Face to face

Brad Pitt faces off with George Clooney in Wolfs (Out of Competition) by Jon Watts, the director of the most vibrant Spider-Man reboots from Marvel. The two stars, playing rival hitmen hired for the same job, reunite after Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy and the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. More stars are in Competition in a story that contrasts the dizzying heights and drastic lows of a promising European architect who moves to the United States in the immediate postwar period. The Brutalist, an epic film directed by the remarkable Brady Corbet, who was discovered in Venice in 2015 with The Childhood of a Leader (Best Director and Best Debut Film), stars Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, and Felicity Jones, who was already an Oscar nominee for The Theory of Everything. And it is a woman who must face off with the military dictatorship in Brazil after the disappearance of her husband, a Labour Party deputy, in Ainda estou aqui (in Competition) by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries), a true story unearthed from the memoirs of writer and journalist Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Once again, confronting difficult chapters of history is the basis of the Romanian tragicomedy Anul Nou care n-a fost (Orizzonti) by Bogdan Mureşanu, a story set on a single day before the 1989 Romanian Revolution that overthrew Ceaușescu. Among the Italians on today’s schedule is the great Marco Bellocchio, presenting the short film Se posso permettermi (Out of Competition), and Francesco Costabile, who with Familia (Orizzonti) brings us yet another face-off – this time between two brothers and a mother abandoned by a father who forcefully returns from a painful past.”