Black mirrors

Among the many “monsters” and transformations that enliven this Festival, Jude Law’s turn as a young and ambitious Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin is certainly one of the boldest and most anticipated. Equally awaited is Jim Jarmusch’s family triptych Father Mother Sister Brother, featuring a stellar cast: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling.
Andrea Di Stefano weaves in My Tennis Maestro a coming-of-age comedy about a young aspiring tennis player and his unlikely coach (Pierfrancesco Favino).
Argentine director Lucrecia Martel presents her first documentary, Landmarks, dedicated to the assassination of indigenous rights activist Javier Chocobar. Another Argentine, Gastón Solnicki, presents The Souffleur, featuring Willem Dafoe’s second appearance at this year’s Festival, here as a paranoid and oppressive hotel manager in a work balancing between comedy and fantasy-noir. Meanwhile, Trieste-born filmmaker Laura Samani, already acclaimed for Small Body (Piccolo corpo), sets Un anno di scuola (A Year of School) in her hometown twenty years ago, telling a delicate adolescent love triangle.
Shifting between documentary, fiction, and theater, Gianluca Matarrese presents in the Giornate degli Autori section Il quieto vivere (I Want Her Dead), an ironically titled tale of vicious family feuds and widespread unhappiness. Also in the Giornate, Lebanese filmmaker Cyril Aris brings A Sad and Beautiful World, a sweeping love story set in a country torn apart by very different wars. Finally, in the Settimana Internazionale della Critica (SIC), Greek director Evi Kalogiropoulou ventures into a blazing all-female gangster story with Gorgonà.