Doc Corner: 'A la calle'

By Glenn Dunks

It’s funny, isn’t it? The subjects that become popular in non-fiction (and film more broadly, I suppose). The ongoing civil war in Syria was surely the most prominent subject of the 2010s while many other global conflicts remained relatively unexamined. This decade has begun with multiple films about Hong Kong. Venezuela is a country that has been discussed a lot in erroneous right-wing viral memes about the pitfalls of socialism, but strangely has made little impact on filmmakers beyond last year’s Oscar qualifying documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, which I reviewed here.

A la calle (In the Streets) embeds the viewer deeper into the fractious political situation than that 2020 title. Maxx Caicedo and Nelson G. Navarrete’s film gets up close and personal within the protests, the political turmoil and the familial anguish that has engulfed the Central American nation now for years.

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Venice Diary #07 - "The Last Duel" and the last movies of the fest

by Elisa Giudici

Michael Myers is back in "Halloween Kills"

Final day!  I hope you are ready because in this entry I am going to cover all the movies I saw in the last two days of the Venice Film Festival. Eight movies, from European arthouse cinema to Hollywood blockbusters, with some solid performances, an instant cult, and the only major disappointment of this incredible edition of the Mostra.

I'll try to keep it short because of the lack of sleep. An inside joke between my roommate and me this year was that the Filipino movie with its 208 minutes of length lasted longer than our typical night of sleep in the last two weeks...

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Review: Cambodia's Oscar Submission "White Building"

by Nathaniel R

I was hoping to catch at least one feature in Venice that would be selected by its home country as an Academy Award submission and I did! Kavich Neang's debut feature (after several shorts) White Building will represent Cambodia for the next Oscar race. I'm already hoping it makes the finals both because the Academy is far too stingy with Asian cinema and because it's very good.

White Building impresses immediately with an aerial shot over a tenement building that looked like a cross between a Rauschenberg and a Pollock, a messy collage of patchwork color and intricate city grime and electrical wiring of the world we’re about to descend into. The building is not white given years of decay but surely once was. We initially have fun with a trio of young men including Samnang (Piseth Chhun) as they share a motorbike around the city, trying to pick up girls...

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How Had I Never Seen... "Last Year at Marienbad"?

by Nick Taylor

Where to even begin with Last Year at Marienbad? In one sense, Alan Resnais’s film announces itself as a slippery, enigmatic object from its very first image. The resplendent music, equally ominous and inviting, mixes with the opening narration like they’re from the same source. Sacha Vernig’s silvery, elegant photography, gliding through the grounds of a baroque, ornate hotel and over dozens of handsome, impossibly rich guests, immediately communicates that Resnais has built a film both ephemeral and obsidian. The editing typically feeds into this gilded fluidity, save for when it disrupts those established rhythms as some other memory and breaks through an ongoing sequence like an intrusive thought to assert its own impression. The hotel itself looks glamorously assembled, yet every tree and painting have the same energy as the obelisk from 2001. The whole place feels inevitable without being easy to read.

And yet, Last Year at Marienbad isn’t obtuse about its mysteries...

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Nathaniel in Venice: "L'Evenement" and "Mother Lode" are gems.

Nathaniel reporting from Venice

This is my final review batch post from Venice. This weekend we'll talk Cambodia's Oscar submission (decided it deserved its own post!), and I'll sound off on "jury of one" stuff after the official winners have sunk in to underline my own 'best' of; You know how we love a list here at TFE and the neat thing about festivals is that everyone designs or ends up with their own program within the larger programs! And yes after all that (aka Monday) we'll be updating each Oscar chart. I am now safely ensconced back in NYC and thanks to Chris for holding down the fort on my travel day. As you read this I am undoubtedly snuggling with the boyfriend’s cat who is very clingy and filled with “missed you” purrs -- heaven! This post will probably contain no movies you’ve yet heard of but don’t run away! Festivals are also about discovering films from all over the world.

Here are the last four films I screened at Venice in ascending order of pleasure...

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