2025 Venice Film Festival

- Opens with Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia

- Jarmusch’s comedy-drama Father Mother Sister Brother, starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, and Tom Waits

- Lanthimos’ sci-fi Bugonia, with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons;

- Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (George Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Laura Dern);

- Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo-themed thriller After the Hunt (Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri)

- Benny Safdie’s Nala Sinephro–scored UFC movie The Smashing Machine (Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt)

- Gus Van Sant’s first in seven years, the Bill Skarsgard–starring Dead Man’s Wire

- Kathryn Bigelow’s first in eight, the geopolitical thriller A House of Dynamite, with Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson

- Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, about the rise of a fictional Vladimir V. Putin spin doctor

- Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave follow-up No Other Choice

- François Ozon’s Albert Camus adaptation L’Étranger

- Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

- Sofia Coppola’s Marc Jacobs doc Marc by Sofia

- Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants

- Closes with 100 Nights of Hero, a movie from writer and director Julia Jackman, with Charli XCX and DL fave Nicky Galitzine

The Stranger adaptation with Benjamin Voisin is a nice surprise! He's turning into quite the little film star, isn't he?

He's collaborated with Ozon previously on Summer of '85, the CMBYN ripoff, which was cute enough.

So Julia supposedly is going to win her second Oscar for this? All I see is her doing her usual schtick - playing Julia Roberts.

r3 It IS her usual schtick, but isn't there something comforting about a Roberts performance in 2025 when everything is falling apart around us? So she might get it because of that comfort food factor. And because of the subject matter, too.

Miss Roberts has arrived bitches!

JFC, how many Lanthimos' Stone and Plemons movies can we take? I'm still fucking traumatized from "Kinds of Kindness". I liked "Poor Things" but that doesn't give him an open invite to make us watch Emma fucking masturbating all the time. Enough!

DL fave KIM NOVAK will be there to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award. A documentary about her life, "Kim Novak's Vertigo" will have its premiere as well 🌀

Where is Taika Waititi's "Klara and the Sun" starring DL favorite Jenna Ortega? It's not at TIFF either.

Jim is 72 and looks good. And that publicity foto is at least 30 years old.

Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro at the Venice International Film Festival.

"Bugonia" the latest Yorgos Lanthimos film starring Emma Stone earns a 6-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.

The review embargo for "After the Hunt" is lifted tomorrow, I think.

R8 They made Klara into a movie? Aww, I love that book and Ishiguro in general.

Jacob Elordi in Venice.

He plays the monster in "Frankenstein", which has its world premiere in Venice on Saturday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Mia Goth is in Venice, too, for "Frankenstein."

And Mia Goth in "Frankenstein."

Sure glad Julia has gone back to being a brunette.

The media needs to stop with headlines that reference the length of the standing ovations.

Just because you trap the people in the theater doesn’t mean the film is any good.

r15 Wow, that's quite the visual. I'm actually excited about the movie now.

Vulture review of After the Hunt. Sounds like something I’ll stream on a cold, snowy night this winter.

George Clooney and Amal...

In the Hand of Dante premieres this week, starring Martin Scorsese as Dante Alighieri's mentor.

The cast is crazy: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa.

Looks like After The Hunt will be another Guadagnino flop.

After the Hunt has a 43% rating on RottenTomatoes with 14 reviews.

But the reviews don't appear to blame the actors:

[quote] After the Hunt works, though, mostly because the cast is uniformly excellent.

[quote] . It’s Julia Roberts’ best work in a long, long time.

Also, at least one reviewer goes there.

[quote] This will be, no question, Roberts’s fifth Oscar nomination, and likely second win.

I'm going to see After the Hunt, probably on home video. Andrew Garfield has been my favorite actor for years now (sorry, Jake). I wonder how I would have liked Andrew as Oliver.

Plot reminds me of Tár, another MeToo and cancel culture movie. Wonder how it'll compare to that one.

Frankenstein reviews are out and they're good. The negative ones are mostly complaining it's too close to the book, although I am intrigued by Variety's dig at cinematography choices.

14 minutes is a lot for Venice, but I wonder if they weren't clapping more for GDT and his contribution to film than for the movie itself.

Or maybe it really is just that good.

Who among us can clap for that long?

Sociopaths, that's who. My hands go numb after about a minute and then I just start faking it.

The foot stomp is a good alternative.

Dwayne Johnson’s Tearful Reinvention at the Venice Film Festival

The action superstar’s pivot to a dramatic role as a drug-addicted UFC fighter in “The Smashing Machine” brought a standing ovation and Oscar talk.

R31: The race is over. He's winning.

If Julia Roberts and The Rock are Oscar nominees, the award show will get some eyeballs.

The race is over on the female side (Buckley), it's very much still open for the guys.

Johnson is entering a best-actor race that will be crowded with other huge names like Leonardo DiCaprio (“One Battle After Another”), George Clooney (“Jay Kelly”), Timothée Chalamet (“Marty Supreme”) and Michael B. Jordan (“Sinners”).

I can't wait to see the Park Chan Wook movie.

The frontrunner (Buckley) has emerged but Best Actress is wide open this year. Julia could nab the 5th slot even though that film is looking more and more like a critical and commercial flop.

R35: Colin Farrell, Jeremy Allen White, and Brendan Fraser will also be in the mix. I hope Chalamet doesn't get in. It looks like he doesn't do anything that special in Marty Supreme and the prospect of another round of insufferable campaigning is frightening.

Erivo's not gonna take that lying down.

Daniel Day Lewis will also be in the running for Best Actor.