Venice Film Festival 2025: Broken English, The Wizard of the Kremlin, No other choice, in Dante’s hand | Festivals and awards

I left the 82^ND Biennale of the exhausted film with gratitude. And to be honest, my gratitude and my exhaustion were almost equal. When I was in my twenties, seeing three or four or even five films in a day seemed something that I could do while keeping a spring in my step all the time. In the sixties, not so much. I deposited a dispatch / whirlwind for this website every two days, and while I was suitable for going home, I realized that I completely have fun writing what should have been the number two. Oops.

It was “No Other Choice” by Park Chan Wook, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” by Olivier Assayas and “Broken English”, co -edit by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. I will start with the image of which I had the most mixed feelings, “Broken English,” An adventurous documentary on the big singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, made with her full cooperation. This means that she signed the unusual approach to the film. It is not a sequence of conventional linear archives and a treatment speaking at the head of Faithfull. Rather, he puts the faithful then alive (which passed in January of this year), in poor health and connected to an oxygen supply, while she tells his life to the actor George Mackay, who plays a representative of “the institute not to forget”, whose efforts are supervised by a sorting control room by a supervisor played by Tilda Swinton.

Faithfull is iconoclastically noisy while she bristles on her notion (undoubtedly inaccurate) that she is best known in the world as “the ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger”. Her formidable discography is a vital contradiction with this idea, but I don’t want to chat with her, and I can’t, as she passed earlier this year. Regardless of what you do with the vanity of the film, the presence of Faithfull bristles throughout and makes the business convincing. She did everything she touched convincing.

“The Kremlin sorcerer” Finds Assayas, after the personal tragedy Personal Covid “Sushed Time”, once again in international geopolitical mode (as in “Wasp Network” and “Carlos”), adapting an Italian novel on a right adviser to Vladimir Putin. Paul Dano embodies Baranov, a gentle but supremely confident figure that agrees with an interview with Jeffrey Wright’s journalist. Speaking like you could imagine a young John Houseman to ring, Baranov tells his years to the team of Vladimir Putin, who was considered an unlikely and unsuitable candidate for the head of Russia; As we know, the ex-KGB has redone his country in his own favorite image.

Many of my critical colleagues found the film so discreet that it was practically sleepy. I thought that the euphemism made things discreetly terrifying. I also appreciated the sneaky tribute from Assayas to Powell and “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” by Powell and Pressburger “in her presentation by Alicia Vikander in three distinct modes of appearance in the role of the possible wife of Beranov.

Park “No other choice” is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel in 1997 “The Axis”, in which a long -standing director of a paper business is relieved of his job and is then plotted to kill potential candidates for his position. A biting satire of American employment mores, it makes a comfortable adjustment with the middle of South Korea – this economic miracle of the country, which began with its accommodation of the 1988 Olympic Games, created a concomitant culture of obeying companies that could use a good spanking, no doubt. In what is in fact the second adaptation of the book (the director “Z” Costa-Gavras filmed one in 2005), Park has the head of the man Lee Byun (star of many notable Korean films but better known in the United States for the series “Squid Game”) milk a lot of Humor Slapstick out of his first affection for assassinations. Although this does not have the enigmatic power of Park’s “decision to leave” in 2022, he has more than a powerful bite in his tail.

The last photo I saw was an evening projection of Julian Schnabel “In Dante’s hand”, “ Based on a novel by Nick Tosches. I have been a devotee from Tosche since reading his musical criticism The voice of the village Before you start to contribute to rock journalism to this document. As was the case with Lester Bangs, he was one of those guys you could admire but never dares to imitate, so precise and hard won was his profane, poetic and hilarious style. I loved his biography of Dean Martin Dino And he made him sign my copy during a book party held at the East Village Fanzine Shop See / Hearing, where they served Genesee Cream Ale and I discussed my favorite guitarist Robert Quine, a friend of Tosche ‘. Good times. A few years later, I was responsible for reviewing the novel by Tosches de Tosches for The Washington Post Book World And was rather mortified to discover that it was not very good. Indeed, I always consider him as the least of the fiction of Tosches – that God, four years before his death, he published what I consider his best novel, Under TiberiusA consideration of Jesue Christ as a crook. Check it!

The film maintains the meta -fictional vanity of the book, in which Tosche is a main character who has approached a mysterious consortium pretending to have the original manuscript of Dante’s Divine comedy. He alternates with scenes from the life of the poet. These are the parts of the novel that I considered valid. I thought that the meta -fictional things, I thought, was the realization of this genre which would not have taxed the imagination of a mega winner of medium lottery. This applies to the film, in a way.

With Oscar Isaac doing conscientious work in the double role of Dante and Nick, Schnabel chooses to impregnate his version of Tosches with several of his own qualities. While the script for Tosches’s novel ends with the author living alone in a reasonably unimaginable wealth, in the film Nick shares her good fortune with a woman who is about to carry her child. This is probably because Schnabel himself has a pronounced penchant to permeate women and then raise their offspring; He has seven children, most of whom work with / for him. Come on, Julian. But the idea is rather funny if you even knew slightly Tosche, a self -proclaimed “skirt hunter” which was also a bit lonely. If you have Nick Tosches’s readerConsult the passages that Tosche chooses to publish from his own newspaper, then try Carré with Isaac with lunar eyes on Gal Gadot. Yes, Gal Gadot. The casting, now that we get there, is what you call a doozy, also including Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler and Franco Nero, because why not. Going out on the night of Venice and in return to the hotel to pack up, I was wondering if I had hallucinated the whole film. I was not the only one.