Word: film
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...festival has another mission, beyond showing left-leaning films to left-leaning audiences. It wants the world to know that Hollywood's Oscar season does not begin at the much larger Toronto Film Festival, held a week later than Venice. It starts right here. Clooney's Goats, a kooky satire about U.S. soldiers in Iraq who've been trained as "psychic spies," is unlikely to get much attention at the Academy Awards; nor is Cage's work in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, though the star's intensity as a ? cop deranged by painkillers...
...with rapture, applauding Chávez's more fiery statements and booing whenever George W. Bush came on the screen. At the end, el Presidente strode into the audience, giving an impromptu five-minute speech and shaking the hand of anyone within reach. (See pictures from the 65th Venice Film Festival...
...impact of Lebanon should reverberate beyond the Adriatic. Maoz served in the 1982 conflict, and says it took him this long to turn his haunted recollections into cinematic form. Except for the opening and closing shots of a field of sunflowers, the entire film takes place in an Israeli tank holding four very nervous soldiers. The only view to the streets outside is through the gunsight aimed at insurgents and civilians. Which ones to shoot at? Which ones to save? Working as both a horrors-of-war screed and a depiction of men under impossible stress, Lebanon is an unrelentingly...
...film needn't take a prize at Venice to grab the attention of the world press. Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is the top-grossing documentary of all time, shifted his focus to the financial meltdown in Capitalism: A Love Story. Provocative and wildly ambitious, it expands beyond the housing and banking crises of the past year into an epic of malfeasance: capital crimes on a national scale. With enough corporate villains to stock a hundred melodramas, who is the hero? The writer-director-star himself. There he is, attempting to make a citizen's arrest of AIG executives...
...worthiest Venice entry was A Single Man. The first film directed by renowned fashion designer Tom Ford, it provides Firth, best known as the dreamboat Mr. Darcy in the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, with the role of a lifetime. No less than Lebanon, this is a film of man in extremis, seen in extreme close-up. Firth's professor, disconsolate over the death of his longtime beau in a car crash, meticulously rehearses his own suicide, by gunshot, but can't find a practical or aesthetically elegant way to carry it off. The Southern California setting...