Venice, 8/31.

"At least one great movie can be guaranteed to emerge from the premieres at this year's Venice film festival," writes John Hooper in the Guardian. "Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves may not be new, but the version screened yesterday at the Lido had never been seen before. It was the result of six months of painstaking restoration and digitisation, which have saved for future generations of moviegoers a masterpiece that was in danger of being lost."

Jean-Michel Frodon for Cahiers du cinéma on The Burning Plain and Jerichow: "In both films, you get the feeling of a lack of sincerity and spontaneity, you see TV fiction conformity which the screenplay tries to palliate by uselessly complicating the story, and the directing and acting are constantly overdone in each gesture, each emotion. We will refrain from attempting to draw a broader theory about this similarity, either regarding the contemporary world or current cinema." Also: "Zhang Ke Jia is present three-fold on the lagoon this year, even if he has no feature film in competition at Mostra."

"The challenging work of Paolo Benvenuti has never been so beautiful." For Cineuropa, Gabriele Barcaro reviews Puccini and the Young Girl, while Natasha Senjanovic reports on the screening of Landscape No 2: "Part historical intrigue, part thriller, part sexfest, in the film, which [Vinko] Möderndorfer adapted from his eponymous novel, electrical appliance repairman Polde (Janez Hočevar) and his young assistant Sergej (Marko Mandić) break into a house of a retired general (Janez Škof) to steal a painting of one the mass graves of the many massacres of Nazi collaborators that took place in Slovenia at the end of WWII."

"In Belgian director Patrice Toye's Nowhere Man, an apparently comfortably off and happily married man sees a raging house fire and on the spur of the moment walks into it in order to fake his death and disappear. The rest of film details the many ways he regrets that decision." Countering Ray Bennett's generally positive review in the Hollywood Reporter would be Eddie Cockrell's for Variety.

Arifa Akbar reports in the Independent on reactions to Valentino: The Last Emperor - from its subjects. More from Geoffrey Macnab (Guardian), David Gritten (Telegraph) and Alissa Simon (Variety).

Damon Wise and Nick James round up "Venice gossip" for the Observer.

The Guardian and the Telegraph have got special sections going.

Posted by dwhudson at August 31, 2008 2:31 PM