardinal Michael Spencer; and the fetching French actresses Cecile de France and Ludivine Sagnier.
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