Upstart New York distributor 1-2 Special has added another indie gem to its fast-growing slate, picking up all rights in North America to Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, one of the highlights of this year’s Venice Film Festival.
George MacKay and Callum Turner star in the eerie drama, playing fishermen in a remote village in Cornwall who board a mysterious ship that appears to be caught in a time loop. Jenkin’s third feature, following the acclaimed dramas Bait (winner of 2020 BAFTAs for outstanding debut and outstanding British film) and Enys Men (which took best sound at the 2023 British Independent Film Awards), Rose of Nevada premiered in Venice in the Horizons sidebar and had its North American debut in Toronto.
Typical for Jenkin, Rose of Nevada was shot on 16mm cameras using a wind-up Bolex with all sound constructed in post-production, with Jenkin acting as writer, director, cinematographer, and editor.
1-2 Special will release the film in theaters next year.
Launched by former Sideshow executive Jason Hellerstein in February, with backing from a group of private investors led by Alex Lo’s Cinema Inutile, 1-2 Special is one a pack of new theatrical-first distributors looking to carve out a space in the domestic market.
The company has been an active buyer on the festival circuit this year, snatching up Radu Jude’s Berlin Silver Bear winner Kontinental ‘25 and his Locarno premiere Dracula; Harris Dickinson’s Cannes prize-winning directorial debut Urchin, Christian Petzold’s Directors’ Fortnight premiere Miroirs No. 3, and Simón Mesa Soto’s Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner A Poet; Ildikó Enyedi’s Venice prize-winner Silent Friend with Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux, and Pete Ohs’ Toronto premiere Erupcja featuring Charli xcx.
1-2 Special negotiated the Rose of Nevada deal with Protagonist Pictures, who are handling world rights on behalf of the filmmakers.
Vulture first reviewed Late Fame when it premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025. We are republishing the review now that it’s playing at the New York Film Festival.
“You must have been beautiful when you were young,” Greta Lee says to Willem Dafoe at one point in Kent Jones’s Late Fame, and for those of us who well remember the actor’s younger years — back when his skin was porcelain, his cheekbones sea-cliff sharp, and his eyes so angelically haunted — it’s hard not to shout “Amen!” back at the screen. First, the line hits because it works within the context of the film: Ed Saxburger (Dafoe) is a postal worker who in his youth published a well-regarded but little-read book of poems, and he’s in the midst of fondly (and melancholically) recalling all the promise of those early years in New York, when poetry was in the air, “downtown was another world, and Soho was like being on the moon.” But it also helps the movie reach beyond the screen; some of us might begin to share Saxburger’s reveries along with our own.
The line also suggests that Lee’s Gloria Gardner, a downtown actress with an aura of mystery to her, appreciates Saxburger in this moment not for who he is, but for who he once was and the world he once belonged to. (Though, let’s face it: Dafoe still looks pretty great.) Loosely adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, Late Fame, as the title implies, follows Saxburger’s rediscovery by an odd group of young writers and thinkers calling themselves “the Enthusiasm Society.” Led by the wealthy and snobbish Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who makes sure to tell Saxburger he bought his book at “Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road” with ever the slightest of fake English accents, these pampered dandies “stand against negativity” and the monetization of everything. They speak of the old virtues, they call each other by their last names, they discuss Big Important Literary Ideas over expensive wine dinners, and they rail against influencer culture and technology and cellphone addiction. But of course, they’re just as glued to their devices and obsessed with their brand. Meyers has Amazon Alexa tech in his Sullivan St. apartment (which is very nice, very expensive, and paid for by his parents), and a $1200 first edition of The Naked Lunch on display. We gather the other members of the Enthusiasm Society aren’t much different; Meyers says one guy’s family “owns every soybean in the state of Missouri.” (He also claims the Enthusiasm Society stands above politics, though in a film more firmly grounded in today’s world they’d probably be Dimes Square-adjacent, which is to say, not above politics at all.)
Schnitzler was a master of narrative high concept in his day. Whenever I see a plot description of one of his works, I find myself wanting to read the story immediately. And the premise of Late Fame is so captivating that one wants to forgive its shortcomings and focus on what it does so well, starting with a truly great and nuanced role for Dafoe, whose physical presence can evoke coarse sturdiness and emotional delicacy at the same time. Saxburger has a tough exterior; he’s reserved and unassuming in his demeanor; he avoids his sister’s calls about his dying brother, and he pushes back modestly against Meyers and his pals’ anointing him as America’s great undiscovered poet. But we also see that he once had art in him, and ambition, too. And we understand that such inner reserves of sensitivity aren’t always a good thing: After one triumphant reading, he hears someone yell out, “Way to go, grandpa!” and that one quip from that one random unseen person kicks eats away at him the rest of the evening.
Also doing excellent work here is Lee, who gives the vampish and self-consciously artificial Gloria a magnetic inner life. She’s not a writer, seems slightly older than these young wannabes, and we suspect she’s not nearly as rich; the more brazen and confident she is, the more we can tell there’s a lot more going on. This character probably twists through the most dramatic extremes over the course of the film (including a riveting cabaret performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny”), and it’s to Lee, Jones, and screenwriter Samy Burch’s credit that the more we find out about her, the less we actually know about her.
So, that’s the good news. Unfortunately, Late Fame stumbles when it comes to its scenes with the Enthusiasm Society itself, which is unfortunate because that’s arguably the most interesting element in the picture, at least at first. But they’re ultimately too cartoonish for a film that otherwise feels so lived-in. It’s not that such tonal shifts can’t work, but here the comic-ridiculous treatment of these well-meaning poseurs seems driven by narrative convenience and the irresistibility of cheap laughs rather than anything resembling an inner life or observed reality. Come to think of it, Burch’s Oscar-nominated script for May December had a similarly slippery quality, but there it benefited from the deft hand of director Todd Haynes, whose work has always existed in a queasy tonal slipstream. Jones is a talented filmmaker — I was once on a Tribeca jury that gave his masterful previous feature Diane(2018) several well-deserved awards — and Late Fame has some true virtues. But as it proceeds, it feels less assured. Still, Dafoe and Lee are so good, and the idea behind the story so enchanting, that I keep wishing it were better. Maybe one day I’ll convince myself it is.
In films like Grizzly Man, Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog has been drawn to obsessive men whose hubris tricks them into believing they can tame nature, only to find nature resistant to human control. South African conservation biologist Dr. Steve Boyes is a worthy addition to that canon of driven eccentrics, his background in environmental science never excluding the philosophical and spiritual reflections of an unabashed dreamer.
In Ghost Elephants, Herzog accompanies Boyes to a remote highland plateau in Angola in search of a possibly mythical herd of giant elephants, which turns out to be exactly what you want the peripatetic, eternally curious German iconoclast to be doing.
Ghost Elephants
The Bottom Line
A poetic exploration of human obsession and mysterious nature.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Director-writer: Werner Herzog
1 hour 38 minutes
The starting point is the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where the largest elephant ever recorded is on display in taxidermy form, officially named — with questionable taste — the Fénykövi elephant, after the Hungarian hunter who shot and killed it in 1955. More affectionately, it’s known at the museum as Henry, an 11-ton mammal Boyes believes must have been at least 100 years old when it died.
For a decade, Boyes has pursued his theory that the mega-pachyderm belongs to a subspecies that still exists in an elusive herd wandering the elevated wetlands of Angola, a sparsely inhabited area roughly the size of England and reachable only with great perseverance. According to Boyes, it’s one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet, and every species that he and his team have discovered there is unique to the area.
The goal of the mission is to obtain DNA from the Angolan elephants and return to the Smithsonian for analysis, hoping to trace a link back to Henry. It’s not entirely clear how Boyes arrived at his theories, but Herzog is more interested in the Sisyphean quest — he likens it to going after the white whale — than the science.
In the characteristically idiosyncratic commentary that has become a signature of his nonfiction work, Herzog muses on Boyes and his ghost elephants: “It doesn’t matter to him if they exist or are a dream. Maybe that’s the future of all animals. To be a dream. To be a memory.”
Punctuating the doc with enchanting underwater footage of elephants splashing around bathing, or with dazzling fast-motion sequences of the enveloping night skies, Herzog tracks the months of preparation for the journey, the long trek through the almost impassable peatlands — first in 4WDs, then on motorcycles for 100 miles and on foot for the last 30 miles from their base camp — and the arrival at their destination.
Their first stop is Namibia, where they sign up indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, the San Bushmen. They observe an all-night dance ritual where the master trackers go into a trance state, allowing the spirits of the elephants to enter them.
It quickly becomes clear that Herzog is just as fascinated by the poetic and magical side of the quest as the outcome — probably more so. Being among what’s believed to be the first people on Earth, from whom we are all descended, fires up his imagination but also his droll, whimsical side.
Watching a tribal elder sitting on the cracked ground fixing a stringed instrument while chickens scurry around him, the director chides himself for it but can’t help romanticizing: “I feel it cannot get better than this.” He also notes without mockery that while the ancestral way of life prevails in this egalitarian society, it’s not unusual to see a bushman on a cellphone.
The convoy expands with the addition of Angolan trackers from the Luchazi tribe, known for their extensive knowledge of the ecosystem, particularly around the Okavango River basin. They refer to the expedition’s plateau destination as the “Source of Life.”
They also talk of the legacy of the 27-year Angolan Civil War, during which countless elephants, hippos and other majestic creatures were gunned down for sport or blown up by landmines. Footage from the 1966 Italian documentary Africa Addio, of a herd of elephants being felled by both ground hunters and sharpshooters in helicopters, is distressing to watch.
The final section may prove anticlimactic for some, given the fleeting images captured of elephants believed to have inhabited the highlands for 5,000 years. But there’s enough forensic evidence of them to obtain the required DNA samples, from dung piles or tree markings where they scratch themselves, leaving behind traces of hair. Boyes estimates from one set of markings that the elephant stands at least 11 feet tall.
In his inimitably deadpan, cryptic fashion, Herzog comments: “Steve would have to live with his success.” What comes after the realization of a dream, he seems to be asking. The director maintains a degree of ambivalence about the wild-eyed Boyes and his need to unravel nature’s mysteries. But the kinship of fellow travelers seems apparent in the willingness of both director and subject to think outside a purely scientific frame.
This aspect comes to the fore in a visit to the tribal king of the area, from whom permission must be granted to track the elephants. With lilting cadences, the king shares the origin myth of his Nkangala people, that a small elephant shed its skin while bathing in the river and a woman emerged, who married and procreated with his ancestors. The inference is that beyond just co-existing with the magnificent beast, the tribe are its descendants.
Boyes nods in vigorous agreement with the tribal belief that the disappearance of the elephants would be a harbinger of the disappearance of human life. That lingering note of myth and melancholy typifies the ways in which Ghost Elephants steps outside the boundaries of science-based nature docs. It makes for a fantastic story.
The Last Viking, the latest collaboration between Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen and his longtime muses Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, is a wild, darkly comic fable about brotherhood, identity and the limits of sanity.
The frankly bonkers plot follows two brothers. Kaas plays Anker, a bank robber whose loot is entrusted to his traumatized younger brother Manfred (Mikkelsen). But by the time Kaas is released from prison, Manfred — a former Viking obsessive — has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. He now believes he’s John Lennon. To jog his memory as to where he stored the cash, Kaas decides to find a collection of similarly afflicted patients — ones that think they’re George, Ringo and Paul — and bring the Fab Four back together.
For Mikkelsen and Lie Kaas, who have previously pushed Jensen’s brand of lunatic sincerity in films like Men & Chicken and Riders of Justice, The Last Viking was another chance to dive headfirst into the madness while keeping hold of something real. “The brother story was, I thought, really beautiful,” Mikkelsen notes. “That way we could be allowed to do all the insanity, but we needed these anchors, these moments where they saw each other for who they were.”
The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Mikkelsen and Lie Kaas to talk about why they keep returning to Jensen’s universe, how they found the reality inside these extreme characters, and whether they’re team Beatles or team Abba.
What made you decide to come on to this absolutely nuts movie? What about the story pulled you in?
NIKOLAJ LIE KAAS For me, it was basically the question about identity and how we have to accept that we are different people. We’re in the same community, and we have to coexist with all our differences. I think it’s a great question to raise, and that was the main reason I saw this as a great project. We also talked about the brothers and how they have to accept each other because they have this huge difference from the start.
MADS MIKKELSEN I was attracted to these guys, and because it’s Anders Thomas. This theme of being yourself, as well, but the brother story was, I thought, really beautiful. We enhanced it, made sure it was the heart of the film. That way, we could be allowed to do all the insanity, but we needed these anchors, these moments where [the two brothers] saw each other for who they were.
KAAS Because Anders’ universe is so crazy, full of all these wild personalities, we knew we had to focus on the bond. What is their profound connection? That was where we kept our attention.
You’ve both pushed the limits with Anders Thomas before, in films like Men & Chicken and Riders of Justice.
MIKKELSENWe’ve both gone to the edge of what’s possible with Anders. We might even have crossed it a few times. But it’s a nice place to be — in Anders’ universe, with friends who know how far to go. You feel comfortable reaching for that limit because you know they’ll pull you back if it’s too much. I don’t think I’d do that with any other director.
How did you approach Manfred — a grown man who thinks he’s John Lennon?
MIKKELSENI approached him as a child — a kid seven, eight, nine years old — with the same impulses, the same narcissism, and the same sense of poetry and beauty in places no one else sees. That also makes him very difficult to live with. That informed everything I did, how he moves, how he talks, how he reacts to things. He’s a guy who tends to throw himself out of windows when things don’t go his way.
Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas in The Last Viking.
Courtesy of TrustNordisk
The film touches on identity and even identity politics. How does that discussion play out in Denmark, and how does it connect to the film?
MIKKELSENEverything that comes to Denmark comes five years later, and with a smaller wave. So yes, the discussion is there too. But it hasn’t influenced my life in a big way. It was very important for the media to deal with it constantly for a period. I don’t know if that’s why Anders made the film but, for me, it’s not the main theme. It’s more the “hat” the film is wearing. If you make films about politics — and you just called it “identity politics” — it’s boring. Everything is boring when it’s about politics. It has to be about human beings and their behavior. That’s the heart of a film. Then you can put a political hat on top. But it can’t be the core.
KAASI think the film raises a big question mark about the idea of identity. It doesn’t make a statement. It asks: Can we accept our differences? That is so important. We have to coexist. That’s the main plan for everyone — to find a way, because we all have to be here.
MIKKELSEN Exactly. And Anders also shows how quickly we build walls, because somebody says, “They’re the problem.”
Which Beatle do you self-identify as?
MIKKELSEN Which one is alive? Ringo. I’d be Ringo.
KAAS I’d say the same. He’s a really nice guy; everybody talks about how nice he is. He seems to have the best time.
MIKKELSEN And he’s got no gray hair.
KAAS Exactly. I’d choose Ringo as well.
A major conflict in the film is between Abba and Beatles fans. Are you team Abba or team Beatles?
KAAS You can’t put them up against each other.
MIKKELSEN Exactly — why does there have to be a conflict? They’re great for different things. We grew up with Abba and were proud of our neighbors making music that went global. But in terms of the music itself, that’s really up to a musician to answer.
KAASI love both worlds. You can’t say one is better than the other.
What was the most fun moment on set?
MIKKELSEN The funny thing is, if you play the “straight guy,” as Nikolaj does, then you’re standing next to complete insanity. That’s a hard job, because you’re not part of it. Being in that insanity is easier — you rarely crack up because you’re in that bubble. But being the one looking at it can be absurd.
KAASDefinitely. But honestly, we held it together better on this one. On Men & Chicken, that was tougher. You have to remind yourself that these characters don’t see their world as absurd or comedic. This is reality to them. That’s the most important thing in Anders’ films — to keep it real, even in the midst of insanity.
What makes Anders Thomas Jensen’s films so different?
KAASI don’t think he has a choice, that’s how his mind works. In Denmark, a lot of directors envy the fact that he’s that bold. His storytelling has something of the fable about it. He creates his own realm every time.
MIKKELSEN It’s there even in his first film, Flickering Lights, that poetry was there. He didn’t really get the credit for it — people called it a “boys’ film.” But he’s always been dealing with big subjects: Family, death, life, God, Satan. Enormous things. For him, the only way to tell those stories without being pretentious is to wrap them in insanity. But inside there’s big honesty and big poetry. That’s what makes him unique.
Many of Anders Thomas’ films have been adapted into English. Do you think his work translates well internationally?
KAAS That’s a good question. I’ve seen some of his films received in the U.S., and the approach is completely different. His films tend to be received very differently in different countries. Even Canada receives them differently from the U.S.. And I honestly don’t know how Sweden will take this one.
MIKKELSEN I once accepted an award on his behalf for The Green Butchers. For Best Drama. Now, that film is obviously not a drama. But that’s how they travel sometimes. Anders is also very wordy, and subtitles can only capture maybe 30 percent of it. Those words are very important to his universe. If people still like the film despite missing that layer, then they’re getting something else out of it. But it’s hard to say what.
KAASThat’s why I’m always curious to see what happens abroad. And yes, maybe even a little worried.
MIKKELSEN Especially with Sweden. They’re so close to us, yet sometimes the establishment there interprets things very differently. But I hope they’ll love it.
Speaking of adaptations — Mads, one of your most acclaimed films, Another Round, is being remade in the U.S. What are your thoughts on that?
MIKKELSENI’m fine with people doing it — as long as I don’t have to. (Laughs.) I don’t know how it works, honestly. Another Round had a very specific Danish approach: It looks at heavy drinking not by condemning it, but by finding comedy in it. Finding comedy in the drama without making it into a comedy. That tonality is hard to replicate. My fear is they’ll turn it into a straight comedy or a finger-wagging “don’t drink” story. But if they can’t find the same balance Thomas did, then why do it? Maybe they’ll change it completely. But then it becomes a different story.
You both work internationally but keep returning to Denmark. What brings you back?
MIKKELSEN My language, my friends, and this kind of storytelling. Anders Thomas’ films are unlike anything else. It’s just nice to come home. I love being abroad, but I love being home too. So far, I’m lucky enough to do both.
KAAS For me, it’s specifically Anders Thomas. You don’t find his kind of storytelling anywhere else. That’s a big reason to keep working with him in Denmark.
The undeniably robust 82nd edition of the VeniceInternational Film Festival has come to a triumphant finish.
Heading into Saturday night’s awards ceremony, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab was widely viewed as the movie to beat for this year’s Golden Lion. The powerful Gaza-set drama, which tells the story of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl’s desperate pleas for rescue after Israeli forces killed her relatives, received a thunderous 21-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, one of the longest in the Venice Film Festival‘s history.
But the film ended up going home with the festival’s Silver Lion for the Grand Jury prize, aka second place.
“I dedicate this award to the Palestinian Red Crescent and to all those who have risked everything to save lives in Gaza. They are real heroes,” Ben Hania said in her powerful acceptance speech. “The voice of Hind is the voice of Gaza itself, a cry for rescue the entire world could hear, yet no one answered. Her voice will continue. Her voice will continue to echo until accountability is real, until justice is served.”
Hollywood heavyweights Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón boosted the movie’s profile ahead of the festival by joining its team as executive producers, while critics on the Lido hailed it as an “intensely involving and resounding” indictment of Israel’s genocidal campaigns against the Palestinian population.
Jim Jarmusch‘s delicate triptych Father Mother Sister Brother, celebrated for its effortless poignancy, was the night’s dark horse champ, handing the American indie film icon his first Venice Golden Lion.
“Oh shit,” Jarmusch said as he accepted his trophy, before quickly adding, “All of us here who make films, we’re not motivated by competition, but I truly appreciate this unexpected honor.”
“Art does not have to address politics directly to be political,” Jarmusch went on. “It can engender empathy and a connection between us, which is really the first step for solving things and problems that we have. So I thank you for appreciating our quiet film.”
Father Mother Sister Brother is composed of three separate but thematically linked stories, each exploring adult siblings and their strained relationships with their parents. The film’s outstanding ensemble cast includes Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and Indya Moore, among others. The Hollywood Reporter‘s lead critic summed the film up as “a funny, tender, astutely observed jewel.”
Jim Jarmusch receives the Golden Lion for Best Film for “Father Mother Sister Brother” at the closing ceremony during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
Benny Safdie brought home the festival’s best director prize for his offbeat MMA biopic The Smashing Machine, his first feature as a solo director without his brother Josh Safdie, and Dwayne Johnson’s first movie as a serious dramatic actor.
Safdie gave an emotional shoutout to his star as he accepted his trophy, saying, “Oh my God, Dwayne, my friend, my brother, my partner — ‘shoulder and shoulder,’ that’s what we called it. I just want to thank you for diving in headfirst with a blindfold and X-ray vision. You truly performed with no net, and we jumped off the cliff together. We grew together, learned together.”
Chinese actress Xin Zhilei took home the festival’s first major awards category earlier in the evening, winning the best actress prize for her heart-wrenching performance in Chinese director Cai Shangjun’s drama The Sun Rises on Us All. The trophy was handed to Xin by jury member and fellow Chinese arthouse star Zhao Tao (Ash Is the Purest White).
And as many on the Lido predicted over the past week, best actor honors landed in the hands of the great Italian theater actor turned film icon Toni Servillo for his humane and hilarious performance as the president of Italy in Paolo Sorrentino’s meditative drama La Grazia. Critics have praised the film as a return to form for the Italian director and his muse, sparking talk of a potential repeat of their awards season magic in 2013, when their breakthrough collaboration, The Great Beauty, won the Oscar in the best international film category.
French filmmaker Valérie Donzelli and her co-writer Gilles Marchand won the best screenplay prize for At Work, an adaptation of a novel of the same name by author Franck Courtès. The film is a drama about a successful photographer who gives up everything to pursue a dream of becoming a writer.
Speculation was especially heated heading into the awards ceremony thanks to the absurd number of must-see movies that festival boss Alberto Barbera had secured for the 2025 program. Netflix brought its strongest slate in years to Italy, including Noah Baumbach’s George Clooney star vehicle Jay Kelly, Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping geopolitical thriller A House of Dynamite and Guillermo del Toro’s dark reimagining of Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elordi as the creature. And scores of the world’s top auteurs came to compete with strong new titles — many of them instant Oscar contenders the moment the customary standing ovations wound down each night inside Venice’s Sala Grande cinema.
Venice’s takeaway after nearly two weeks of peerless moviegoing was resounding: The business model of theatrical film may be under relentless assault, but the art form remains as vital as ever.
Korean maestro Park Chan-wook’s wildly inventive black comedy No Other Choice was possibly the festival favorite with critics, while Yorgos Lanthimos’ bonkers Bugonia and Sorrentino’s aching La Grazia were also celebrated as exquisite returns to form. Show-stopping performances that went home empty-handed came in the form of Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s provocative #MeToo-themed thriller After the Hunt and Amanda Seyfried as the riveting lead of Mona Fastvold’s visionary period drama Ann Lee.
And there was much more: Jude Law as Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, France’s François Ozon back in fine form with Albert Camus adaptation The Stranger, Willem Dafoe pulling double-duty with characteristic excellence in Late Fame and The Souffleur, Julian Schnabel’s must-see, Megalopolis-like misfire In the Hand of Dante (with a cast including Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, John Malkovich, Martin Scorsese and Jason Momoa), and the one and only Werner Herzog receiving a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the start of the fest from none less than fellow uber-auteur Francis Ford Coppola.
Two-time Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Sideways) chaired the panel of global film figures tasked with the difficult duty of selecting this year’s winners. Payne’s jury included Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian filmmaker Maura Delpero (Vermiglio), Chinese actress Zhao and Palme d’Or winning Romanian director Cristian Mungiu.
Saturday’s ceremony included a tribute and prolonged standing ovation for the late, great Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who died Thursday at the age of 91.
“Thank you, Giorgio Armani, for teaching us that creativity thrives in spaces where disciplines meet —fashion, cinema, art, new materials, architecture — just like they do every day here at the Venice Biennale,” said Carlo Ratti, curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which is currently underway alongside the film festival.
The 2025 Horizons section (Orizzonti) — which highlights the latest aesthetic trends in cinema with special attention to debut films — honored Mexican director David Pablos’ hauntingly original road movie En El Camino (On the Road) with its best film prize. The film follows a young drifter and a taciturn trucker who link up and forge a precarious bond on Mexico’s dangerous highways.
“This film comes from a very personal place — from the guts — and it’s beautiful to see that it connects with other people,” said Pablos in his brief acceptance speech.
This year’s Horizons jury was chaired by French director and Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau of Titane fame.
Italy’s Benedetta Porcaroli took Horizons’ best actress prize for the drama The Kidnapping of Arabellaand Giacomo Covi nabbed best actor for his turn in the Italian-French coming-of-age film A Year of School. Indian filmmaker Anuparna Roy won best director for Songs of the Forgotten Trees, a moving drama set in Mumbai about an unlikely bond that forms between a part-time sex worker and a corporate employee. And the Orizzonti jury prize was handed to Japanese director Akio Fujimoto for his drama Lost Land, the story of two Rohingya child refugees on a perilous journey to reach Malaysia.
The 2025 Venice Film Festival ran Aug. 27-Sept. 6. A complete list of this year’s winners follows.
Main Competition
Golden Lion — Best Film Father Mother Sister Brother
The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock suspense Bigelow does so well. Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
The very basic premise of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is gripping on its own: A single missile is launched at the United States, nobody knows where it’s from, and the national security apparatus springs into action. Thankfully, the movie delivers on that promise. The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock, military-grade suspense she does so well. Bigelow intercuts multiple arenas and juggles a small army of characters without ever losing sight of the central, upsettingly simple set of dilemmas: Can they stop the missile in time? Who fired it? How should the U.S. respond? The film is already receiving hosannas at Venice and will surely grab its share of eyeballs when it eventually premieres on Netflix.
A House of Dynamite actually has a predictable set of moves, at least once the main plot kicks in, but this makes Bigelow’s ability to maintain suspense that much more impressive. Her technique gives Noah Oppenheim’s jargon-heavy script conviction and urgency. I probably couldn’t tell you much about what terms like launch azimuth and exoatmospheric kill vehicle and terminal phase and dual phenomenology really mean (not to mention the several dozen acronyms being tossed about), and I sure as hell couldn’t say if they’re being used properly here. But the film has an aura of technical accuracy, which is what matters. The actors sing their lines with a rat-a-tat confidence that’s so convincing we start to worry they’re giving away government secrets.
Watching Bigelow depict these offices, situation rooms, and control centers all abuzz with increasingly hurrying (and increasingly horrified) officials, we suspect she is drawn to these type-A professionals because she relates to them. Ever since Zero Dark Thirty, her 2012 film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was attacked for buying too fully into the CIA’s version of events, the director has been accused of unquestioningly laundering the images of the U.S. military and the intelligence industry. There will be those who take one look at a picture like A House of Dynamite and consider it a form of propaganda for the national security apparatus. This is frankly ridiculous — the film is all about how the system, even when functioning perfectly, will surely fail us.
Bigelow can make a movie like this because she understands the appeal and awe of power. She depicts these powerful spaces with elegant establishing shots and smooth camera moves suggesting control, calm, and certitude. But whenever it steps out into the real world, the film becomes agitated and hurried, our vision obstructed. A House of Dynamite doesn’t have the sweaty humanity of Fail Safe or the dark absurdism of Dr. Strangelove. Rather, it has a fascination with authority and professionalism and their limits: What if everyone follows orders and does their job really well and everything still goes to shit? (Forget what might happen if the people in charge are a bunch of incompetent, ignorant buffoons; surely that would never happen.)
The film’s action is split into three sections, each focusing on a different set of individuals as they respond to the fact that, in 18 minutes, a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific will most likely hit the city of Chicago and instantly incinerate around 10 million people. The structure elegantly goes up the chain of command: Each level of the government org chart must tackle this problem at a different point in its trajectory. In the first chapter, most of the activity centers on a missile-defense battalion in Alaska, with its command and control center run by Major David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), and the White House Situation Room, where watch-floor senior duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to respond to the rapidly developing crisis; their job is to identify and ultimately bring down the nuke. In the second chapter, we follow what happens at U.S. Strategic Command, where gung-ho general Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) begins urging the president to prepare to strike at all U.S. adversaries in case this is a coordinated attack; meanwhile, at the emergency operations center deep beneath the White House, deputy national security advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) tries to advise calm.
In the final section, we watch the secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) and the president (Idris Elba), both of whom, we gather, have only recently entered office, try to deal with what’s starting to look like the ultimate calamity. At one point, they remark that they have been briefed about this eventuality only once, whereas they’ve been briefed about filling a potential Supreme Court vacancy countless times. Even as she depicts the professionalism of her characters, Bigelow makes it clear that they are all totally unprepared for this situation. Lines like “We’ve run this drill a thousand times!” and “We did everything right, didn’t we?” ring not with optimism but with bitter irony.
Not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, A House of Dynamite is fundamentally an institutionalist’s outcry about the horrors of nuclear proliferation. The specter of atomic annihilation, once such a major part of our collective fears, has been dormant for so long, even as the danger hasn’t decreased. We get brief, little human details for many of the characters — not enough to edge into corniness but just enough to make it clear they are, in fact, people: One is dealing with a breakup, another with a divorce; one with a pregnancy, another with a child sick at home with a 102-degree fever; one needs a new apartment, another plans to propose to his girl. The secretary of Defense is mourning his wife, which gives weight to his initially selfish-sounding reflection that his daughter lives in Chicago. These tiny bits and bobs of humanity gather power as the film marches on. As a result of the overlapping timelines, certain small moments play out multiple times, each moment with fresh context.
The fractured narrative replicates the characters’ fractured perspectives. From within their highly secure rooms, where they can’t even bring their own cell phones, these people struggle to reach the outside world. Communication is fragile and inconsistent, reflecting both physical and existential claustrophobia: Nobody really knows or sees what’s going on. Early in the timeline, we see the president attending a WNBA kids’ event with Angel Reese, but this moment out among the public also feels highly choreographed and manufactured. Along with everyone else in this film, he is closed off to the rest of the world — even as he holds in his hands the power to obliterate all of it.
Mexico in the late 1980s. The eight-year-old Roberta watches her family of seven women fight to save their home from mounting debt. It is a struggle that will reshape how she sees herself and those around her. This is the premise of Vanilla (Vainilla), the feature directorial debut by writer-director Mayra Hermosillo, an actress you may know from Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico or Amat Escalante’s Lost in the Night.
World premiering Wednesday, Sept. 3, in the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) lineup, a sidebar of the Venice International Film Festival, the ensemble cast includes Aurora Dávila, María Castellá, Natalia Plascencia, Paloma Petra, Rosy Rojas, Fernanda Baca and Lola Ochoa.
The cinematography is courtesy of Jessica Villamil, with Sonia Sánchez Carrasco handling editing. The producers are Stacy Perskie (Bardo, Spectre), Karla Luna Cantú, Andrea Porras Madero and Paloma Petra. Bendita Film Sales is handling world sales.
Based on personal experiences and set in a nontraditional, all-female, multigenerational household, Vanilla is about “the difficult process of breaking free from the limitations of inherited social expectations of women,” highlights a description of the movie. As such, it is “a deeply sensitive exploration of identity, family, and the experience of womanhood.”
The filmmaker tapped into her personal and professional experience for Vanilla. “I’ve had the privilege of learning from filmmakers whose work encouraged me to find my own voice as a writer and director,” says Hermosillo. “That journey led me to Vanilla, a story rooted in my childhood in northern Mexico. I grew up in a nontraditional home, and although it felt normal to me, the conservative community around us didn’t see it that way.”
She continues: “The film follows Roberta, a young girl shaped by this environment, who believes she can somehow fix her family’s situation. It’s a story about growing up too soon, about how shame and love intertwine, and how identity is formed when you live outside the norm.”
Vanilla
Courtesy of Venice Days
Concludes Hermosillo: “Rather than criticize tradition, Vanilla asks what it means to belong, and how we judge lives different from our own. Making this film in my hometown is my way of honoring where I come from, while opening the door for other stories that explore family, gender and resilience in places often overlooked by cinema.”
The trailer for Vanilla that THR can exclusively present below hints at how the movie features all sorts, including signs of financial challenges, a contest featuring a beach holiday as a prize, smiles, dancing, the beach, ice cream.
At the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Jim Jarmusch spoke out against Mubi for their ties to the Israeli military. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he said he was “disappointed and quite disconcerted” that the company distributing his latest film accepted a $100 million investment from Sequoia Capital earlier this year. The venture capital firm is reportedly a key investor in Kela, an Israeli tech startup founded after October 7 that develops military AI. “I have spoken to Mubi about it,” Jarmusch said, noting that he’s worked well with Mubi’s chief content officer Jason Roppell in the past. “I was, of course, disappointed and quite disconcerted by this relationship.”
Jarmusch lamented that making any commercial art in the 21st century almost always involves taking what he called “dirty money.” “I’m not the spokesman. However, yes, I was concerned. I also have a distribution agreement with Mubi for certain territories, which I also had entered into before my knowledge of this,” he said. “But having said that, on a personal level, I have to say I’m an independent filmmaker, and I have taken money from various sources to to be able to realize my films. And I consider pretty much all corporate money dirty money. If you start analyzing each of these film companies and their financing structures, you’re going to find a lot of nasty dirt. It’s all there.”
Indya Moore, who stars in Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother continued that the work to divest art from the military industrial complex is ongoing. “Since the genocide of Palestinians began, there has been an incredible amount of creative warfare and resource warfare behind the scenes,” she said. “What people are trying to figure out is how do we work in a capacity that is ethical and is not enabling a systemic pipeline that funds these kinds of things to happen to people. The due diligence that people are learning how to do is a developing process.”
The Mubi question was raised amid ongoing protests outside the Venice International Film Festival. Hundreds gathered on the Lido August 30 to denounce “ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing across Palestine carried out by the Israeli government and army,” per Deadline. Other filmmakers who have decried Mubi’s partnership with Sequoia include Fresh Off the Boat creator Eddie Huang. “The beliefs of individual investors do not reflect the views of MUBI,” the company said in a statement to social media June 14. “We take the feedback from our community very seriously, and are steadfast in remaining an independent founder-led company.”
An eternal “it girl” — charismatic, original and ahead of every curve right up until she died this year aged 78 — British singer-songwriter-actor Marianne Faithfull receives a fulsome, loving tribute with sui generis cinematic whatsit Broken English.
A fittingly weird and wacky portrait of a woman whose career was full of swerves and swoops, this feature flutters between docu-style, seemingly unrehearsed conversations with Faithfull herself in her last months; reflections on her legacy from a studio of female intellectuals; covers of her songs by eminent admirers (such as Beth Orton and Courtney Love); and little bits of staged and written dramatic vignettes, performed by the likes of Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Sophia Di Martino and Zawe Ashton among others, all pretending to be bureaucrats employed at the Ministry of Not Forgetting.
Broken English
The Bottom Line
The making of an icon.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Cast: Marianne Faithful, Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Sophia Di Martino, Zawe Ashton Directors: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard Screenwriters: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, Ian Martin, Will Maclean
1 hour 39 minutes
In other words, it’s a lot like 20,000 Days on Earth, the directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s breakout feature about singer-songwriter Nick Cave and his collaborator Warren Ellis (both appear here too), another kooky-compelling blend of doc, performance and flights of fancy, with a big dollop of gutsy pretension.
As with nearly every film homage to a significant figure in the arts, the mileage of viewers’ affection will vary according to how much they’re pre-sold on the artist’s oeuvre in general. Even though Faithfull has been in the public eye since the mid-1960s, when she broke out as a singer/actor/counterculture poster girl, she probably doesn’t have the same solid, fervent fan base that Cage has, an audience built up over years of consistently dispensed albums and tours.
That said, the diversity of media Faithful has worked in (theater, film, recorded music) and the range of musical genres she’s explored over the years (rock, folk, New Wave, Kurt Weill, jazz, spoken word and more) probably means she has the more eclectic and diverse fan base. And that’s before you get to people seduced mostly by her protean public image as it played out in the tabloid press — a long slow evolution from ingenue to bohemian belle to debauched grande dame and back.
While skittishly edited, the film nevertheless builds up Faithfull’s biography in basic chronological order. The scripted sections, with all those name actors playing fictional civil servants, don’t always mesh effectively with the more spontaneous, doc-style interludes, but they serve to clarify the timelines and relationships and add editorial gloss.
That’s the job mostly of Swinton’s Overseer, seen on her own mostly in a studio set wearing a suit and tie, recording thoughts about Faithfull into a Dictaphone as if for future transcription. MacKay, on the other hand, has double duty with his role as the Record Keeper. Sometimes he’s reading through old-fashioned card files and muttering to himself, but mostly he serves as Faithfull’s onscreen interviewer, establishing a charming rapport with her that suggests chat-show host could be a future career option for him.
To be sure, he acquits himself better as an interlocuter than some of the interviewers we see in archive clips, including legendarily prurient prober Terry Wogan and a rather rude Tony Wilson. Faithfull takes everything in stride, and in the clips with MacKay that luminous smile hardly ever breaks even though it’s clear that time and COVID had taken their toll on Faithfull by the end.
Watching the archive material, she mostly seems amused by her younger self, and all the outrageous antics of her years of peak fame, like the infamous time she was arrested at Keith Richards’ house, Redlands, while wearing only a fur rug, or the time she met Bob Dylan, captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker for his doc Don’t Look Back. At one point, MacKay shows her a recently rediscovered clip of her singing Weill songs with a symphonic orchestra, her voice in particularly good form. What does she think, he asks. “I wish I’d worn lipstick,” comes the giggly, nonchalant reply.
Most of the stations of Faithfull’s cross also get visited here, including the overdoses and struggles with addiction, breakups, a miscarried child, and spells when she was clearly being exploited by others who were happy to use her notoriety to their own advantage. All the same, Faithfull is hesitant in the film’s present to castigate anyone too much, and like so many other women of her generation, she wears her trauma lightly like a casually tied scarf. The intellectuals pulled in by Forsyth and Pollard to discuss her legacy in what looks like a BBC radio recording studio, everyone wearing headphones, are the ones who parse the deeper meanings of the Faithfull, her iconicity as a sex symbol, notorious junkie or comeback kid.
If all that is a little too cerebral, viewers can wait out the pontificating until the next performance comes along. Some of the covers are inevitably stronger than others. Orton’s stripped down As Tears Go By is one standout, as is the dance-forward rendition of Why’d Ya Do It? performed by Jehnny Beth. Of course, the emotional climax of the film is the last song, Misunderstanding, sung by Faithfull herself with support from Cave and Ellis, a beautiful, wrenching ballad that takes maximum advantage of the cracked timbre of Faithfull’s mature voice. It was her last performance ever recorded, and it serves as a lovely, weathered gravestone for a rich and full life.
If you’ve loved a Danish film in the past 20 years, there’s a good chance it was written by Anders Thomas Jensen. The wildly prolific Danish screenwriter has been a co-author with Susanne Bier — on the Oscar-winning In a Better World (2010), as well as Brothers (2004) and After the Wedding(2006), both of which got U.S. remakes) — Nicolaj Arcel (The Promised Landfrom 2023) and Kristian Levring (2000’s The King is Alive), while still regularly churning out darkly comic gems as a writer-director.
He started with 2000’s Flickering Lights, where four inept crooks hole up in the country and accidentally open a restaurant. The Green Butchers (2003) went darker, with Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas discovering human flesh is a best-seller — Hannibal with slapstick. Adam’s Apples (2005) upped the dysfunction, pitting a neo-Nazi, a priest and assorted misfits against stray bullets and falling fruit in a warped take on the Book of Job. A decade later came Men & Chicken (2015), where five maladjusted brothers learn their quirks may stem from dad’s Frankenstein-style experiments. Most recently, Riders of Justice (2020) cast Mikkelsen as a grieving soldier turned vigilante in a revenge thriller that mixes John Wick-esque carnage with math jokes.
The Last Viking, premiering out of competition in Venice and being sold by TrustNordisk, may be Jensen’s wildest yet. Kaas plays Anker, a bank robber whose loot is entrusted to his traumatized younger brother Manfred (Mikkelsen). But by the time Kaas is released from prison, Manfred — a former viking obsessive — has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. He now believes he’s John Lennon. Kaas sees no alternative: He has to find a collection of similarly afflicted patients — ones that think they’re George, Ringo and Paul — and bring the Fab Four back together, all in the hopes of jogging his brother’s memory and finding the cash before their past catches up with them. An action comedy combined with a sharp but still sweet satire on identity politics, The Last Viking sees Jensen at the top of his game.
Jensen spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about finding the funny in trauma, giving Mikkelsen his most challenging role yet and why, in the never-ending Beatles vs. ABBA debate, he’s team Bjorn.
This is a crazy idea for a film. What was the spark that initiated it?
You always get this question, and I like the idea of being in the shower, and an idea just pops up. It’s not like that for me. Ideas come when I work with them. For the last 15 years, every conversation with my kids and everywhere in the media has been about identity. The whole Western civilization has, instead of looking out towards others, turned the camera on themselves, because they suddenly could, because of social media and whatever.
So I wanted to do something about identity. And I had this idea about a boy who always wanted to be a Viking and wasn’t allowed to do it. I sat down with [Danish producer] Peter Aalbaek Jensen and was telling him about this old idea I had about a psychiatrist putting together the Beatles with people suffering from identity disorders. He told me to work that into it. It was a lot of different stuff put all together.
You have a lot of empathy for your characters, but you also seem to be mocking some of the more extreme elements of identity culture, about everyone having the right to their own version of reality.
I don’t try to mock. And this is an elevated story, it’s sort of absurd. I think it’s fantastic that we live in a part of the world at a time where everybody can seek out who they are and become who they really are. But when the surroundings have to adapt to the reality of one individual, things become absurd. That’s basically where a lot of the comedy in the movie comes from.
That seems to be personified in Mads Mikkelsen’s character, who is convinced he’s John Lennon. It’s an “identity” for Mikkelsen unlike anything we’ve seen him do before.
I wouldn’t have dared to do this if it hadn’t been with Mads. It’s not easy what he’s doing. The whole struggle was to get real emotions into a character that is this far out and still make it relatable. I think he pulls it off. Mads approached this role with caution. I know he was challenged by it. But he comes across as real. You believe that this person exists. He lands.
There’s another conflict in the story, between Beatles and ABBA fans…
My whole childhood, all the intellectuals liked the Beatles. Like all of Scandinavia, I grew up with ABBA. But it was like: ABBA might be fun, but it’s not art. The Beatles, they’re the real thing. ABBA was always in the shadow of the Beatles, intellectually.
But any dance floor will tell you otherwise. The Beatles is fantastic music and young people today of course, still know the Beatles. But ABBA is part of mainstream culture in a way that nobody could have foreseen.
Do you see this film as a spiritual sibling to Riders of Justice? I see a lot of thematic connections…
They are very different in their structure. With Riders of Justice, I think you could teach a class with that structure. The midpoint is exactly halfway through. I don’t think this movie has a midpoint. It’s more experimental. But we are dealing with people who are on the edge of sanity in both films.
I think in Riders of Justice there’s actually one normal person, the daughter. But in this movie, there’s nobody who isn’t lying to themselves about who they are. There’s nobody who’s straight or normal in this movie. So that’s a little development there. That was my journey. It took my five years to get away from anything normal.
You bookend the story with a “children’s book” about The Last Viking, in which the push for inclusion involves chopping off hands and legs to make everyone equal. It seems to undermine the more inclusive message about identity in the rest of the film. Why was it important to include it?
Well, first of all, the book sets the tone that this movie is a fable, a fairy tale. Because the first 20 minutes of the movie look very realistic, almost like a Danish 90s crime movie, like Pusher of something. So you need to tell people they are watching a fable so you don’t get a shock when you hit the second act.
On the themes, I tried with this movie to represent everything I’ve heard and seen over the last 15 years about identity. The tone of the movie celebrates the idea that we should all be whatever we are, and there should be room for everybody. I had all the characters from my reality represented, except for the older white male, which is why I put in Werner [played by Soren Malling], who writes the children’s book. So that’s his voice telling us: “Hey, there’s a limit to this identity thing. There’s a reality out there too.” I’m not saying that’s my opinion. It’s Werner’s vision.
I also just thought it was funny to put such violence and absurdity into a children’s book.
I imagine Werner’s book won’t be a best-seller.
We’re actually going to publish it as a real kids’ book. For older kids. So we’ll see.
You’ve had a lot of your work adapted. How involved are you in the remakes?
I try not to get too involved. Normally, I’ll read the script. With Brothers, I spoke many times with the director, Jim Sheridan, and I really liked the American version. I think it turned out quite good. But normally, I just pass it on and just wait and see what they do with it.
I learned this very early as a screenwriter, and I tell younger screenwriters this: If you’re too emotional about what you do and how it turns out, you shouldn’t be a screenwriter. Because a script is not a finished piece of art. It is a working tool that you pass on. Others might elevate it, or they may wreck it. If you get depressed for two years every time you go to a screening and see one of your scripts ruined, you won’t get any work done.
My philosophy is: Make it as good as you can, make sure you’re on the same page with the director and producer, and then lean back and enjoy what you can enjoy and forget the rest.
You do your own stuff, but you also co-write with other directors — Susanne Bier, Nikolaj Arcel. Do you adjust your voice to match their sensibilities?
I do. You have to be a sort of chameleon. You try and see what other directors do well. Nikolaj Arcel, for example, is really good at structure, so I won’t put my energy there. For others, it’ll be character. You try and focus your energy on the parts where it needs help.
And you need to be aware of what movie you’re doing. When I’m writing for Susanne Bier, doing a very dramatic scene, I have to slap myself on the fingers when I’m writing, because I tend to slip in jokes in what’s supposed to be a melodrama.
What’s up next, then, another directorial effort?
I’m writing a few screenplays now. I’m doing one with Arcel and I’m working with another director, but I don’t know if it’s going to land, so I won’t put names on it yet. It’s really good that I can both direct and write. Writing is very internal, a kind of lonely process. After a while you really want to go out and direct. Right now, after finishing this film, it’s the exact opposite. Right now, I’m happy not to have 100 people asking me questions every day. I’m looking forward to being alone to write.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia began life as a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and it retains the broad outlines of that strange classic. But it also feels like Lanthimos through and through, albeit with the strangest of twists: It’s the first picture of his populated by characters who feel like they exist in the real world, people you could run into if you walked out the door. The power of Lanthimos’s work has always come from his ability to provide surreal but dead-on metaphors that take on lives of their own: a futuristic resort where one must debase oneself to find a mate, in The Lobster; or a family where the parents have trained their kids to accept absurdities as reality, in Dogtooth. With Bugonia, it feels like he’s entered our world at last, at least for a while. Which also makes it maybe the saddest film he’s ever made.
Bugonia, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival and will release in theaters in October, is basically a two-hander, albeit with three central characters. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Donald (played by newcomer Aiden Delbis) live in a ramshackle house in the woods where they keep bees and are methodically preparing for a shocking act: They will kidnap high-powered, slick-suited pharmaceutical-company executive Michelle (Emma Stone) and hold her hostage until she confesses that she’s an alien who has been sent to experiment on humans. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” they declare after shaving her head and taking off her blindfold. Teddy wants Michelle to contact her mothership and take them to her queen, with whom he intends to negotiate for the aliens’ withdrawal from Earth.
Teddy has done his research. He’s studied all the YouTube videos and photos and he’s gathered all the necessary information, and he knows exactly what these aliens are and what their ships look like; the good-natured though not entirely convinced Donald goes along with him out of loyalty and love, and also because Teddy seems like the one person who treats him as an equal. Michelle, meanwhile, is at a loss to how to react: She’s a tough, wealthy power player, the kind of person who does martial arts in the morning and doesn’t take any shit from anyone. And she has no idea how she’s going to convince these kooks to let her go.
Lanthimos has guided multiple actors, including these, to some of the best performances of their careers (Stone won an Oscar for 2023’s Poor Things, and Plemons won the Best Actor award at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness last year), so it seems weird to say that Bugonia is also his first film to feel like a true showcase for his stars. But it is: The movie unfolds as a series of confrontations between Teddy and Michelle, her increasingly insistent desperation crashing against the rocks of his languorous immovability. Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho. First, she’s calm and controlled and confident; then, she tries kindness and pliancy. Plemons’s laid-back confidence is bone-chilling initially. But he also has to fuel our ire, earn our pathos, and maybe even provoke some twinges of solidarity. The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.
The director’s work has always turned on humiliation and power trips. (Think of The Favourite and how beyond all its ornate rituals and ironclad hierarchies, the line between power and disgrace remained so tenuous.) Bugonia is no different. If what Teddy is saying is true, Michelle would be a more powerful being than he could ever dream of. And yet, he needs it to be true. He needs to explain his own powerlessness, even as he seemingly holds her life in his hands. If she is, in fact, an emissary from an alien race, then the degradations of his life will finally make sense. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” he tells his cousin. “They are.” It’s hard not to sense the slightest bit of hope amid all that outrage.
Gradually, we learn what lies at the root of all this. Surreal flashbacks show us how Teddy’s ill mom (Alicia Silverstone) suffered at the hands of Michelle’s company, how the empty corporate platitudes offered in exchange for his family’s horror merely confirmed his belief that there was more to what was being said and what had been done. Bugonia’s narrative trajectory is, on one level, a predictable but resonant one, as we slowly learn to accept Teddy’s irrational actions as a response to a fundamentally irrational world. But we also see that the only thing that will lead to resolution and a way out of this mess is, well, more humiliation.
So, that describes most of the movie. Bugonia heads in, let’s say, a different direction as it reaches its conclusion. (If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, you’ll know where it’s going.) While these developments aren’t exactly new or shocking — some viewers will probably find them predictable — they actually bring the world of this film further into Lanthimos-land. His style is Olympian on the surface, the ironic detachment of his pictures casting a cold, curious eye at humanity’s follies and derangements. But this coolness is a ruse, and he always lets the sadness peek through, making it clear that he is, after all, one of us. By the time Bugonia is over, with a series of beautiful and haunting images that seem to come out of nowhere, we understand that beneath its bemused dispassion lies a deep longing for connection. Early in the film, Teddy looks at his dying bees and sees similarities with humanity: “A dead colony atomized in a trillion directions with no way home again.” By the end, it’s clear the director has seen the same thing.
In his first official appearance as the president of this year’s Venice Film Festival competition jury, veteran filmmaker Alexander Payne fielded some heavy questions about everything from the war in Gaza and his personal views on the ongoing conflict to the role of movies today amid a constantly shifting industry.
In fact, questions about Gaza dominated the start of the presser held inside the Lido’s Palazzo del Casinó — a Q&A session that saw Payne joined by festival director Alberto Barbera and fellow jury presidents of alternate sections, including filmmakers Charlotte Wells, Julia Ducournau, and Tommaso Santambrogio — but Payne opted not to weigh in at length.
He first was asked about how the jury will be approaching “what’s happening in the world” with conflicts raging in Ukraine and Gaza, but he deflected by suggesting it was a better question for Barbera as festival directors are more adept at answering as they have “their fingers on the pulse of cinema” and how it reflects culture, society and politics. But then another journalist asked a more pointed question: What are your views on Gaza?
“Quite frankly, I feel a little bit unprepared for that question,” Payne explained. “I’m here to judge and talk about cinema. My political views, I’m sure, are in agreement with many of yours. But as far as my relationship with the festival and what the industry does, I have to think about that for a while to give you a measured response.”
Barbera then took over by offering a more detailed response in Italian, adding that the festival has “not hesitated” to say that they are against the “enormous suffering” that is happening in Palestine, particularly with the deaths of civilians and “especially of children.” He also said that everyone is welcome at the festival and no one has been disinvited from participating.
Barbera’s comments come just hours after a protest in front of the festival’s red carpet premiere venue, Sala Grande, where two dozen pro-Palestine activists raised a “Stop the Genocide” banner as a way to call attention to the raging war in Gaza. The group has stated that they have a march scheduled for Saturday morning as another tool to demand the festival denounce what’s happening there.
The Venice Film Festival’s competition jury finds Payne serving as president with members including Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, French director and screenwriter Stéphane Brizé, Italian director and screenwriter Maura Delpero, Palme d’Or winning Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Chinese actress Zhao Tao. He said that his role leading the team didn’t actually feel real until yesterday when he arrived “by water taxi to my beautiful hotel” and dropped his bags off.
“Soon I was seated next to Francis Ford Coppola watching a restoration of a 1928 silent film,” Payne revealed of his private itinerary. “And I thought, I’m in heaven. Now I get to watch 21, 22 films by incredible directors for the first time in a theater, not knowing anything about them, surrounded by jury members, all of whom I have the most immense respect for, and it’s an honor to be with them. This is heaven.”
The only hard part of seeing so many films? Deciding who to award with prizes. “We’ll figure it out somehow,” he teased.
The entertainment industry is also figuring out how to steady itself amid a shifting landscape of moviegoing habits and studio consolidation, and Payne weighed in on that as well during one of his answers to another heavy question: What is the relevance of movies today?
Payne approached his answer by focusing on “who sees movies and how.” He used himself as an example: “I watch a lot of movies at night, you know, on my stomach but I much prefer to see them projected in the cathedral of cinema. And I lament that many great movies, both of artistic and political importance, don’t become a larger part of the conversation — certainly a cinematic conversation — because of the immediate means of distribution [with streaming]. Maybe I’m just an old guy, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, but as a film lover, it’s typically films which have a theatrical release that become a part of the cultural conversation and then have some kind of impact.”
Payne then posed another question: Can a film really change society or culture?
“I don’t know, doubtful,” he said. “But at least though when we make films which are relevant to the times, we leave a document that someone was thinking about that. Did [Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be] or [Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator] prevent World War II or the Holocaust? No, but they are documents that people were aware of at the time, even before those things happened. We have those [films] as documents and, as such, we can try to learn from them.”
Moments later, Payne offered a sneak peek at the speech he will deliver later this evening during the opening ceremony about how he’s approaching his work here on the ground. “I always tell myself, and I’ll tell my fellow jury members that we’re selected because working professionals that maybe know something about cinema. But at the same time, I think we should approach each film as though we’ve never seen a movie in our lives before, and to treat each movie we see as a type of small miracle.”
The miracles of 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival will be presented this year from Aug. 27-Sept. 6.
Hundreds of Italian and international filmmakers, artists and cultural figures have signed an open letter calling on the Venice Film Festival to take a “clear and unambiguous stand” against what they describe as genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
The appeal, organized under the banner of Venice4Palestine (V4P), was sent on Friday to the Venice film festival umbrella organization the Biennale di Venezia, as well as the festival’s independent sections Venice Days and International Critics’ Week.
In the letter, the group accuses the Israeli government and military of carrying out genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing across Palestine, and urges the festival to avoid becoming “a sad and empty showcase” by instead providing “a place of dialogue, active participation, and resistance, as it has been in the past.”
Signatories include British filmmaker Ken Loach, Italian actor Toni Servillo — star of 2025 Venice opener, La Grazia from Paolo Sorrentino, Italian actress and director siblings Alba and Alice Rohrwacher, actress Jasmine Trinca, French directors Céline Sciamma and Audrey Diwan, British actor Charles Dance and Palestinian directorial duo Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser, who won best director in Cannes Un Certain Regard this year for their latest film Once Upon A Time In Gaza.
The group references the deaths of nearly 250 Palestinian media workers since the start of the conflict and frames artistic institutions as responsible for fostering awareness and resistance.
“As the spotlight turns on the Venice Film Festival, we’re in danger of going through yet another major event that remains indifferent to this human, civil, and political tragedy,” the letter reads. “‘The show must go on,’ we are told, as we’re urged to look away — as if the ‘film world’ had nothing to do with the ‘real world.’”
For once, the letter continues, “the show must stop. We must interrupt the flow of indifference and open a path to awareness,” adding, “there is no cinema without humanity.”
The letter calls on the festival to host events highlighting Palestinian narratives and to create “a constant backdrop of conversations and initiatives” addressing “ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, colonialism and all the other crimes against humanity committed by Israel for decades, not just since October 7.”
In a statement in response to the letter, the Biennale said they and the Venice festival “have always been, throughout their history, places of open discussion and sensitivity to all the most pressing issues facing society and the world. The evidence of this is, first and foremost, the works that are being presented [at the festival].” The statement noted that The Voice of Hind Rajab, a real-life drama from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, about the killing of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024, will be screening in competition at Venice this year.
The Biennale noted that last year’s Venice lineup featured Israeli director Dani Rosenberg’s film Of Dogs and Men, shot in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.
“The Biennale is, as always, open to dialogue,” the statement said.
A separate group of Italian artists, the Artisti #NoBavaglio network, has called for a public “stop genocide” protest on August 30, on the first weekend of the festival.
The 82nd Venice international film festival runs Aug. 27 to Sept. 6.