Venice Film Festival 2025: The Smashing Machine, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, The Testament by Ann Lee, father Sister Brother Sister | Festivals and awards

The piece of the film of the 60s of Jean-Luc “Pierrot Le Fou” where Belmondo asks the filmmaker Maverick Sam Fuller, playing himself, to give him a precise definition of the cinema was cited in a thumb of his life. So, for preface with a reagan paraphrase, I start again. Quoth Fuller: “The film is like a battlefield … It is love, hatred, action, violence, death. In a word, emotions! ” The four films that I will talk about here could not be more disparate at a superficial level. But they are all finally on emotions. The emotions were twisted, the emotions turned around again and again, the emotions that are unleashed and the emotions are almost buried.

Benny Safdie “The Break Machine”, “ With Dwayne Johnson in the role of Mark Kerr, a real pioneer in the now omnipresent sport of mixed martial arts, is an often ecstatic portrait of a man addicted to victory – who then becomes addicted to more immediately and mentally dangerous things. The film treats only a few years in Kerr’s life, first when it goes from victory to victory, climbing in the hierarchy of its sport, which is international – many of its fights are in Japan – but not organized in a way as conglomerate as it has become.

His greatest allies are his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), who walks in tight jeans and a push-up bra under his bonded sweaters, and is his cheeky cheerful, and his colleague and possible Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader). “Winning is the biggest feeling in the world,” said Mark at first, the blood always on his teeth after his emergence from the ring with another victory.

So what’s going on when you finally lose? The film is the most tense and the most overwhelming when it shows Mark’s crisis of confidence and the road on which it puts it. If there was a doubt that Johnson, who came from the world of professional struggle, is a really great screen, this image will dissipate them for good. (And yes, you will read other columnists mentioning a little golden man – I can see the old rock get it too.)

“Vertigo by Kim Novak” is also a portrait, this real novak, now 92, by Alexandre O. Philipe (“78/52”). The screen icon, performed with rare beauty and almost frightening vulnerability, abandoned Hollywood decades ago and keep her own advice in a spectacular house (two anterior burned on the ground) where she painted almost obsessively.

Despite the title, this film deals with the entire Novak career; The films surrounding “Vertigo” are supports. For an obsessive Novak like me, it gives some disappointments. When Richard Quine appears, she says: “Of course, I fell in love with him” and that’s about it. We see clips of Quine / Novak MasterWorks as “ineffable foreigners when we meet” and “Bell, Book and Candle”, but not much more. But the film is called “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” and among others, it is pleasant to hear one of the greatest of “Hitchcock blondes” say complementary things on the master of suspense. The dominant personality of the film is hers, and it is fascinating.

“Ann Lee’s will”, “ Directed by Mona Fastvold and with Amanda Seyfried in a frightening dedication performance, is also a real story, of a founder of the Shaker movement – a sect of the Quakers, so named because while speaking to the Lord, they, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, shake– who faced a painful persecution in America in the era of revolutionary war. Fastvold has co-written the scenario with Brady Corbet, his partner and collaborator since the first decade of the 2000s.

“Ann Lee” has some affinities with “The Brutalist” by Corbet (also co-written by Fastvold). He is shot on the film. It’s very strong. And it is a convincing charismatic leader with very defined ideas and little concern about their alienation for others. Oh, it’s also a musical. (What “the brutalist” was not.))

The song is part of Shaker Practice in general so that you do not quite obtain that at the beginning, but, yes, in this Diegetic, the characters will walk and they will repercussions in the song as in “The Sound of Music”, but not quite. Seyfried makes the fervor of Ann Lee Palpable. Here, faith is largely a question of emotion and demonstrating emotion.

Finally, the new photo of Jim Jarmusch, “Father mother sister brother” is, for the first two sections of its three -story construction, a meticulous look at repressed emotions, of families who can only be clumsy houses. The first story, with Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik who made a visit to the north of the supposed that dad does not, Tom Waits, has a touch of O. Henry. The second, with Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett as too hip sisters and sadly square, respectively, finds them not connecting with Charlotte buttoned mom waste. Only the sequence of the “Brother Sister”, with Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as twins exploring the excavations of their parents who died in Paris, has his relatives who show heat with each other.

After the relative crowd realizes “Paterson” (2016; melancholy, slowly comic) and “The Dead Don Die” (2019; the horror of the living dead filtered through a cultural manifesto “Off My Lawn”), this sees Jarmusch in difficult mode. It is nevertheless enriching.