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. Also vying for the Lion is Orphan by Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes (Son of Saul), an evocation of family memories following the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising.
In Orizzonti, Benedetta Porcaroli, alongside Chris Pine and Eva Robin’s, stars as the misfit heroine of The Kidnapping of Arabella, Carolina Cavalli’s second feature (after Amanda, Venice 2022), while Slovak director Tereza Nvotová presents Father, a true story reflecting on the thin line between tragedy, chance and guilt. Tragedy also stirs in the Critics’ Week with Stereo Girls (Les immortelles) by French filmmaker Caroline Deruas Peano, with Emmanuelle Béart, and in La Gioia (Venice Days) by Nicolangelo Gelormini, featuring Valeria Golino and Jasmine Trinca in the tormented, forbidden bond between a frustrated teacher and a teenage prostitute.
Venice Classics highlights include Don McGuire’s gem The Delicate Delinquent (1957), with Jerry Lewis at his peak, and Iranian director Bahram Beyzai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989), about a boy orphaned by the Iran–Iraq war, along with Megadoc, Mike Figgis’s chronicle of Coppola’s Megalopolis. Finally, echoing his Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Werner Herzog unveils his new “fantasy doc” Ghost Elephants: anything but conventional.