#venice-film-festival

#venice-film-festival

With startling audacity, Ben Hania has used the real audio recording of Rajab's heart-wrenching voice, while fictionally reconstructing the drama of the emergency responders in their call-centre office, with real people played by actors, talking, shouting and emoting in response to Rajab's actual voice. The result was greeted with a 23-minute standing ovation at Venice, about a quarter of the film's running time, with journalists and festival attenders reportedly sobbing in the auditorium.

If there's one thing Hollywood loves, it's a red carpet moment. If there's two things, it's a red carpet moment and a speedboat to get them there, which might help explain the star-studded vibe of 82nd Venice International Film Festival. The cinematic extravaganza is winding down (the annual film festival comes to a close Sept. 6) but not without delivering a week and a half of Oscar-bait arthouse flicks, multi-minute standing Os and celebs jetting down Venetian canals.

The programmers for Venice don't fall for generic documentaries shaped by anecdotes told by talking heads, leaning instead on the projects that say as much about their creators as their subjects. Ross McElwee, Lucrecia Martel, and Alexandre O. Philippe use their backgrounds, interests, and even their flaws to tell their newest stories, and all of them are worth a look. One will even break your heart.

There was no shortage of glitz and glam at the 2025 amfAR Venezia gala. The annual gala, which takes place during the Venice Film Festival, raises money for the Foundation for AIDS Research. Colman Domingo hosted the 2025 Gala on Sunday at the Arsenale, and a slew of stars from all over the world attended the benefit. Many A-list attendees, including Halsey, Laura Harrier, and Jude Law, walked the amfAR red carpet in high-fashion looks.

"The complexity of Alma as a character is pure Guadagnino, a natural fit into a cinematic body of work defined by the prospect of voracious hunger, and offers Roberts her best role since 2004's Closer." The film contains a "smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play" in what is "an arresting psychodrama", Strong added.

A typically laconic Tom Waits plays Adam Driver's father in the first trailer for Jim Jarmusch's star-studded new film, Father Mother Sister Brother. Watch it below. Written and directed by Jarmusch, the movie is "carefully constructed in the form of a triptych," according to a press release. "The three stories all concern the relationships between adult children, their somewhat distant parent (or parents), and each other. Each of the three chapters takes place in the present, and each in a different country."

Now, at the age of 92, the last of the great, glamorous movie stars of Hollywood's golden era is back in the spotlight. She is being honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice film festival, where a documentary about her life and career, Kim Novak's Vertigo, is premiering. For Novak, it is a tribute not just to her acting but to her lifelong refusal to be controlled and manipulated by Hollywood, or anyone else.

The Oscar-winning actor is making her Venice film festival debut with the psychological thriller from the Italian director Luca Guadagnino. It premieres out of competition on the Lido on Friday evening. The drama is set in the world of higher education and stars Roberts as a beloved professor who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star student (the Bear's Ayo Edebiri) makes an accusation of assault against her friend and colleague (Andrew Garfield).

The convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year's Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury.