Every year, the Venice Film Festival delivers a slate full of headline films, fires the starting gun on awards seasons and throws up a bunch of viral moments, some of which will have you wincing in horror. This year threw up some surprises, including a Golden Lion winner, in Jim Jarmusch’s family triptych Father Mother Sister Brother, that absolutely no one saw coming and a Luca Guadagnino #MeToo drama that many festival goers wished they hadn’t seen at all. Kathryn Bigelow scared us witless, The Voice of Hind Rajab and Remake moved us to ugly tears, and Dwayne Johnson launched the beefiest Oscar campaign in cinema history. Here’s what to look out for between now and Christmas.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
This Silver Lion winning docudrama had Venice audiences in floods. It’s an elegy for six-year-old Hind Rajab that centres the distress call she made in January 2024. The Palestine emergency services hear from Hind in Gaza, trapped in a car with the corpses of relatives, begging for an ambulance as IDF tanks (that would riddle her car with 355 bullets) close in. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania brings uncompromising political acumen to a film that offers a chance to collectively mourn for both Hind and Palestine.
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow has made two defining ‘War on Terror’ epics in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She loses none of her touch in switching focus to a hypothetical involving a nuclear attack on the US. A strong cast – Jared Harris, Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Anthony Ramos – perfectly captures the battle between professionalism and humanity that would no doubt play out in this nightmarish scenario. The result is a horror film disguised as a thriller. Prepare your nervous system accordingly.
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The Smashing Machine
One of the big questions hanging over this year’s Venice – ‘Can Dwayne Johnson act?’ – was answered in fine style in Benny Safdie’s bodyslams-and-pills biopic about mixed martial arts pioneer Mark Kerr. His Rockness is a revelation, almost unrecognisable under all the prosthetics and pouring it out in every moment as the fighter battles ringside rivals and addiction. Emily Blunt matches him as Kerr’s long-suffering girlfriend, too.
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The Testament of Ann Lee
Director Mona Fastvold reunites with screenwriting partner Brady Corbet for a period musical that makes the hefty visions of The Brutalist look almost conventional. Amanda Seyfried dazzles as 18th century evangelical Ann Lee, a ‘Shaker’ who channels her fierce religious devotion into song and dance and eventually takes her ’aving it brand of Christianity to the American colonies. It wasn’t for everyone at the festival, and it won’t be for everyone when it swirls euphorically into cinemas, but we’re major stans.
Dead Man’s Wire
Two American indie legends had new films at the fest. While Jim Jarmusch’s gently probing comedy-drama Father Mother Sister Brother took the Golden Lion, it was Gus Van Sant’s real-life kidnap yarn that felt like the stronger of the two. Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery play the gunman and his mark over three sweaty, besieged days in a Midwestern apartment block. The pair are great, and while Al Pacino is barely in it, his presence as an unscrupulous mortgage company CEO only reinforces the Dog Day Afternoon comparisons.
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Frankenstein
The empathic master of creature features, Guillermo del Toro, tells the story that first captured his imagination as a child, and the results are as sweepingly emotional and visually splendid as you would hope. Heartthrob Jacob Elordi shows previously untapped depths as The Creature to Oscar Isaacs’ cruel creator Victor Frankenstein, while Mia Goth has never been better as sweet soul Elizabeth. The best and worst of humanity are all contained in this heartfelt gothic epic.
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Cover-Up
The child of Holocaust survivors, investigative journalist Seymour ‘Sy’ Hersh has been a thorn in the US establishment’s side since 1969 when he exposed the cover-up of the US army’s massacre of unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children in My Lai. He went on to cover abuses of power in Watergate, Abu Ghraib and Gaza, amongst others. Together with co-director Mark Obenhaus, Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) provides a warm, absorbing and non-hagiographic portrait of a living legend. The film crackles with Sy’s inimitable way with words.
No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook has found his sweet spot. The stylish Korean filmmaker behind The Vengeance Trilogy has made a brilliant and absurd black comedy with nothing good to say about late-stage capitalism. Man-Su (Lee Byung-hun, the Front Man from Squid Game) is fired from his job at a paper company and, in a fiercely competitive job market, proceeds to murder rivals for a position at prospective employer Moon Paper. On the agenda? Glorious action sequences, inventive gore and lashings of wild humour.
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Rose of Nevada
British director Mark Jenkin films on 16mm and records all sound separately, a gorgeous, tactile methodology that he first minted in 2019’s Bait. For his third feature, he uses this signature style to tell a hell of a yarn about a ship that breaks the laws of space and time. George MacKay and Callum Turner are sublimely well cast as chalk-and-cheese deckhands who react very differently to their journey into unchartered waters. This is hauntingly original and entertaining cinema.
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