Venice, 8/28.

"Cold Lunch - which opened Critics' Week at the Venice Film Festival - is the remarkable feature debut by Norway's Eva Sørhaug," writes Camillo de Marco. "Seemingly harsh (no director has ever dared inflict such a horrible end on a newborn baby, attacked by fierce Hitchcock-like gulls) but tinged with human empathy, Cold Lunch closes with a final chapter entitled 'Paradise regained.' Perhaps it's possible to emerge from Hell but it's difficult to escape from loneliness. Northern European films thus continue to tackle social issues with flashes of paradox."

Also in Cineuropa, Gabriele Barcaro on PA-RA-DA, which has opened the Horizons sections and is "directed by Marco Pontecorvo (son of Gillo, legendary director of The Battle of Algiers), the acclaimed DoP known for his work with masters Francesco Rosi (The Truce) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Eros). Shot during nine weeks in Bucharest - with a spell in Paris, in the shadow of Beaubourg - the film retraces the human (and humanitarian) adventure of Franco-Algerian clown Miloud Oukili. In the early 1990s, the latter - who was 20 at the time - devoted himself to saving children and street urchins in the Romanian capital from a life of drugs and prostitution."

In Screen Daily:

• Lee Marshall on Valentino: The Last Emperor: "Vanity Fair journalist [Matt] Tyrnauer - who claims that he reached for the camera when he realised words did not do Valentino justice - may have begun with the idea of capturing the twilight years of an old-fashioned stylist in a world increasingly governed by market pressures. But somewhere along the way the film turns into an understated love story, charting the mutual dependency and tensions in Valentino's 45-year association with Giancarlo Giammetti, his sometime boyfriend and constant life and business partner."

• Also: "Immersed in the gritty multicultural realities and historical short-circuits of life in the northern suburb of Finsbury Park, [Sallie Aprahamian's debut feature] Broken Lines is one of the rare films that nails the odd flavour of contemporary London."

• Dan Fainaru is underwhelmed by Nowhere Man, "Patrice Toye's flawed update of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger."

"[T]hose who stay the full Venice course will be depending heavily on [festival director Marco] Mueller's judgement, for he has assembled a programme of films from all over the world by people that very few have ever heard of," writes Peter Popham in an overview for the Independent.

Jean-Michel Frodon in a first diary entry from Venice for Cahiers du cinéma: "Marco Müller, who has proven his capacity to radicalize programming demands at the head of a first-class festival over the previous years, seems to have gambled this time on the creation of a dynamic that travels the contemporary world of the cinema off the beaten path, on trails once known but now erased (the return of grand masters such as [Werner] Schroeter, [Amir] Naderi or [Haile] Gerima), the transferal of most of the confirmed auteurs to non-competition categories (Varda, Kiarostami, Claire Denis and others), as well as many newcomers or those accustomed to second ranks."

"Venice isn't sinking, but that hasn't stopped some Lido regulars from jumping ship," write Nick Vivarelli and Ali Jaafar in Variety. "A number of sales agents, PR companies and journos who would usually be seen on the hotel terraces of the Excelsior and Des Bains talking shop and drinking bellinis have given this year's fest a miss with many opting instead for a one-stop Toronto trek."

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2008 1:39 PM