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If there is one thing everyone has had to get acquainted with during Covid-19 times, it would have to be reinvention. Parents have had to become their children’s schoolteachers; employees had to convert their dining rooms to workspace and zoom calls have replaced out of town meetings.

Vanessa Kirby has a one-two-punch in Venice. She is the only actress who, in a toned-down year, has two films here.

Tilda Swinton did not just come to the Lido to collect an award – the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement no less – and wear a great mask, she also starred in and introduced The Human Voice, a short film by Pedro Almodóvar, a man she has admired greatly for many years. Wearing a yellow Haider Ackerman blazer and her newly red hair, she paid tribute to the Spanish master:  “My relationship with Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema started with the cinema of William Wyler and George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and then Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was the first time I saw his spirit and I’ve been entirely besotted by his cinema ever since.

When Cecil B. DeMille released his silent movie The Cheat in 1915, his villain was a Japanese ivory merchant called Hishuru Tori played by Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa.

In his new HBO Max series Raised by Wolves, Ridley Scott leaps forward in time to the end of humanity on Earth and shoots off to a faraway planet where humanity is to be restarted. He explores themes that are familiar from his previous work: androids, religion versus science, the fallibility of both human and non-human nature.

Melbourne-born model-turned-actress Abbey Lee (33) steps into the world of 1950s racist America, in Jordan Peele’s horror drama series, Lovecraft Country. She first appeared on the big screen in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which led to a slew of movies including Gods of Egypt, Neon Demon (2016), The Dark Tower, and Welcome the Stranger (2017), Elizabeth Harvest (2018), and last year’s Lux/Eterna.

He is a young Swedish writer, cinematographer, and documentarian who had a few projects in the pipeline when he heard about a 15-year old schoolgirl who was staging a lone protest in Stockholm. Intrigued, he took his gear and his cameraman and went down to see what it was all about.

It is indeed a strange year when one of the biggest movies at the Venice Festival is a little British comedy with a title that misleads some theatergoers into expecting a typical period piece. The Duke is neither typical nor a costume drama.

Beginning in 1952 when the Cecil B.  deMille Award was presented to its namesake visionary director, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has awarded its most prestigious prize 66 times.

The highly-anticipated documentary about climate activist Greta Thunberg premiered to what would be deafening applause in a year of social closeness not distancing. Still, the atmosphere in the half-empty theater was filled with cheers and appreciation and rightfully so.