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  • friday, 5 september 2025

Extra time

by Riccardo Triolo

It all comes down to time – the decisive, extra time – in the selection of films screening today and tomorrow. In Competition, the highly anticipated Silent Friend by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is a meditation on deep time: a Ginkgo Biloba, witness to lives and centuries, provides the backdrop for a story that intertwines science, soul, nature, and the waiting of a neuroscientist (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Tsai Ming-liang stops time itself, stretching it into long silent sequences. In Hui jia (Back Home), his lens turns to memory and return, to a cyclical time revealed through his unmistakable contemplative gaze. Also in today’s line-up is Andrea’s Island by Antonio Capuano, honored this year with the Pietro Bianchi Award from the Italian film press. Time can also be mocking, irreverent. As in Bravo Bene! by Franco Maresco, a reflection that investigates the past, confronting the ghost of the incomparable Carmelo Bene. Orizzonti closes with the dilated time of night shifts in Grand Ciel by Akihiro Hata and the feverish time of Bangkok in Funeral Casino Blues by Roderick Warich. The future, instead, belongs to Chien 51 (closing film), Cédric Jimenez’s dystopian vision of Paris under the rule of AI, with its stellar cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gilles Lellouche, Louis Garrel, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

All the photocalls' Daily pick

SILENT FRIEND

by Ildikó Enyedi
SILENT FRIEND Ildikó Enyedi

For her eighth feature film, the Hungarian director once again entrusts her storytelling to the force of n...

READ

UN FILM FATTO PER BENE

by Franco Maresco
UN FILM FATTO PER BENE Franco Maresco

What connects Palermo to Carmelo Bene? Many things, as shown in Franco Maresco’s latest work. As the late Goffredo ...

READ

L’ISOLA DI ANDREA

by Antonio Capuano
L’ISOLA DI ANDREA Antonio Capuano

Marta and Guido, a separated couple in their forties, turn to the court to obtain the so-called “judicial” ruling...

READ

GRAND CIEL

by Akihiro Hata
GRAND CIEL Akihiro Hata

Vincent (Damien Bonnard, already acclaimed in Venice in 2024 for Emmanuel Mouret’s film Trois Amies) works...

READ

FUNERAL CASINO BLUES

by Roderick Warich
FUNERAL CASINO BLUES Roderick Warich

An urban melodrama rooted in rural stories of debt, usury, and disappearance, set against a feverish, hallucinatory B...

READ

CHIEN 51

by Cédric Jimenez

In a futuristic Paris divided into three zones separating social classes, AI bot ALMA revolutioniz...

READ

SILENT FRIEND

by Ildikó Enyedi
SILENT FRIEND Ildikó Enyedi

For her eighth feature film, the Hungarian director once again entrusts her storytelling to the force of n...

READ

UN FILM FATTO PER BENE

by Franco Maresco
UN FILM FATTO PER BENE Franco Maresco

What connects Palermo to Carmelo Bene? Many things, as shown in Franco Maresco’s latest work. As the late Goffredo ...

READ

L’ISOLA DI ANDREA

by Antonio Capuano
L’ISOLA DI ANDREA Antonio Capuano

Marta and Guido, a separated couple in their forties, turn to the court to obtain the so-called “judicial” ruling...

READ

GRAND CIEL

by Akihiro Hata
GRAND CIEL Akihiro Hata

Vincent (Damien Bonnard, already acclaimed in Venice in 2024 for Emmanuel Mouret’s film Trois Amies) works...

READ

FUNERAL CASINO BLUES

by Roderick Warich
FUNERAL CASINO BLUES Roderick Warich

An urban melodrama rooted in rural stories of debt, usury, and disappearance, set against a feverish, hallucinatory B...

READ

CHIEN 51

by Cédric Jimenez

In a futuristic Paris divided into three zones separating social classes, AI bot ALMA revolutioniz...

READ

    Extra time

    It all comes down to time – the decisive, extra time – in the selection of films screening today and tomorrow. In Competition, the highly anticipated Silent Friend by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is a meditation on deep time: a Ginkgo Biloba, witness to lives and centuries, provides the backdrop for a story that intertwines science, soul, nature, and the waiting of a neuroscientist (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Tsai Ming-liang stops time itself, stretching it into long silent sequences. In Hui jia (Back Home), his lens turns to memory and return, to a cyclical time revealed through his unmistakable contemplative gaze...
    READ

      And Other Monsters…

      They are among us, sometimes within us. Insidious, fascinating, revealing. These are the monsters wandering freely today at the Lido, starting with those explored in the highly anticipated Netflix series Il Mostro (Out of Competition – Series), centered on the investigation into the “Monster of Florence” and directed by Stefano Sollima, a skillful storyteller of crime and true crime. “Monstrous” too are the photographs of Ferdinando Scianna – for their cultural weight, evocative power, and ability to unveil the unspeakable and the shadow. Ferdinando Scianna – The Photographer of the Shadow (Out of Competition) is the tribute that the excellent Roberto Andò has dedicated to the great master from Bagheria, a leading author of Magnum Photos and inimitable poet of an ancestral and ritual Sicilian identity. Also in Competition, another monstrosity: the one that perhaps lurks in the personality of the protagonist of Elisa by Leonardo Di Costanzo, who is serving a sentence for killing her sister and burning her body. Starring in the new work by the author of the rightly acclaimed Ariaferma are Barbara Ronchi and Valeria Golino...
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        Great expectations

        The second week at the Lido shows no signs of slowing down: star-studded casts, bold productions, and highly anticipated works dominate today’s lineup. Leading the way is In the Hand of Dante, Julian Schnabel’s latest effort, which will receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award. A constellation of stars shines on this adaptation of Nick Tosches’s novel about the discovery of the original manuscript of the Divine Comedy: Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, John Malkovich, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Louis Cancelmi, Italians Franco Nero and Sabrina Impacciatore, plus the versatile Benjamin Clementine, apparently making a definitive break from music. Absent are Gal Gadot and Gerald Butler, criticized for ties to the Israeli government. The voice of Gaza is brought by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania with The Voice of Hind Rajab, backed by Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer...
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          Coolness

          A perfect balance between classics and new entries today at the Lido, with a female presence behind the camera that is anything but taken for granted. Kathryn Bigelow returns – the queen of tense, rigorous cinema and the first woman to win an Academy Award, in 2008, with The Hurt Locker, which premiered right here in Venice. With A House of Dynamite (Venice 82), Bigelow once again treads the line of American and global fears, telling the story of a race against time to stop a missile launched against the United States. The cast includes Idris Elba, Jason Clarke (who worked with Bigelow in Zero Dark Thirty), and Rebecca Ferguson. Also competing is François Ozon, with L’Étranger, adapted from Camus...
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            Stars-Anti-Stars

            You can slip on the red carpet, too. A reminder comes from Kim Novak, who today receives the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement: she once embodied stardom, only to later return it to sender by walking away from Hollywood. Hers was an unusual, interrupted career, one that marked the transition to a new kind of celebrity – less ethereal and more grounded, born of a cinema less tied to the Olympus of the Studios and more attuned to media spectacle. Novak’s ‘vertiginous’ life, explored in Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film Kim Novak’s Vertigo (Out of Competition), now passes the torch to the stars of today’s Hollywood – children of franchises and platforms, bearers of audiences...
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              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)...
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                About monsters

                More than a genre or a character, Frankenstein and its myth function almost as a cinematic hypertext: after Whale, Branagh, the Hammer films, and countless variations, Guillermo del Toro’s version competes this year (he won the Golden Lion in 2017 for The Shape of Water), with Oscar Isaac in the title role, Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, and Lars Mikkelsen. Lars is the older brother of Mads Mikkelsen (the extraordinary Bastarden, Venice 80), the prince of Danish actors, who we will also see out of competition in The Last Viking by Anders Thomas Jensen, a very dark comedy about two brothers hunting for a “forgotten” treasure...
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                  Julia’s choice

                  The first appearance at the Festival of a star like Julia Roberts – playing a university professor faced with a traumatic choice – marks the return to Venice of Luca Guadagnino. In After the Hunt (Out of Competition), he tackles the theme of sexual harassment from his very personal perspective. The cast also features Andrew Garfield. With Cover-Up, Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Golden Lion 2022) and Mark Obenhaus bring to the Lido a political thriller about the career of investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh...
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                    Shadows & Stars

                    A star-studded red carpet today. In Competition, Emma Stone reunites for the fourth time with Yorgos Lanthimos in Bugonia, a sci-fi dark comedy about very contemporary conspiracy paranoias, while George Clooney (joined by Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, Jim Broadbent and Alba Rohrwacher) plays an actor at a crossroads in Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach’s third time at Venice...
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                      A touch of Grace

                      Three years after winning the Grand Jury Prize with The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino returns to Venice, opening the Competition with the crepuscular, “presidential” love story La grazia. The film also marks his eighth collaboration with Toni Servillo, who by now can rightly be called Sorrentino’s alter ego. Starring alongside him is Roman actress Anna Ferzetti, recently seen in Ferzan Özpetek’s Diamonds...
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