Exclusives

The festival enters the final stretch in Venice and it's time for showcasing several more unconventional films and works that defy easy definition. Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog certainly fits that bill.

The Venice Film festival took a decidedly offbeat turn with the premiere of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa. With his latest work, the thrice Golden Globe-nominated screenwriter and director (Being John Malkovich, 2000; Adaptation, 2003; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2005) moves into the unexplored idiom of stop motion animation, even as his narrative treads familiar territory.

Luca Guadagnino is one of the more interesting new authors in Italian Cinema. His visual style has been compared to the likes of Visconti and Antonioni and three years ago he made, well, a big splash, with I Am Love, garnering a well deserved Golden Globe nomination.

There are ways to break up an exhausting junket day. “How civilized!” is how Eddie Redmayne put it happily as he walked to his lunch with the HFPA at the Sala Stucchi in the Excelsior Hotel.

Thunder and lightening did not prevent the biggest stars on the Lido from attending the Hollywood Foreign Press Venezia 72 reception at the Italian Pavilion of Cinecitta at the Excelsior Hotel, this Saturday, September 5. “Special effects! You even have special effects!“ laughed festival director Alberto Barbera pointing at the sky.

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After the highly charged male-driven series of English language films – Everest, Spotlight, Black Mass – Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl finally lent a needed softer tone to the festival here. In fact, a different gaze altogether, a female energy one would be tempted to say, were it not that the film’s subject is precisely the sometimes uncertain boundaries between genders.

Star power finally ignited the Lido in earnest with the arrival of Johnny Depp for the premiere screening of Black Mass and hordes of fans – many of whom had spent the night waiting – besieged the Palazzo del Cinema. Scott Cooper’s telling of the life story of Boston gang boss Whitey Bulger and his unholy alliance with FBI agent John Connelly features a stellar cast that includes Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll, Kevin Bacon and Peter Sarsgaard, but the molten core of this movie is undoubtedly Depp who proves, as Cooper put it in Venice, to be a superstar willing to take risks that few others would.

Jonathan Demme is president of the Horizon Jury in Venice this year. He also was the recipient of the Persol Award for Visionary Talent which festival director Alberto Barbera presented to him at a ceremony at Sala Darsena.