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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First Oscar Predictions of the Year - Complete!

Whew. That took longer than expected but you can now see all of the "April Foolish" first-round predictions for this Oscar year, albeit compiled in May & June and delivered to you in early July. Since the first wave of 20 categories takes so long to compile (updates are easier) we should note up front that James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg, another film centered on the Nuremberg Trials, was scheduled for a November 2025 release after the weeks of research for these charts so it is not yet included.  That said we can hardly claim it a certainty as a competitor. World War II is no longer automatic "Bait" for voters, Vanderbilt is not (yet) an Oscar player and though the cast has four previously nominated actors none are the sort that Oscar voters ALWAYS watch regardless. Anyway, we'll save it for the next up date.

What follows are a dozen key questions were asking ourselves in July about the upcoming competition before things really heat up during the fall film festivals. We've love to hear your thoughts on these 12 questions...

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