ON THE ROW — Reviews from the 83th Venice Film Festival

GOLDEN LION BEST FILM / VOLPI CUP FOR BEST ACTRESS

WOMAN UNKOWN

By May el-Toukhy

Woman Unknown: the movie, the Golden Lion and the controversies.

This is indeed an interesting film about the condition of women and their bodies in society, told through the persecution of so-called female collaborators after the war. We are in Denmark in 1945, where women who had relationships with German soldiers are publicly humiliated and punished, their sexuality treated as a form of national betrayal. The contradiction at the heart of the film is strong: the country has been liberated, women considerably less so.

May el-Toukhy is interested in how women survive and what opportunity means when so little agency is available to them in a postwar patriarchal society that claims the right to judge, condemn and publicly humiliate them for what they do with their own bodies. The question is directed at us as well, and the point of the story is strong. Marie is a maid about to marry her wealthy employer, using one of the few routes available to her towards social mobility while hiding a resurfacing relationship from the past with a German soldier during the occupation. Both opportunities pass through her body, which has been left scarred by an abortion after she became pregnant, and which requires strong opiates to make the pain of having sex with her future husband bearable. The film is smart enough not to make her simply a victim. Survival also makes her lie, manipulate and eventually allow other women to carry the consequences. The question becomes more uncomfortable: how much moral freedom can you demand from someone whose choices were never really free, but made in constant survival mode?

Mathilde Arcel is excellent at holding that ambiguity together. El-Toukhy’s measure is to keep the direction constrained and almost cold, refusing easy emotional identification and keeping Marie difficult to fully read.

That distance may be deliberate, but it is also where the film loses its grip. At 126 minutes, its restraint starts flattening the film into a conventional costume piece that never quite produces the emotional or cinematic force the material seems capable of.

It’s a decent film, sure, but its coronation with not one but two prizes last night — the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup for Arcel — has nevertheless shocked quite a few people. And certainly not because of Mathilde Arcel’s powerful performance. If Venice generally operates on a one-prize-per-film rule, with limited exceptions in its history, it’s hard to see this film as deserving such rare treatment. After the opening press conference at the beginning of the festival, the running joke was that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s jury would reward the only solo female director in Competition to give the decision political weight, as she seemed set to do. That’s exactly what ended up happening. And it’s hard to ignore this, despite the jury’s reassurances.

I struggle to imagine a discussion where Possible Love, NAZA and Woman Unknown were put on the table and the conclusion was that Woman Unknown deserved the Golden Lion above both. And in this context, the Special Jury Prize for NAZA feels almost dismissive.

But this has become a pattern. Recent Golden Lions have often gone to minor films that went nowhere, and the dynamics of a jury can explain part of it. The Golden Lion is not necessarily the product of everyone agreeing on the best film. When strong preferences split around different films and no consensus can be found, a second or third choice can become the film everyone is prepared to agree on because it makes sense in one way or another. The compromise takes the top prize, while the films that inspired the strongest support can end up with the Silver Lions. At this point, you increasingly have to look at the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize to understand what the jury was really fighting for before agreeing on compromises. It just keeps happening, and it’s not hard to say that the Golden Lion itself has lately felt pretty useless. This time, hopefully, it will at least serve a purpose.

And all of this because a 76-year-old man, festival director Alberto Barbera, put only one solo female director in Competition, and a woman heading the jury was left to politically compensate for it. Somehow, we’re back to men being the problem.

Which, ironically, brings us straight back to the film. Woman Unknown is about what happens when women are given so little agency that seizing opportunities and survival become almost indistinguishable. An invisible line runs from Marie to May el-Toukhy to Maggie Gyllenhaal. Not because their circumstances are comparable, but because each recognises a structure where opportunities for women remain scarce enough that when one appears—when you have the chance to take women out of the unknown—you take it. You don’t wait for the next one. Or for a man to give you another opportunity. You take it right away.

Gyllenhaal found herself heading an overwhelmingly male Competition at the world’s second-most-important film festival and decided to use the power she had. She seized the opportunity, twice, without hesitation. So perhaps Woman Unknown still has something exceptional after all: not because it was the best film at Venice, but because its place in the festival made the implications of the very system it describes visible. A film about women having to seize the few opportunities men leave them won the Golden Lion because a woman seized the chance herself to decide what to do with one. And that choice will reverberate through the industry, reach the public and, eventually, create more opportunities for the female directors who come next.

It’s hardly an ideal outcome if we’re talking strictly about cinematic merit. But the imbalance that made such a decision feel necessary isn’t ideal, either.

SILVER LION – GRAND JURY PRIZE

POSSIBLE LOVE

By Lee Chang-dong

Some of the greatest South Korean films of the last decade have returned obsessively to the same national wound: class. From Lee Chang-dong’s Burning to Parasite and No Other Choice, economic inequality has become a defining subject of contemporary Korean cinema. Possible Love returns to it from perhaps the most delicate angle yet. These films approach it in radically different ways, but all confront a society where work, status, and the ability to keep up with an increasingly demanding idea of prosperity determine not only how people live, but how much dignity they are allowed to preserve.

Lee Chang-dong arrives there in perhaps the most delicate way possible. Possible Love is beautiful, masterful filmmaking. It begins with two couples on opposite sides of the class divide: Ho-seok and Mi-ok, whose lives have been devastated by a factory layoff and its violent aftermath, and Ye-ji and Sang-woo, wealthy enough to approach that suffering initially as something to observe. Ye-ji is making a documentary about labour relations and gradually turns the other couple’s life into her material.

The origins of the film make that choice particularly interesting. Lee began thinking about the project after being deeply affected by a real mass layoff and the violent suppression of the workers’ protest in South Korea in 2009. But the event also confronted him with another question: what right did he have to turn somebody else’s suffering into a film? This question became the film itself.

Class determines who gets to observe whom, who gets to create narratives out of other people’s lives, and whose version of reality gets to circulate. There is privilege even in looking. Ye-ji’s empathy may be genuine, but she still owns the camera, the edit and ultimately the narrative. The working-class couple own only the experience being turned into material. As their lives become increasingly entangled, friendship, curiosity and exploitation become almost impossible to separate.

There is masculinity in there too: work as identity, unemployment as humiliation, money and professional success as different ways of performing male worth. Capitalism is never an abstract system in Lee’s film. It is embodied in marriages, bodies, sex, envy, shame and in the small humiliations through which people learn what their position in society is.

And yet Lee never turns any of these people into symbols or villains. That’s precisely why the film hurts. Even genuine empathy can reproduce the same imbalance, and even love has to operate inside a system constantly assigning different values to different lives.

Lee doesn’t offer an answer. He leaves us with the possibility contained in the title: whether love, friendship or simple human dignity can survive structures designed to keep people apart. Delicately devastating, incredibly precise, and somehow still deeply humane. Lee Chang-dong remains an absolute master.

SILVER LION – BEST DIRECTOR

DAU

By Ilya Khrzhanovsky

DAU is part of one of the most insane projects in cinema history. Ilya Khrzhanovsky originally set out to make a biopic of Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, then built an enormous Soviet research institute in Kharkiv and turned it into a social experiment. From 2008 to 2011, hundreds of people effectively lived inside this reconstructed world, filmed on 35mm across some 700 hours of footage, which eventually produced several films released in 2020. This DAU is essentially the biopic he never made, combining footage from the original experiment with newly shot material.

DAU (2026) is insanely colossal, with an almost impossible visual grandeur. At times, you could almost believe it was AI-generated. We start in Leningrad in 1928, following Nobel Prize-winning and anti-Stalinist physicist Lev Landau across four decades of Soviet history, but the film barely behaves like a biopic. It’s an immersive experience, with situations accumulating without explaining themselves.

We witness fragments of life, shot handheld, inside an extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of the period. But that realism constantly slips into something grotesque, theatrical, almost circus-like, producing a feeling that becomes increasingly oppressive and repulsive. What emerges is less a portrait of Dau than of the system surrounding him: a Soviet regime obsessed with catching up with and surpassing the West, but stuck in hierarchy, repression and control, ultimately destroying its brightest minds and annihilating its own people. It’s almost revolting. The anti-Soviet, anti-Russian-state position is unmistakable, especially considering the controversy preceding the festival.

At 3h30m, it’s difficult, disorienting and at times almost impossible to follow, but visually staggering and unlike almost anything else. DAU works less as a compelling narrative than as experiential cinema, and perhaps that is where its achievement really lies. The operation itself is almost a masterpiece: the scale, the reconstruction, performance and lived experience into something that feels genuinely inhabited. Its anti-totalitarian argument emerges not so much through what the film tells us, but through what it forces us to experience: hierarchy, surveillance, paranoia, repression and the gradual suffocation of individual freedom. As a story, it drags and often loses you. As an experience, there’s really nothing like it.

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

NAZA

By Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

This is an eye-opening, important documentary built around the testimonies of 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on the digitisation of mass killing in Gaza and the genealogy of a genocide.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli filmmakers behind No Other Land, return with something closer to a document than a documentary, detailing how this AI-powered killing machine works, but also how the trauma of October 7 obscured almost any critical thinking and allowed a “there are no innocents in Gaza” doctrine to become normalised, supported or simply left unquestioned within Israeli society and beyond.

What makes it particularly poignant is that this isn’t about settlers, religious extremists or far-right fanatics. The people speaking are young, highly educated and liberal, and say they have nothing against Arabs in their everyday lives. Inside elite intelligence units, they became technicians in a killing machine, moving from target to target, destroying homes and neighbourhoods from a distance while calculating how many civilian deaths were acceptable according to the importance of a Hamas target. Ten, twenty, sometimes a hundred. At some point, “collateral damage” stops describing an accident and becomes part of a system.

And they all knew. They had surveillance, phone data, images and voices. They could know how many civilians or children were present while AI-assisted systems helped identify and process targets. These are not mea culpas. The testimonies are cold, precise and methodical. This was my job. These were the orders and objectives. There is something chillingly reminiscent of testimony from the Nuremberg trials in that bureaucratic separation of individual morality from the machinery being described.

Produced by The Guardian, the film approaches all of this with the rigour of an investigation. No sentimentalism, no emotional manipulation, almost no need to judge the people speaking. It asks questions, listens and lets them explain the system themselves. That makes it much harder to dismiss.

Shot backlit on a Tel Aviv rooftop to preserve anonymity, this is probably not a documentary for those who already know and have protested. It is for those who kept finding justifications or chose to look away: within Israeli society, among Western politicians, or simply among people instinctively suspicious of anything framed as a left-wing position, or quick to dismiss criticism of Israel as antisemitism. NAZA is straight, factual and extremely difficult to argue with.

One interviewee says none of them ever protested, as they couldn’t even allow themselves to question whether what they were doing was moral because the entire system depended on trust. They had to tell themselves there was no alternative but to destroy the enemy. NAZA focuses on the cracks appearing from inside the system that made this horror possible, finally giving that reality an unequivocal name we can all agree on: genocide.

BEST SCREENPLAY

UN BON PETIT SOLDAT

By Stephane Brizé

Un bon petit soldat sees Stéphane Brizé returning once again to the workplace, which over the years has become his subject of choice, digging deeper each time into the mechanics of labour and, through them, the logic of capitalism and the society it has produced. This time, he expands his social realism into a surprisingly successful dramedy about the logic of constant performance we’ve all internalised. And he does so with a film full of rhythm, awkward situations and catchy music.

Alba Rohrwacher works in HR for a large company, dealing with workplace mobbing inside a system where results increasingly take precedence over morality. She is subjected to that pressure but also responsible for passing it down. Brizé almost never shows her at home. We see her at work, on the metro, in bars and cafés, constantly moving between her professional obligations. Even her relationship with her son mostly exists through phone calls and video calls. Her private space disappears from the story as she seems to live entirely within the totalising space of work, and its logic inevitably guide her personal life and parenting too.

At times, the parallel between corporate performance culture and private life feels a little too schematic in making its point, but the film is sharp, entertaining and often very funny. Vincent Lindon plays a CEO whose brutal reasoning is always perfectly understandable, sometimes even reasonable, which says as much about how deeply we’ve internalised this logic as anything else.

VOLPI CUP FOR BEST ACTOR

WILD HORSE NINE

By Martin McDonagh

Here is the first banger of the festival. Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh’s first film since The Banshees of Inisherin, is basically a two-hour continuous blast of comic energy built around two CIA agents stationed in Chile in 1973.

John Malkovich is Chris, an ageing operative with terminal cancer, a serious morphine addiction and absolutely no interest left in keeping state secrets. Sam Rockwell is Lee, his younger companion and protégé. They’re both stationed in Santiago, working on the covert coup operation against Allende’s democratically elected socialist government, when Chris suddenly decides he needs a break and heads to Easter Island. Lee is sent after him, partly as a companion, partly as a minder. Their boss, played by Steve Buscemi, has every reason to panic: Chris is writing his memoirs and has started telling complete strangers about decades of CIA wet work and black operations.

And no, McDonagh isn’t exactly shy about the CIA’s involvement in all sorts of dirty jobs. Guatemala, Lumumba, Chile: the finger is pointed straight at American interventionism. Even the JFK orchestrated assassination makes its way in, not as some throwaway joke but as a substantial element of the story. Chris gradually emerges as someone who has been present at some of the darkest corners of postwar American history, while becoming increasingly unsure what any of it was for.

Historical revisionism is what McDonagh uses to make it political and at the same time extremely funny. His enjoyment in saying the supposedly unsayable and testing how far he can push his characters feels sharper than ever here. Everything becomes available for jokes: political correctness, American imperialism, state secrets, assassinations and war, but also liberal morality, masculinity, death and friendship, often without the film telling you which side you are supposed to take. And it works incredibly well.

Rapa Nui becomes the perfect absurd setting for it: one of the most isolated islands on Earth, like the backdrop for an intense male friendship in The Banshees of Inisherin, stranding two men accustomed to violence and lets conversation slowly expose what they have done to each other and to the world, just as in In Bruges. All the signatures are there: two damaged men, violence, friendship, guilt, beautifully constructed dialogue.

McDonagh is McDonagh, as we know. A playwright until the age of 33, when he became a film director, he writes with almost pedantic precision. This screenplay is almost suspiciously perfect, a neat piece of clockwork in which everything eventually clicks into place: symbols, stories, character arcs, actions, motivations, side characters, jokes. Something mentioned casually will inevitably return 40 minutes later with a purpose. You can practically hear the machinery working to perfect itself in every scene. At times, it is almost too neatly engineered to leave anything genuinely accidental alive. But the machinery is very, very good.

What prevents all that construction from becoming sterile is Malkovich. Chris can be monstrous, ridiculous, lucid, racist, funny and unexpectedly vulnerable, sometimes within the same conversation. The morphine, cancer and growing awareness of his own mortality gradually turn all the comedy into a sadder reckoning of a man who spent his life doing terrible things in the name of a country that can never publicly acknowledge that he did them. McDonagh has said the film only really came together when he understood it as a story about guilt and regret, and you can feel that underneath almost every joke.

But there is something darker beneath the jokes: people confronting systems of power so much bigger than themselves that protest, argument or simply being right changes very little. One of John’s most provocative pieces of wisdom basically amounts to: if you see someone in uniform, shoot them. It’s hardly a moral lesson, but it leaves an uncomfortable question hanging beneath the comedy: what happens when protest, good intentions and discussion no longer seem capable of influencing power? What does resistance become when consequential decisions are made not in the political arena, but behind closed doors?

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI AWARD FOR BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS

15/18, A PLACE TO HEAL

By Cédric Kahn

Cédric Kahn’s cinema has long been drawn to the impossibility of fully reading another person, to the mystery of their impulses, silences and contradictions. From L’Ennui and Roberto Succo to The Goldman Case, he has pursued that mystery through an almost behaviourist method, resisting psychological explanation and leaving actions opaque while their consequences come sharply into focus.

15/18 takes that inquiry somewhere new: inside the institution designed to search for those explanations. “15/18” is the administrative designation of a psychiatric ward, referring to the age of the adolescents confined within it. Kahn has explored adolescence before, most notably in Trop de bonheur. Here he enters its most volatile territory and, unusually for his cinema, begins tracing behaviour back towards the traumas buried underneath it.

The film’s first half is deliberately horizontal. Kahn builds a collective portrait through clinical interviews, family meetings, communal meals and conversations in bedrooms and corridors. Each patient carries a different diagnosis, history and degree of distress. Each story briefly overlaps with the next. No character is initially given greater narrative weight. Together, they form a large, unstable portrait of damaged youth, making the institution appear to be the film’s central subject.

Kahn shot the film with three cameras after an extended period of research inside psychiatric facilities, giving these scenes the nervous energy of documentary-inflected social realism. The ward has locked doors and strict rules; at times, it resembles a detention centre. Yet it is also a place of friendship, desire, laughter and passion. For several of these teenagers, it may be the first environment in which they encounter both a peer group and adults prepared to listen. We follow this turbulent community through its routines, crises and imperfect systems of care.

Then gradually, the film’s geometry changes. Its centrifugal movement tightens. The observational realism of the opening gives way to a more conventional narrative, and the focus narrows from the group to several characters and finally, at the very end, to one young woman. The collective becomes context. The individual becomes the subject.

This shift reveals the film’s central idea. 15/18 is ultimately less concerned with explaining the institution than with examining the extreme permeability of adolescence. These young people carry diagnoses, but diagnoses cannot contain their lives. Their developing minds have absorbed violence, neglect, humiliation and parental failure—experiences they possessed neither the language nor the emotional structure to process.

The film’s most powerful trajectory is then unmistakably gendered. It leads towards a young woman taught to doubt, minimise and conceal what she experienced. The abuse belongs to the past, yet it continues to shape her self-worth, her desires and her relationships with others. One act of violence, experienced before it can even be understood, has reorganised her psyche around itself.

Kahn exposes the fragile and arbitrary line separating outside from inside, “us” from “them”. Psychological collapse is no distant pathology. The distance between an ordinary adolescence and a psychiatric ward can be a single traumatic event buried inside a developing mind.

Only at the end does the English title, A Place to Heal, acquire its full meaning. It is not about the hospital. The decisive place of healing lies in an act of agency: recognising what happened, naming it, and finding the courage to act on it.

The movement from the collective to the subjective may be the film’s narrative structure and its definition of healing.

And the cast and direction are incredible.

BEST DIRECTOR — ORIZZONTI SECTION

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JO: CHAPTER PHAEDRA

By Jacqueline Lentzou

Surprisingly powerful second feature from Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou. She starts from one of the defining deaths of modern Athens, the 2008 police killing of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which triggered weeks of protests across Greece, and transforms it into the imagined last day of a girl. Lentzou doesn’t reconstruct the event. She invents Jo, also 15, and gives her one last ordinary day.

And ordinary is the point. Missing the bus, fighting with her mother, going to school, hanging out with friends, becoming fascinated by Phaedra, a classmate whose singing opens up the possibility of something new. Lentzou is interested in everything that can exist inside a life before we know it will end.

From there she goes full arthouse dreamy, completely uninhibited, with a lightness and freedom of vision, inventing new visual ideas in almost every sequence. The film moves between teenage realism and abstraction, the banal and the cosmic. It’s a deeply female gaze, concerned almost entirely with interiority rather than plot, eventually approaching death and the afterlife in mystical terms.

For more than six minutes, conventional cinema almost disappears: a dark screen, flashes of light, bodies and voices becoming immaterial. From there, we look back at life. It’s a huge formal gamble and probably where the film will lose some people, but also where it becomes genuinely powerful. What started as an ordinary teenage day suddenly carries the weight of everything that can be taken away in a second.

Not every experiment lands, and at 88 minutes it can still be a demanding watch. But the freedom is the point. After Moon, 66 Questions, Lentzou feels increasingly like a filmmaker with a language entirely her own. She just won Best Director in Orizzonti. We’ll be hearing a lot more from her.

SALON DE BELLEZA

By Nathalia Acevedo

A radical debut from Mexican filmmaker Nathalia Acevedo, Salón de belleza adapts Mario Bellatin’s cult novella about a gay hairdresser who turns his beauty salon into a refuge for men dying during a mysterious epidemic. Acevedo is a first-time director but hardly new to this kind of cinema: she made her acting debut as the female lead in Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, which competed at Cannes in 2012, and later worked with filmmakers including Khavn and Marialy Rivas. This is the kind of lineage that gives context to this debut.

Inside this salon, once a temple of beauty, death took over, turning it into a liminal space where decay, care and sex, affection and oblivion exist side by side. Everything is symbolic, poetic, sometimes almost hypnotic. There is barely any dialogue, apart from the protagonist’s occasional voice-over. Acevedo lets images do almost everything: bodies, fish tanks, empty rooms, sex, illness, water. There isn’t much of a conventional narrative, just a succession of beautifully composed scenes slowly building this estranged world, defined by the pressing confrontation with death.

The production itself is quite interesting. A Mexico-France co-production between Kintsugi Cine and Farol, produced by Paulina Valencia and American filmmaker Matt Porterfield, the film was actually shot in Naples. Balthazar Lab is behind the cinematography, Olivia Neergaard-Holm edited it, and experimental cellist/composer Lucy Railton did the music. It’s an unusually strong group of collaborators for a debut, and you can see the level of control in almost every frame.

And it is beautiful. The cinematography, the framing and the colours are incredibly striking. I could watch those five-minute underwater shots indefinitely. But the radical austerity and very serious arthouse ambition sometimes feel like a lot for a first film to carry. At times, it becomes simply arduous to endure. There is so much here that I like, and yet somehow the whole thing never completely clicked.

IL FUOCO CHE TI PORTI DENTRO

By Edoardo De Angelis

The Fire Within You, takes on two recurring fixtures of Italian storytelling: the family comedy set at Christmas and the cultural divide between North and South. A rancorous, abrasive Neapolitan matriarch comes to Milan to spend Christmas at her son’s home, bringing with her everything he has apparently tried to leave behind.

The situations, misunderstandings and family dynamics are mostly predictable, and the North-South divide inevitably carries its share of familiar rhetoric. But De Angelis reworks both formulas into a surprisingly successful and genuinely funny exercise. Over one very long Christmas Eve, set almost entirely inside a Milanese apartment, a whole gallery of supporting characters gradually exposes the distance between mother and son, but also the impossibility of ever completely separating from that relationship.

De Angelis avoids the banal often enough, finding humour and clever ideas inside material that could easily have become a collection of regional stereotypes.

Vanessa Scalera is fantastic, genuinely Coppa Volpi territory, holding the whole film together. For all the clichés built into its premise, De Angelis finds the right measure to make this piece work.

THE ECHO CHAMBER

by Andrea Pallaoro

You have an incredible cast: Susan Sarandon, Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander. You have Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay. You have Diego García’s stunning cinematography and a beautiful score by Clément Ducol. On paper, The Echo Chamber has everything.

And then there is the Pallaoro method: explain almost nothing, strip everything down and let an accumulation of gestures, silences and long fragments of life carry the film forward. It worked much better in Hannah and Monica. Here, the method ends up taking more from the film than it gives, draining incredibly rich material of much of its emotional life.

So much is left deliberately opaque that ambiguity becomes less fascinating than frustrating. The long takes, silences and 1:1 framing keep insisting on authorship without necessarily producing it. What should feel mysterious increasingly feels withheld, until the formal control becomes almost suffocating.

There is enormous ambition here, but that severity doesn’t translate into the film’s strength. Not for me. Pallaoro’s authorship becomes the very thing standing between the material and the audience.

ACCADRÀ QUESTA NOTTE

by Nanni Moretti

Moretti tries again, adapting Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo after the failure of Three Floors (2021). This time, it takes different stories from Legami and forces them into a single romantic narrative. The seven-year time jumps are back, as is the street dancing, along with plenty of familiar Morettian mannerisms. But there is a different vitality here. The film keeps changing direction, sometimes unexpectedly, perhaps precisely because of the fragmented nature of Nevo’s source material.

Moretti even reflects on that form. In Matteo’s bookshop, a customer complains that she cannot finish a collection of short stories and asks for a novel instead, something where things are clearer. A fairly ironic statement of intent from a film constantly trying to give fragments some kind of coherent trajectory. By the final theatrical sequence, with Garrel moving from one performance to the next, the fragmented form returns in perhaps its most artificial and sentimental version.

That same fragmented nature is also where the film struggles. Stories, characters, deaths, marriages, children and digressions keep accumulating, and Moretti sometimes pushes very hard to make all these borrowed pieces belong to the same whole. There is plenty of overstuffing along the way, and the film repeatedly slips into banality. But somehow Moretti gets away with quite a lot of it. After the stiffness of his previous movies, this feels surprisingly light, unpredictable and alive. Not entirely convincing, but considerably easier to like.

MR. NELSON, DID YOU KILL PEOPLE?

By Shinya Tsukamoto

Cyberpunk cult director Shinya Tsukamoto brings a biopic to Competition, based on the life of Allen Nelson, an African-American Marine sent to Vietnam in 1966 who returned home with severe PTSD after being trained to kill almost automatically. The film follows his struggle to survive the trauma, while the brutality of the war constantly resurfaces through flashbacks.

Tsukamoto tells the Vietnam War through the eyes of an African-American Marine who enlisted voluntarily as an escape. The larger subtext, though, is how disproportionately the war fell on working-class Americans and minorities, while college deferments protected many young men from wealthier backgrounds. In 1966, the same year Nelson enlisted, Robert McNamara introduced Project 100,000, which lowered military entry standards and brought hundreds of thousands of previously ineligible men into the armed forces. Around 40 per cent were African-American. By 1967, Black Americans represented roughly 11 per cent of the US population but 23 per cent of American combat troops in Vietnam.

There is no restraint in the way Tsukamoto depicts what these American soldiers inflicted on Vietnamese civilians, and coming from a Japanese filmmaker, it feels significant. In this frame, Nelson is both perpetrator and victim of the system that produced him. Through continuous therapy sessions with a middle-aged Nelson confronting his PTSD, the war keeps returning in sudden, brutal flashbacks as he begins to come to terms with why he killed people. His body remembers before he can control what he remembers. The blood, gore and physical violence are not merely decorative shock tactics, but a way of understanding violence physically, through the body, where it is learned, turned into reflex and stored for years to come.

If war teaches soldiers to dehumanise the enemy and this makes barbarism possible, talking about it becomes Nelson’s way of reversing that process, restoring humanity to the people he killed and confronting what killing them did to him. He eventually turns that process into anti-war activism and becomes an acclaimed public speaker. It is a fairly conventional arc, much like the film itself, and the film falls short when it becomes too eager to provide answers and anti-war moral lessons, often simplifying complexities and overexplaining its point. If that comes with the biopic territory, Tsukamoto does little to resist it. The film stretches towards the end, with several moments that feel like possible endings before we are dragged into the next one. But perhaps that is the point. Trauma never quite finds a stable ending.

FURIES

By Rami Kodeih

Furies is a blast, but also deeply political. Director Rami Kodeih turns Lebanon’s very real banking collapse into a delirious heist movie in which two sisters rob a bank to get their own money back. The absurdity comes directly from reality. After Lebanese banks effectively froze people out of their savings in 2019, Kodeih and his wife and co-writer, Nora Mariana, found themselves unable to access their own money when she needed surgery.

From there, the film opens up into something much bigger, giving a sense of Lebanese society that we rarely get to see. Beirut in 2020, devastated by an economic crisis and political collapse, but still incredibly alive. The civil war is never very far away either. One of the characters is a former Christian militiaman still carrying what he did decades earlier, connecting the violence of the 1980s to a younger generation now dealing with a completely different kind of dispossession.

Kodeih doesn’t turn any of this into a history lesson. The film is chaotic, sexy, funny, and sometimes excessive, moving between politics and pure genre without taking itself too seriously. Maria Nakouzi and Rym Mroue are fantastic, and their relationship keeps everything together when the film itself threatens to go off the rails.

And somehow, through all this mess, you get a surprisingly vivid picture of Lebanon. The crisis, the unresolved history, but also nightlife, music, sexuality, humour and a vibrant cultural scene that rarely makes it into the images of the country we see from outside. Angry, messy, wildly entertaining, and powered by the very real absurdity of a system where robbing a bank to recover your own savings starts to feel like an act of common sense.

THE BASIS OF PHILOSOPHY

By Paul Schrader

The Basics of Philosophy is a very divisive film, and clearly not one designed to be liked so much as to make its audience uneasy. That discomfort becomes harder to separate from Paul Schrader himself. In April 2025, the filmmaker was accused by a former assistant of sexual assault and harassment, allegations he has denied. The screenplay predates those accusations becoming public, but the film’s story inevitably makes it feel like an unusually exposed piece of self-interrogation. A respected philosophy professor sexually abused a minor decades earlier, escaped public punishment and now finds himself consumed by the question of whether he can ever be forgiven.

This is familiar Schrader territory. His cinema has always been populated by men consumed by guilt, trying to impose discipline, reason or faith on something inside themselves they cannot resolve. It comes directly from his Calvinist upbringing and its doctrine of total depravity. You cannot earn salvation through good actions; redemption depends on grace. Schrader has spent most of his career making films about men trying to do exactly that anyway, to punish, discipline or purify themselves into redemption.

Here Spinoza provides the intellectual framework, but underneath it is Schrader’s familiar religious sense of sin. Philosophy becomes another attempt to rationalise the irrational. If we are shaped by forces beyond our control, and if a person can genuinely change over thirty years, what does that change entitle them to? Can remorse have moral value when punishment never came? Can someone claim redemption without the forgiveness of the person they harmed?

The weird part is where the film places its weight. We experience the suffering of the perpetrator, his guilt and his search for forgiveness, far more than the suffering of the victim. His punishment is essentially internal, while he has been able to build a life without publicly paying for what he did. This makes the central question even more uncomfortable. Is feeling guilty for thirty years a form of punishment? Can we really change? And is Schrader asking us to understand someone who claims he has?

The film stays deliberately and frustratingly inside that ambiguity. At times it feels genuinely morally disquieting; at others, too simplified. It’s definitely cringe, occasionally clumsy and rough around the edges, but also an interesting outcome of an uneasy personal reckoning by an 80-year-old filmmaker returning to the question that has obsessed him for most of his career: whether a person can truly change, and whether change alone can ever amount to redemption.

BUCKING FASTARD

By Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has spent most of his career following people obsessed with impossible things, with nature and animals. There’s much of it in his new movie, but not in a particularly convincing mix.

Inspired by the strange true story of identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, Herzog turns them into Jean and Joan Holbrooke, played by real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. They dress alike, move alike, their brains seem synchronised and they speak simultaneously, almost incapable of imagining an existence that does not include the other. They fall in love with the same man, played by Orlando Bloom, become obsessive stalkers and face trial. From there, barely 20 minutes in, Herzog progressively abandons anything resembling a conventional biopic—rightly so. But it all feels more arbitrarily abrupt and overstuffed than dreamy.

The film follows one digression after another into increasingly symbolic, absurd and sometimes completely indecipherable territory. They move from place to place, with new scenarios, characters and themes shifting the direction of the movie every now and then. They live in the city, they live in the countryside, until eventually they set out to dig through a mountain in search of a kind of Arcadia, a place where they might finally be allowed to exist exactly as they want. It’s okay. It’s fun. And it is certainly Herzog.

There is certainly something there, despite how easily the story could have become an exercise in eccentricity. It is the desire for the individual to remain unintelligible, unformed by convention, driven exclusively by dreams and desire. The twins exist as a pacified duality, almost a single right-brain consciousness set against the uptightness and conformity of the world. The outside is the problem: doctors, judges, lovers, families and institutions keep trying to separate, diagnose or explain something the twins themselves refuse to explain. Their journey towards Arcadia, with the tunnel through the mountain and, metaphorically, the unconscious, becomes a very Herzogian oneiric fantasy of escaping a world obsessed with making people fit, compressing reality into boxes.

But their battle to follow an internal emotional coherence against outside logic may also be the problem of the movie itself. Herzog has earned the right to make exactly the movie he wants, and Bucking Fastard increasingly feels like watching him exercise that privilege. You can admire the fact that you have absolutely no idea where the film is going while simultaneously wondering whether it actually needs to go there.

Maybe that is why the film is so difficult to dislike and equally difficult to love. At 83, Herzog still seems genuinely curious about the world and the peculiar people who refuse to live according to its rules. But weirdness and two extraordinary performances don’t necessarily add up to make a great movie.

These may well be the reasons why Cannes didn’t take it for Competition and Herzog chose Venice instead, refusing an out-of-competition Cannes slot and giving his actresses the opportunity to compete for awards. Which they deserve. But considering the premise, the cast, the story and Herzog’s vision, the whole thing ultimately feels like a lost opportunity.

SENZA DOLORE

By Gianni Amelio

The premise sounds almost dangerously close to a liberal fable with an obvious moral lesson in compassion: a well-meaning city-centre guy, a second-hand bookseller—let’s call him a leftist—ends up taking migrants into his home, partly out of guilt. It’s like taking the old right-wing taunt—if you care so much about migrants, why don’t you take them into your own home?—and basically answering: fine, let’s see what happens if someone actually does. But thankfully, Gianni Amelio has made something stranger and much less predictable than that. Maybe because there are younger screenwriters behind it too: the talented Davide Serino and Andrea Quetti, who worked on the screenplay with him.

Nessun dolore follows Davide, played by Alessandro Borghi, who runs a small second-hand book stall in the centre of Rome. His rather uneventful life changes when a North African man suddenly tries to leave his young son with him in the street and something tragic happens. What could already have been enough material for a conventional guilt-and-redemption story instead becomes the beginning of something much stranger.

The film keeps shifting under your feet, complicating its own premise and almost always avoiding slipping into the banal. What begins in recognisable social realism becomes increasingly strange, suspended and almost allegorical. It doesn’t always work, but there’s a freshness in not explaining everything. Migration is there, of course, but so are loneliness, personal suffering, guilt, the responsibility of caring for someone else and the complications that come with actually doing it. Solidarity is never simple, and neither are the people practising it.

This is also what saves the film from its potentially unbearable starting point. Davide isn’t presented simply as a good man doing good things. Is he acting out of generosity, guilt, weakness, confusion? At some point even he doesn’t seem to know. His private act of compassion becomes increasingly absurd because it is being asked to solve something that an individual obviously cannot solve.

Everyone is essentially left alone to deal with something much bigger than themselves. The State is almost nowhere to be found in the story, except when it eventually appears to punish him. Maybe that’s the point: private compassion is asked to compensate for a collective and political failure, while the individual is left to confront unsolvable problems alone.

Alessandro Borghi is extraordinary—probably the real highlight of the movie.

INK

by Danny Boyle

The story is familiar. London, 1969. Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch wants a foothold in Fleet Street, the heart of the British newspaper establishment. Having already bought the News of the World, he acquires the struggling Sun, then selling around 850,000 copies against the Daily Mirror’s seemingly untouchable five million. Murdoch installs former Daily Mail journalist Larry Lamb as editor and gives him a mandate to be ruthless: sex, sport, crime, celebrities, enormous headlines, plain language, all fuelled by resentment toward a stuffy, self-satisfied, “hypocritical” establishment.

Murdoch and Lamb see themselves as insurgents. Their battle is for the new, for innovation, even, in their minds, for freedom. Their impossible target is to overtake the Mirror.

Danny Boyle’s Ink follows Lamb through the first year of that experiment, as every journalistic boundary becomes negotiable in pursuit of circulation. The kidnapping of Muriel McKay and the introduction of the topless Page Three girl become milestones on the way to turning The Sun into Britain’s most successful tabloid.

It is, essentially, an origin story for the attention economy: clickbait and engagement before algorithms, outrage before social media, the logic of virality before anyone had a word for it. Boyle and screenwriter James Graham, adapting Graham’s own play, trace a system in which the market progressively separates ambition from morality, until any means can be justified by the simple fact that they work. Responsibility becomes secondary to results. Freedom is framed as freedom from the burdens of morality.

I can see why this is a potent and remarkably contemporary story. The problem is that Ink rarely finds anything particularly surprising to do with it. Its dramatic arc feels preordained, Graham’s writing remains theatrical, often explaining its ideas through dialogue, and Boyle directs with characteristic fizz. He is clearly having fun representing the ancestors of modern populism: the boldness, the speed, the vulgarity, the thrill of turning news into entertainment. But the film’s energy rarely translates into insight.

More troubling is what happens to Murdoch. Ink almost absolves him of the very system he creates. The film repeatedly assigns its most unscrupulous decisions to Lamb, turning him into a creature who gradually escapes his master’s control — clearly playing with the lamb turning into a wolf — breaking rules behind Murdoch’s back, crossing lines Murdoch supposedly would not cross, while Murdoch ultimately gets to claim the success.

This is especially bizarre in the case of Page Three. Murdoch approved the topless photographs in reality. In Ink, he becomes furious when Lamb introduces them and tries to stop him. The scene itself fundamentally rearranges responsibility. The man who helped establish the formula is transformed into an external agent, while Lamb becomes the rogue operator who pushes the paper into moral freefall. What the hell?

Boyle has said he deliberately resisted portraying Murdoch as a monster, seeing the young Australian publisher as a disruptive force entering a rigid and prejudiced British establishment. But why turn one of the most consequential media proprietors of the modern era into a strangely passive entrepreneur?

The film seems to want the safety of nuance and the force of a warning without really committing to either. The closing scene gestures toward the manosphere, Andrew Tate, rage-bait, social-media polarisation and the contemporary politics of grievance. But where are Trump and MAGA? Musk? Where are Nigel Farage, Brexit and the populist political ecosystem that Murdoch’s method helped shape and normalise?

In trying to remain measured, the film refuses to take a real stand or scrutinise those who actually hold power, and that weakens the entire project. What is the point of telling this story if it is just to show where this machinery began and how it started to work? Is the film suggesting that the rise of outrage-driven media was inevitable, merely the natural projection of a changing market? What does it really say about individual choices and the consequences they have?

Ink may be an entertaining, well-acted and often exhilarating film, but its central ambiguity feels like an avoidance of its core. The movie is fine. I just found myself increasingly annoyed by it.