This year's Venice Film Festival will include a stylish thriller from Tom Ford, a sci-fi drama with Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams and a star turn from Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Organizers of the world's oldest film festival announced a 20-strong competition lineup Thursday that includes fashion designer Ford's "Nocturnal Animals," with Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams, Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi feature "Arrival" and Pablo Larrain's biopic of the former U.S. first lady, "Jackie."
Venice is an important awards-season springboard – along with the overlapping Toronto Film Festival – and gave Academy Award best-picture winner "Spotlight" its world premiere last year.
Potential awards contenders in Venice this year include U.S. filmmaker Derek Cianfrance's "The Light Between Oceans" – a domestic drama set in a remote lighthouse starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander – and Dutch director Martin Koolhoven's thriller "Brimstone," with Dakota Fanning and Guy Pearce.
Films competing for the festival's coveted Golden Lion prize also include American auteur Terrence Malick's documentary "Voyage of Time" and new films from cinema heavyweights including France's Francois Ozon ("Frantz"), Germany's Wim Wenders ("The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez"), Serbia's Emir Kusturica ("On the Milky Road") and Russia's Andrei Konchalovsky ("Paradise").
Other contenders include "The Bad Batch," a cannibal love story starring Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves from Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour, and "La Region Salvaje" ("The Untamed") by hard-hitting Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante.
Also screening at the festival, although not in prize competition, is Mel Gibson's World War II drama "Hacksaw Ridge." The story of a pacifist army medic, it's Gibson's first film as a director since 2006, the year he launched an anti-Semitic tirade during a drunk-driving arrest.
The 73rd Venice festival opens Aug. 31 on the maritime city's Lido island with the world premiere of Damien Chazelle's musical romance "La La Land," with singing, dancing performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.
The festival closes Sept. 10 with Antoine Fuqua's remake of the classic Western, "The Magnificent Seven," starring Denzel Washington.
The winner of the Golden Lion and other prizes will be decided by a jury led by "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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