Reviews

For all its well-earned reputation as a showcase for edgy indie fare, Sundance has been known to screen some great comedies through the years. This year The Big Sick filled that bill and then some.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power opened the 33rd  Sundance Festival which , as detailed at the opening conference by Robert Redford and Artistic Director John Cooper, will devote special attention to the environment. That focus is expressed by the first New Climate section featuring 14 films and “VR experiences” dedicated to global warming.

Buon giorno, John Porno. Past the festival midpoint viewers tend to get a little tired of Hollywood hype as well as artistic or pseudo-artistic international art faire.

Golden Globe nominated director Pablo Larraín confirms that he is one of the brightest young talents in film making with the world premiere of his Jackie, which screened in competition on the Lido. The Chilean director has a gift for casting an oblique light of famous lives – witness the excellent Neruda, which was just screened in Cannes, on the life of his famous countryman and poet.

With a ten minute standing ovation after the first screening of his Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson could hardly have hoped for a more auspicious return to filmmaking. The Word War II epic marks his fifth feature as a director and the first since Apocalypto ten years ago.

The Venice festival has been at the forefront of recognizing serialized fiction as an emerging and integral part of the film making landscape. Two years ago Golden Globe nominated HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge bowed at the Sala Darsena here, and this year the festival hosted the world premiere of the HBO/Canal+/Sky The Young Pope, directed by Golden Globe winning director Paolo Sorrentino, (La Grande  Bellezza, Best Foreign Film - 2013).

Québécois director Denis Villeneuve is more of a regular at the Cannes Festival than on the Lido (he has shown no less than four films on the Croisette), but this year his Arrival had its world premiere here in Venice. After the emotional family backstories of Incendies, the gut-wrenching thriller Prisoners  and the dark cartel procedural Sicario , the  Canadian director treads new territory with this adaptation of Ted Chiang’s science fiction novella The Story of Your Life which conjures a “first contact” scenario in which sky scraper-sized alien crafts suddenly land in 12 locations around the world.

The Venice Film Festival opened with a bang – or rather a shimmy and a song – here in a sunny Lido with the world premiere of La La Land, as Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature lived up to all of its pre-festival buzz (and augured well for a continuing festival streak). From the long tracking shot that envelops an ensemble dance number that erupts from a traffic jam on a freeway ramp  (how has no one ever filmed this before?!), to its fanciful duel ending, the film is both an homage and a fresh updating of the Hollywood musical.

Ken Loach, one of the greatest living British filmmakers – alongside Mike Leigh and Terence Davies – may become the oldest working director in the UK.  At 80, with a solid body of work that consists of 19 films, he still shows his strong, unfailing commitment to social issues cinema – slanted toward left-wing politics.

After making the inconsequential airplane farce I’m So Excited! (arguably his weakest film in a career spanning 36 years), Pedro Almodovar is back on terra firma with Julieta, a femme-driven tale that justifies his title as a great woman's director, or rather a filmmaker who has specialized in telling emotionally touching stories about all kinds of women--of various ages, social classes, professions. Julieta has already opened in Spain, but it receives its high-prtofile international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (in competition).