World War III
A manual day laborer is selected to play Hitler in a film, but this stroke of “luck” leads to terrible tragedies on the film set in Houman Seyedi’s expertly crafted, realistic/metaphoric tale about authoritarian society.
VENICE 2022
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Mexican master Alejandro G. Iñárritu (‘Birdman’, ‘The Revenant’) takes time off for a very personal project with autobiographical and cinematic undertones.
Stonewalling
Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s latest is slow but thoughtful and strangely engaging on the subject of a young Chinese woman on the verge of making a potentially life-changing decision.
Venice Film Festival 2022: The Awards
Strongly worded films with clear social and political attitudes took the prizes at the 79th Venice Film Festival, led by Laura Poitras’s Golden Lion winner ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’
Venice 2022: The Verdict
A crowded, often frustrating reset of the first post-Covid festival partly obscured the high-quality programming.
Vicenta B.
Director Carlos Lechuga sends a powerful farewell letter to a country adrift in depression and despair in this heartbreaking chronicle of the post-Cuban revolution.
The Listener
Steve Buscemi makes a rare return to directing for ‘The Listener’, starring Tessa Thompson, a well-meaning but slender single-person drama about hurting and healing in a post-Covid world.
Beyond the Wall
A shattering drama that courageously portrays Iran as a violent Big Brother police state, Vahid Jalilvand’s third film is a shrill, breath-taking mind-trip driven by between two exceptional actors, Navid Mohammadzadeh and Diana Habibi.
Saint Omer
Alice Diop’s superb fiction debut is a marvel of control and depth, using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents.
Lord of the Ants
Director Gianni Amelio recreates a dismaying but true story from 1960’s Italy, when a brilliant writer who does little to hide his love for young men is persecuted and put on trial by a laughably outmoded justice system.
Call of God
A young woman’s first love turns out to be a bad dream in the final film of South Korean master Kim Ki-duk, a visually striking if (for Kim) restrained relationship film that was posthumously completed by Estonian producer and director Artur Veeber.
The Eternal Daughter
Joanna Hogg’s latest exploration of mother-daughter relations sees Tilda Swinton playing both roles in an etiolated ghost story whose artificiality kills its characters despite Swinton’s admirable performances.
When the Waves Are Gone
Philippine auteur Lav Diaz offers a damning and doomed critique of the violent state of his country through the on-screen physical and psychological disintegration of a policeman weighed down by the guilt of his officially-sanctioned murderous past in ‘When the Waves Are Gone’.
In Viaggio
Italy’s premier documaker Gianfranco Rosi turns his attention to Pope Francis and his non-stop foreign travels, stressing the ecumenical core of his messaging as he comments on the world’s horrors.
The Last Queen
An old-fashioned historical epic on steroids in which a bloodthirsty corsair makes an alliance with the King of Algiers but then determines to conquer the ruler’s headstrong wife.
Master Gardener
A timely occasion to foreground the growing role of American extremists like the Proud Boys is largely manqué in Paul Schrader’s unconvincing story about a marked man trying to redeem himself, starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Artist Nan Goldin’s activism in holding the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis is seen as a natural extension of her rebellious, freely lived and proudly messy life in Laura Poitras’ well-structured, powerful documentary.
Bobi Wine: Ghetto President
Whatever its structural defects, Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s documentary is an important document of political tyranny in this decade.
Bones and All
Luca Guadagnino again proves his understanding of the yearning for a fellow soul that defines all feelings of difference in this beautifully played road trip movie which uses cannibalism as metaphor.
Like Turtles
Midlife crisis meets coming-of-ager in this sensitive, elegant first film set in Rome and directed by Italian actress Monica Dugo.
The Origin of Evil
A wicked French thriller that goes overboard but does it in fun and clever ways, with nods to both Hitchcock and Chabrol.
White Noise
Noah Baumbach and an inspired cast headlining Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig enjoyably bring Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” novel about America in the Eighties to life with retro gusto, while straining to make it relevant.
Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous
Paris-based Lebanese filmmaker Wissam Charaf’s second feature takes a delicately droll and deadpan approach in depicting social malaise in Beirut, as seen by a migrant Ethiopian maid and a bomb-surviving Syrian refugee.
The March on Rome
Mark Cousins’ thought-provoking examination of the rise of Fascism through a detailed analysis of a 1922 propaganda film that signaled the start of a far-right ideology whose insidious roots continue to find fertile ground.