Venice: "Scarlet" is an ambitious misstep

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

With Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda takes his boldest swing yet, and lands his weakest film. Even compared with his early commercial outings (Digimon, One Piece), this latest work is a misfire: ambitious in scope, but undone by confused storytelling and uneven execution. The premise fuses Shakespeare and isekai. The film opens in 16th-century Denmark, where Scarlet, daughter of a murdered king, vows revenge against her uncle Claudius, who has seized the throne. Before she can act, Claudius poisons her, and the story pivots into the logic of isekai: Scarlet awakens in a strange afterlife populated by dragons and people from different eras, suspended in time. Death here is permanent, raising the stakes but also exposing how little sense the world makes...

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Venice: Luca Guadagnino's discomfiting "After the Hunt"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

Ayo Edebiri makes an accusation in "AFTER THE HUNT"

Luca Guadagnino has never shied away from controversy, and After the Hunt confirms he’s still unafraid to provoke. A story of sexual assault on a university campus becomes the lens through which he examines the messy, ongoing intergenerational debate around #MeToo, forcing audiences to wrestle with discomfort rather than dodge it.

The film begins with Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri), a wealthy Black queer student, under the mentorship of Alma (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor fighting for tenure with the support of her husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg). Across campus is Hank (Andrew Garfield), an assistant professor from a modest background, also seeking to cement his place in academia. When Maggie accuses Hank of harassment, the film pivots on questions of belief, loyalty, and moral authority—questions shaped by race, class, gender, and generational expectation...

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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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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: Paolo Sorrentino returns with "The Grace"

by Elisa Giudici, reporting once again from Venice 

Toni Servillo stars in "The Grace". Image credit: Andrea Pirrello

For a director who has already devoted two films to real and controversial Italian prime ministers (Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi), two series to fictional popes, and one feature to the president of the Italian Republic (a largely ceremonial role compared to its French or American counterparts), La Grazia (The Grace) plays like a natural progression. Yet it still manages to surprise. What's particularly astonishing is how Sorrentino shot a €13 million production in some of Italy’s most symbolic locations for months—La Scala included, packed with extras—without a single leak...

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