This year's Venice Film Festival will tackle topics from the financial crisis to drone warfare, and feature performances from Willem Dafoe, Al Pacino, Jennifer Aniston and Ethan Hawke.
Organizers on Thursday announced a 20-strong competition lineup that includes Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani's subprime-mortgage drama "99 Homes," with Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern, and New Zealand-born filmmaker Andrew Niccol's "The Good Kill," starring Hawke as a dissatisfied drone operator.
There is a strong American presence, both behind the camera and onscreen, among the films in the running for the Golden Lion. They include David Gordon Green's Texan drama "Manglehorn" starring Pacino and Holly Hunter; Abel Ferrara's "Pasolini," featuring Dafoe as taboo-breaking Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini; and Italian director Saverio Costanzo's "Hungry Hearts," a suspenseful drama set in New York starring Adam Driver.
The festival, which mixes big-name directors and arty auteurs with the work of exciting newcomers, also includes "The Cut," a drama by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin starring Tahar Rahim; Swedish director Roy Andersson's "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence"; and "The Postman's White Knights" by Russia's Andrei Konchalovsky.
Documentary-maker Joshua Oppenheimer competes with "The Look of Silence," a sequel to his powerful investigation of Indonesian political violence, "The Act of Killing."
Films from France, Italy, China, Japan, Turkey and Iran round out the competition lineup.
Pacino appears again at the festival, as an aging actor in Barry Levinson's "The Humbling," adapted from a Philip Roth novel. It is among the "out of competition" entries which are not contestants for the Golden Lion.
The eclectic out-of-competition roster also includes Peter Bogdanovich's Broadway comedy "She's Funny That Way," starring Imogen Poots, Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson; Lisa Cholodenko's Maine-set drama "Olive Kitteridge," with Frances McDormand and Bill Murray; actor-turned-director James Franco's adaptation of William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury"; and Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier's "Nymphomaniac Volume II."
The 71st Venice Film Festival opens Aug. 27 with the world premiere of Alejandro Inarritu's "Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance," starring former "Batman" Michael Keaton as an actor struggling to get beyond a famous superhero role.
The festival runs to Sept. 6, when a jury led by composer Alexandre Desplat awards the Golden Lion for best film and seven other prizes.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More