Tag: Oscars
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Netflix poised to make a move on “The Testament of Ann Lee”?
By all accounts, it appeared that Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet wanted to apply the same savvy release strategy that they unfurled last year with “The Brutalist,” the runaway talk of Venice, with this year’s “The Testament of Ann Lee.” After its Venice debut, Corbet’s “The Brutalist” would go on to be acquired by A24…
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Final Venice Predictions
The winners of the 82nd Venice Film Festival will be announced this Saturday, so here are our final predictions for which films might take home a prize. Recently, Ildikó Enyedi’s competition entry SILENT FRIEND received a very warm reception — great news, as she remains one of our most prominent surreal humanist filmmakers, a true expert at…
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Venice Day Seven HOT TAKES: The Return of Kathryn Bigelow, The Sealing Of A Best Picture Nominee
The biggest news out of today’s Venice Film Festival screenings was loud and clear: Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years (her last being the under-seen Detroit in 2017) was unanimously adored by critics, earning an impressive 88 on Metacritic and 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. Joseph and I predicted this outcome on our last podcast,…
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Venice Day Six HOT TAKES: Acting Contenders Emerge in Dwayne Johnson, Amanda Seyfried, and Emily Blunt
The two biggest premieres on Day 6 of the 82nd Venice Film Festival were without question Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine—his first feature without his brother Josh—and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, which arrives on the heels of her Oscar nomination last year for co-writing The Brutalist. Both films landed strongly with critics,…
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Telluride Film Festival RECAP: Get Ready For HAMNET
The 52nd Telluride Film Festival (which always takes place over Labor Day weekend) wraps up tomorrow, with most of the heavy hitters now unveiled. Among the standouts already seen at Cannes (and by yours truly) were Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident, The Mastermind, Nouvelle Vague, The History of Sound, and…
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Venice Day Five HOT TAKES: Jim Jarmusch’s latest adored by critics; WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN and Ann Lee receive polarizing reactions
The biggest premieres of day 5 of the Venice Film Festival were the Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, and first peek at Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Anne Lee. Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist style, wry humor, and poetic portraits of outsiders have made him a pioneer of independent…
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Venice Day Four HOT TAKES: Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN is Alive!!
Guillermo del Toro’s dream project was finally unveiled tonight at the Venice Film Festival. What seems like a perfect melding of artist and subject, his take on Frankenstein certainly drew it’s ardent admirers—many who were in awe of the film’s craftsmanship, and del Toro’s success in crafting a transcendent, romantic, emotionally complex melodrama—as well as…
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Venice Day Three HOT TAKES: Is Park Chan-wook’s NO OTHER CHOICE the next Golden Lion winner?
Day three saw the official red carpet premier of After the Hunt, which has continued to procure very mixed reviews, prompting many on film twitter to hastily declare it a catastrophic misfire (the good ol’ folk on film twitter tend to oscillate between extremes often, especially regarding film festival premieres, especially during awards season). This…
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HAMNET is soaring at the Telluride Film Festival; Jeremy Allen White impressing as The Boss
The Telluride Film Festival has officially started, and the first big peeks were Chloe Zhao’s much anticipated HAMNET and Scott Cooper’s DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. We’ll have more tomorrow, when official reviews will be out, but the verdict for HAMNET is: a bona fide Best Picture contender (as Joseph and I predicted from the get-go),…
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Venice Day Two HOT TAKES: BUGONIA ascends; AFTER THE HUNT falls; JAY KELLY is mid-tier Baumbach
Day 2 of the Venice Film Festival was a big one: the highly anticipated, and Oscar-pegged, titles of Jay Kelly, Bugonia, and After the Hunt revealed themselves to the world for the first time (After the Hunt during a press-only screening). Results were interesting, if not all that surprising. Prior to the festival bows, Joseph…
