Venice Film Festival 2018 – all our coverage

Venice 2018 midway round-up: a quadruple whammy

New films from Yorgos Lanthimos, Alfonso Cuarón, Jacques Audiard and László Nemes are the highlights so far at a sterling – if very masculine – Venice Film Festival, reports Nick James.
Tuesday 4 September 2018

Venice Film Festival awards 2018: read our reviews of the winning films

Alfonso Cuáron won the Golden Lion for his beautifully distilled Roma, with the runner’s up prize going to Jennifer Kent’s colonial horror The Nightingale, and westerns from Jacques Audiard and the Coen brothers also amongst the winners.

Virtual voyages at Venice Film Festival 2018

A well-curated selection of immersive adventures at this year’s festival showed how far the technology and the talent has come, but also how different these experiences are from cinema, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Thursday 20 September 2018

Kado (A Gift) and the short-film highlights of the 2018 Venice Film Festival

Aditya Ahmad’s prize-winner is an intriguing and refreshingly joyful exploration of gender identity – and not the only great find at the 2018 festival, writes Laurence Boyce.
Thursday 20 September 2018

The Nightingale first look: a bloody song of freedom from Australia’s colonial violators

Jennifer Kent’s furious follow-up to The Babadook lays bare her country’s original sins, with an Irish convict settler and Tasmanian guide finding common cause in flight from their monstrous British oppressors, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Monday 10 September 2018

Vox Lux first look: a roiling satire of post-traumatic popsploitation

Raffey Cassidy and Natalie Portman play a mass-shooting survivor turned pop puppet coming apart at the seams in Brady Corbet’s turbo-burlesque, in which fame is just another form of assault, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Friday 7 September 2018

22 July first look: is Paul Greengrass’s Utøya docudrama a pyrrhic re-enactment?

Paul Greengrass’s dramatisation in the round of Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 killing spree is deftly impactful, but leaves Nick James with qualms about its moral value.
Friday 7 September 2018

Our Time first look: Carlos Reygadas gores masculinity on its own horns

Carlos Reygadas lays bare masculine pathology with a typically bravura and extraordinarily unsparing dissection of love and marriage, casting himself and his spouse Natalia López at the heart of the piece, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Thursday 6 September 2018

El Pepe, a Supreme Life first look: Emir Kusturica reveals a president in repose

José Mujica was no ordinary politician, and Emir Kusturica’s portrait of the retured former Uruguayan president is an impressively intimate study of a great man, writes Elisabet Cabeza.
Thursday 6 September 2018

American Dharma first look: Errol Morris gives Steve Bannon the whip hand

Errol Morris concedes the ring leader of the alt.right a softly satirical showcase that’s unlikely to change any minds, says Jonathan Romney.
Thursday 6 September 2018

The Sisters Brothers first look: Jacques Audiard takes a delightful detour from the western trail

Jacques Audiard’s take on the deathless genre is a mournfully comic yarn that builds at its own loose pace to a surprisingly profound conclusion, writes Jessica Kiang.
Tuesday 4 September 2018

Sunset first look: a belle epoque a hatstand of a movie

László Nemes’s overblown melodrama tracks Juli Jakab’s would-be hatter through a lavishly recreated late-imperial Budapest, a florid procession of headwear and a madly unfocussed plot, writes Jessica Kiang.
Tuesday 4 September 2018

A Star Is Born first look: Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga revive a Hollywood tale for the YouTube age

Bradley Cooper’s accomplished debut stars Lady Gaga as an aspiring singer looking for a break, while the director plays the sozzled rocker who gives her a hand up, writes Paul O’Callaghan.
Tuesday 4 September 2018

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs first look: a six-pack of western rambles by way of the Coen brothers

Joel and Ethan Coen explore how the west was spun in an eclectic portmanteau that covers the American cinema’s foundational genre territory with gimlet-eyed glee, says Michael Leader.
Monday 3 September 2018

Non-Fiction first look: Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet talk out publishing’s digital takeover

Set in the analogue milieu of a digitally discombobulated Parisian media couple, Olivier Assayas’s latest pulse-of-the-times drama falls back to old-school 16mm and a lot of old-hat debates over the page versus the pixel, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Monday 3 September 2018

The Favourite first look: Yorgos Lanthimos courts controversy but cops out

Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone play pointless power games in Yorgos Lanthimos’s baroque and profane regal romp that runs out of steam far too soon, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Friday 31 August 2018

Roma first look: the film of Alfonso Cuarón’s career

A turbulent year in Mexico City is seen through the eyes of a young woman and the family she works for, in this very personal film that reframes the director’s own childhood memories, writes Beth Webb.
Friday 31 August 2018

First Man first look: an elegant, intimate epic about the Moon landing

Ryan Gosling delivers the most mature performance of his career as Neil Armstrong in Damien Chazelle’s fourth feature, a film that manages to make the iconic Moon landing story feel fresh again, writes John Bleasdale. 
Wednesday 29 August 2018