Expect Anything and Everything at This Year's Venice Film Festival

"For many years, the festival was regarded as a high-minded and only moderately star-studded showcase for the latest and greatest in art cinema. But a little over a decade ago, Venice decided to embrace its fortunate timing - just ahead of Toronto and largely concurrent with Telluride on the calendar - to become a bigger, more Oscar-friendly event. Today, Venice is a kind of hybrid: a lineup filled with premieres of big (often American) titles, alongside independent, artier films."

"Yorgos Lanthimos returns with another Emma Stone-Jesse Plemons collaboration, this time in the form of a remake of the strange classic Korean kidnapping thriller Save the Green Planet! Plemons plays a desperate and downtrodden man convinced that humanity is being experimented on by a race of aliens. Stone is the high-powered pharma exec being held hostage by this lunatic. Perhaps what's most promising (and disturbing) about this premise is that even though it's based on a movie that's more than two decades old, and made by a director whose work tends towards the surreal, it feels like it could be ripped from today's headlines."

"We know the story. But there's still something delectable about Guillermo del Toro, a director who is both a visionary and a genre classicist, returning to the original horror novel, the tale of monsters and madmen that gave birth to all subsequent tales of monsters and madmen. Oscar Isaac plays the doctor, Jacob Elordi is his creation, and Mia Goth is his fiancée. Previous versions of this story understandably tend to dwell on the doctor's delirium. It'll be interesting to see how Isaac, an actor so good at conveying thought onscreen, handles th"

Venice has shifted from a largely high-minded, art-cinema showcase into an Oscar-friendly festival by embracing its calendar position just before Toronto and near Telluride. The lineup now mixes big, often American premieres with independent, artier work, creating a hybrid festival where attendees balance important films with adventurous sleepers. Yorgos Lanthimos presents a remake of Save the Green Planet! starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, a premise that feels eerily topical. Guillermo del Toro returns to Frankenstein with Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth, emphasizing the doctor-creation dynamic and performance-driven interpretation.

Read at Vulture