Venice: The Rock and Emily Blunt in "The Smashing Machine"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

The Rock stars in "THE SMASHING MACHINE"

The Smashing Machine feels familiar even if you’ve never heard of Mark Kerr. That’s part of its strength: Benny Safdie takes the real story of a man who helped shape mixed martial arts and reframes it with a clarity that cuts through the clichés of the sports genre. In the late 1990s Kerr and his friend Mark Coleman (here played by MMA veteran Ryan Bader) were pioneers, carrying American fighters to Japan’s Pride tournaments; huge, almost gladiatorial events that revealed how far the sport could go. Those who came after turned that groundwork into global stardom and multimillion-dollar careers. Kerr and Coleman, instead, were the trailblazers whose brilliance was real but whose recognition was fleeting.

This film wants to correct that. At his peak, between 1997 and 2000, Kerr was an undefeated champion. Then came the spiral: defeats, opioids, psychological collapse. But what could have been yet another story of decline is reshaped here into something richer...

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International Oscar Update: A Boat Load of Official Contenders

by Nathaniel R

We have now reached the season where it's hard to keep up with all the updates and it will keep on being this way throughout September. Nevertheless I'm at least keeping the submission charts up to date. At this writing twenty-five countries have selected their official contender for Best International Feature Film. We can safely expect another 60 or so countries to submit by the deadline of October 1. In terms of participation the category peaked at 97 contenders back in 2020 and has been dipping slightly since and has returned to 2010 numbers (the high 80s).

After the jump the "new" announcements since our last update are in bold and I've highlighted one new contender per chart for fun...

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Venice: Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice...

NO OTHER CHOICE

In 2005, Costa-Gavras adapted Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax into Le Couperet, a stark meditation on the cruelty and dehumanization embedded in the modern workplace. Nearly two decades later, Park Chan-wook returns to the same source material with No Other Choice, dedicating the film to Gavras, and in doing so asserting himself once more as one of the most audacious and precise filmmakers alive. Here is a director capable of merging Korean cultural specificity with an elegance of cinematic form so distinctive that only he could achieve it—where narrative, composition, and moral complexity are intertwined to such an extent that a single viewing can scarcely contain their richness.

At the center is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), head of a company producing security and specialty papers, who finds himself suddenly dispossessed of the only role matching his qualifications...

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Venice: Noah Baumbach's Awards Hopeful "Jay Kelly"

by Elisa Giudici

George Clooney and Adam Sandler in "JAY KELLY" Photo by Peter Mountain © 2025 Netflix ,Inc

When Noah Baumbach presented White Noise on Netflix, expectations were sky-high: a star-studded cast, major ambitions, and the aura of a filmmaker fresh off Marriage Story. The film’s muted reception, however, seemed to threaten his trajectory, leaving a lingering sense of failure. Jay Kelly, his latest feature, feels like a response to that setback. Not so much a radical departure, but a project with a clearer aim: to offer George Clooney and Adam Sandler two roles carefully designed for visibility, prestige, and perhaps even awards...

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Venice: Yorgos Lanthimos Returns with "Bugonia"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

The cage match comes first: a ruthless CEO named Michelle (Emma Stone) wakes in a crumbling suburban house, bound and outmaneuvered by Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a low-wage packer with a ponytail, a backyard of beehives, and a head full of conspiracy podcasts. With help from his guileless cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy gives her three days to lead them to her spaceship before a looming lunar eclipse. Money won’t tempt him; sex won’t distract him—he and Don have even resorted to DIY chemical castration to blunt any “alien” manipulation. The stakes sound absurd, but the menace is real: in Lanthimos’s world, delusion can be methodical, rage can be lucid, and the invisible can prove terrifyingly effective...

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