Watched for the second time after seeing it at Cannes last year, and the second viewing hit even harder than the first, which had already left me broken.
Parthenope is Sorrentino's greatest ode to love, desire, loneliness, loss, and depression, and it is an incredible film that exists entirely within its own imaginative reality. The stunning locations seem to represent an idea of Naples so elevated that it feels abstract. And many of the characters, especially the protagonist, are so…
I don’t think I can find any other words to describe I Saw the TV Glow than those of Jordan Raup from The Film Stage, who called it "nothing short of staggering". My personal testament to the grandeur and complexity of Jane Schoenbrun’s work lies in the fact that, while watching it, I barely thought of it as an allegory for being transgender, so absorbed was I by the incredible use of science fiction to depict a teenager's loneliness. Or…
Fun fact: to make this film Walter Hill used an AI program, fed it all western movies ever made, and then just proceed to click the ‘shuffle’ button as hard as he could.
We can only imagine the smirk on his face getting bigger and bigger with every cliché line the AI randomly put together and with every sepia layer it added in color grading.
If there's one thing that will be remembered from this edition of the Venice Film Festival, it's that the biopic genre is entirely ineffective. After Ferrari and Maestro, even Priscilla struggles to awake the slightest interest.
Coppola's direction is highly commendable and consistently refined. However, the problem here is that after the brief first act, the film never evolves, it keeps repeating the same dynamics for two hours, becoming increasingly faded until the inconclusive ending. It might even be a reflection of the story it tells, but in terms of narrative language, it works very poorly.
