Is Venice Film Festival’s 2023 line-up the strongest of all time?
Here are the 11 movies everyone will be talking about on the Lido this month, from Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein biopic to Woody Allen’s latest romance.
There may be worries that the actors’ and writers’ strikes could torpedo the Venice Film Festival. Well, without wishing to jinx it, the line-up looks tasty. There are movies, in competition and out, from big Hollywood hitters (David Fincher, Michael Mann), award-winning stylists (Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater) and brilliant filmmakers at opposite ends of their careers – Bradley Cooper brings his second feature as director, while William Friedkin’s offering will no doubt celebrate his legacy following his death this week. That’s without mentioning a double helping of high controversy with the latest from Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. This edition of the festival, which runs from August 30 to September 9, could be the best – and juiciest – in years.
Maestro
Bradley Cooper didn’t do too badly on his first outing as director. A Star Is Born was nominated for eight Oscars, winning one for Lady Gaga’s song Shallow. Cooper stays in the realm of music for his follow-up, a biopic of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in which he plays the title role, having written the screenplay with Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post, First Man). Co-starring Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, the American-Costa Rican actor and activist who became Bernstein’s wife, and produced by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Todd Phillips, this one has “prestige picture” written all over it.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Wes Anderson wins this year’s “busy boy of film festivals” award, after following up his spectacular Cannes splash Asteroid City with this starry Venice entry, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, featuring Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and Benedict Cumberbatch. The Netflix-funded, London-shot project is actually a short film, with a running time of 37 minutes. Anderson may have been inspired by his Cannes colleague Pedro Almodovar, who briefly became the talk of that festival with his even shorter, 31-minute western Strange Way of Life. Anderson last tackled Dahl in 2009 with a fabulously off-kilter adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox. The bar has been set.
Ferrari
Not content with portraying one Italian icon, Maurizio Gucci in House of Gucci, Adam Driver is deploying his Roman nose and raven locks to play Enzo Ferrari, who rose from racing driver to entrepreneur to founder of the most famous motor-racing team of them all. The latest cerebral study of masculinity from Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral) even has some women in it: Penelope Cruz plays Ferrari’s wife, Laura; Shailene Woodley his mistress, Lina Lardi.
Priscilla
With memories still strong of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis – Austin Butler is probably still talking in a Memphis drawl – Sofia Coppola directs a film about the King’s wife, Priscilla Beaulieu. Written by Coppola (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette) and Beaulieu, it stars Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), who plays Priscilla between the ages of 15 and 27, and Jacob Elordi (The Kissing Booth, Euphoria), as Elvis. “I was just so interested in Priscilla’s story and her perspective on what it all felt like to grow up as a teenager in Graceland,” Coppola said recently. “She was going through all the stages of young womanhood in such an amplified world – kind of similar to Marie Antoinette.”
The Palace
The last time “controversial film director” Roman Polanski brought a film to Venice it was An Officer and a Spy in 2019. That movie duly won the festival’s Grand Jury prize, but it was below-par Polanski, and seemed far too self-serving by focusing on a historical protagonist, Alfred Dreyfus, who was accused of treason and outrageously ostracised by the establishment when he was blameless all along. Ring any bells? The Palace, co-written by Polanski’s Knife in Water collaborator Jerzy Skolimowski, promises to be a much meatier affair. It’s described as a “black comedy” set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, in the Gstaad Palace, a luxurious Swiss hotel, where chaos ensues. This year’s Triangle of Sadness?
Coup de Chance
“In for a penny in for a pound” seems to be the guiding logic behind Venice’s selection of Polanski and Woody Allen, two lightning rods for controversy, in showy out-of-competition slots. Coup de Chance is Allen’s 50th project, his first in French, and has been described in early buzz as “his best film in years”. Allen calls it “a contemporary story of romance, passion and violence set in contemporary Paris”. The drama, about a seemingly perfect Parisian couple who descend into infidelity and crime, sounds very Match Point, and even more like Claire Denis’s recent Both Sides of the Blade. Allen is scheduled to make a rare appearance at the festival in support of the film. Expect applause and protest.
The Killer
Michael Fassbender plays an assassin who has a mental crisis in David Fincher’s adaptation of the French graphic novel series of the same name. Let’s hope it’s as good as Fincher’s other portraits of killers – Seven, Zodiac, Mindhunter – and much better than Fassbender’s Assassin’s Creed. With Tilda Swinton among the supporting cast and a script by Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, the signs are promising.
Hit Man
The cheery assassin theme continues as Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise) directs a drama about an undercover Houston policeman who poses as a hitman and arrests those who try to hire him. Glen Powell, the cocksure Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick, plays the cop and with Linklater writes the script, which is adapted from a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth, who co-wrote Linklater’s Bernie in 2011. Adria Arjona Torres plays a woman whom Powell’s character has to protect, which doesn’t sound like much of a role but surely will be in the hands of the Puerto Rican actor, who won rave notices as the resistance fighter Bix Caleen in Andor.
Origin
Ava DuVernay made a huge impact in 2014 with her Oscar-nominated Martin Luther King Jr drama Selma. Since then, however, she has made one expensive sci-fi flop, A Wrinkle in Time, and has become, instead, a director of award-winning television, such as When They See Us. This Netflix-funded project marks her return to high-profile feature drama, and is a fictional adaptation, written by DuVernay, of the nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The subject is an unacknowledged “caste system” that reinforces prejudice and oppression in contemporary societies. The acting line-up includes Aunjanue Ellis, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in King Richard, Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation and Donna Mills from the soap classic Knots Landing.
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
William Friedkin was one of Hollywood’s most revered directors, thanks in large part to his 1970s double whammy of The French Connection and The Exorcist. Friedkin hadn’t made a fiction film since Killer Joe in 2011, but he returned to the director’s chair at the age of 87 to adapt The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, the story of a power struggle aboard an American warship. Based on Herman Wouk’s courtroom play of the same name, which he adapted from his Pulitzer prize-winning 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, it moves the action from the Pacific during the Second World War to the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, in the present day. Jake Lacy (The White Lotus) plays Lieutenant Steve Maryk, who takes control of the vessel, believing that its commander, Phillip Francis Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), is psychologically unstable.
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos, the Oscar-nominated Greek director of The Favourite, has been forced by the actors’ strike to postpone the autumn release of Poor Things, his latest period romp, by three months until early December. It’s a measure of the festival’s vital importance as an awards-season launch pad that Lanthimos is nonetheless bringing it to Venice. There will begin the buzz for a 19th-century Frankenstein remix about a woman (Emma Stone) who is brought back from the dead by a crazed scientist (Willem Dafoe) and is determined to drain the marrow out of life. And the Oscar goes to …
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