ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 (AUG. 28 - SEPT. 7, 2024) . SOURCE (Jessica Kiang, VARIETY)
Buzz suggested the ambitious and reportedly magnificent 3 1/2 - hour Brady Corbet fictional bio-epic THE BRUTALIST (starring Adrian Brody, Guy Pearce) would get the Golden Lion from the jury chaired by Isabelle Huppert, but it went to the milder Almodóvar film, his first in English, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, instead.
Brady Corbet got Best Director for THE BRUTALIST, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR Best Picture, and Best Actor went to Nicole Kidman for her lead role in BABYGIRL directed by Dutch actor-filmmaker Halina Reijn. (Kidman could not attend the awards; she had to rush home after the passing of her mother.) Romanian director Bogdan Mureşanu won the award in the Horizons sidebar for THE NEW YEAR THAT NEVER CAME, a drama about resistance and revolution. Scandar Copti's HAPPY HOLIDAYS took the Horizons Best Screenplay award. Best Director, Best Actress and Best Debut Feature went to Sarah Friedland's film about aging, FAMILIAR TOUCH.
Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics are in contention at Toronto to acquire Brady Corbet's bio-epic, which is about a fictitious Hungarian Jewish escapee from Europe called László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, who becomes an important architect in America. Peter Bradshaw in his Venice GUARDIAN review gave it five stars and said it "stuns and electrifies." Bradshaw wrote:The Oscar Expert's 'Brother Bro' (in a video review of THE BRUTALIST filmed at TIIF) said it is "thrilling to behold" and that he would go back and rewatch its three and a half hours "in a heartbeat." They are sure it will get multiple nominations, including score, and say Brody is brilliant. (They are considering other titles, Sean Baker's ANORA and Jacques Audiard's EMELIA PEREZ.) Bradshaw wrote that THE BRUTALIST " is about antisemitism and the capitalist adventure, about the unassimilated immigrant experience and about American can-do naivety versus the tragic, painful depths of European culture and expertise."This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.
VERMIGLIO
The Venice Grand Jury Prize went to an Italian war film by Maura Delpero, VERMIGLIO.
The VARIETY review calls it “a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps” and Jury president Isabelle Huppert expressed her own fervent admiration, at the post-award press conference, for its slanted take as a war story without any war in it. “It’s like you have a great offscreen subject matter, but you get to see what’s going on only through a small eye, through the latch of a door,” she said - Jessicaa Kiang.Bradshaw on APRIL (four stars), in which he says the Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili "comes ito her own" with what he calls a "haunting abortion drama": "Shocking violence is tempered by strange, silent sequences in a sophomore feature about an obstetrician under investigation, which has echoes of THE PIANO TEACHER," Bradshaw writes. I reviewed Kulumbegashvili's first film BEGINNING as part of the 2020 Virtual New York Film Festival.VERMIGLIO was only outdone in breathtaking formalist austerity by Special Jury Prize-winner Déa Kulumbegashvili’s extraordinary APRIL, which Variety’s Guy Lodge called “an uncompromising, intensely felt panorama of female identities, agencies and desires under attack — by the patriarchy, certainly, but sometimes by the intangible cruelties of nature itself." - Kiang.
GEORGIAN DIRECTOR DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI'S APRIL
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