Booth Moore here, the new Editor-at-Large of WrapStyle. 

During my two-plus decade career in journalism as a Los Angeles-based reporter, editor and critic, I logged thousands of miles covering fashion runways in New York and Europe and interviewed the designers of nearly ever brand from Armani to Zimmerman. 

Closer to home, I have documented the ascendence of L.A. as a fashion capital, writing about the rise of Hollywood stylists, celebrities becoming designers, costume designers becoming influencers, talent agencies launching fashion divisions and luxury brands getting into filmmaking. 

In this weekly newsletter, I will be writing about all that, as well as interesting happenings at the intersection of fashion, beauty, art, lifestyle and entertainment, brand collaborations, retail openings, shopping obsessions and more.

I hope you’ll join me. 

Venice Fashionpalooza

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior haute couture debut! Dario Vitale’s first Versace venture – and celeb twinning moment! Armani vintage, Miu Miu and Tom Ford parties galore!

Fashion was officially back in session at the Venice Film Festival, where the world’s top luxury brands competed for attention on red carpets.

There is a lot riding on the creative director overhaul that has installed new designers at nearly every fashion house in recent months in hopes that they can jumpstart the slumping luxury industry. And many of those creative directors will be showing their first women’s ready-to-wear collections on the runways in Milan and Paris is the next few weeks. But they offered a taste of what’s to come on the stars in Venice.

The strategy of teasing new designer runway collections on the red carpet really caught fire last year when Timothée Chalamet debuted looks from the new designers at both Givenchy and Tom Ford during awards season. It does generate attention, but not always the right attention.

Backed by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, new Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson was given the biggest boost, at least in sheer number of dressing credits, starting with debuting his first women’s haute couture look on “Three Goodbyes” actress Alba Rohrwacher. While the sapphire gown with a bustle back was in keeping with the designer’s recent exploration of 18th century historicism in his first men’s Dior runway collection shown in June, to the fashion chorus of the Internet it was a dud.

The less edgy, more elegant sleeveless black drop waist gown with a subtle bow worn by Monica Barbaro was easier to digest, as was the draped brown slip dress Mia Goth debuted at the premiere of “Frankenstein,” though neither seemed particularly Dior or Jonathan Anderson. Greta Lee’s dramatic plunge-front, cape-back Dior minidress was on the money though, and very J.A. in a good way. 

In a fun Hollywood-fashion tie-in, Anderson superfan and “After the Hunt” director Luca Guadagnino turned up at a photo call in a cheeky “No Dior No Dietrich” T-shirt. (Anderson designed costumes for Guadagnino’s film “Challengers,” including the “I Told Ya” T-shirt that went viral.)

The slogan refers to Marlene Dietrich’s ultimatum to Alfred Hitchcock and Warner Bros. during her contract negotiations for the 1950 film “Stage Fright,” that Christian Dior create her costumes or else. (They caved.) The shirt was clever, immediately endearing to film insiders, and yes, it will be sold.

Another debut came courtesy of Julia Roberts who wore a custom Atelier Versace gown by Dario Vitale, who took over as creative director after Donatella Versace stepped down in April. The crepe de chine gown featuring black and navy embroidery in a diamond motif took 300 hours of work, according to the brand.

Styled by Elizabeth Stewart, Roberts also wore Vitale’s first daytime look for the brand, a tailored navy blazer, yellow striped shirt and jeans. In a cute touch, Stewart’s client Amanda Seyfried asked to borrow the outfit and rewore it during a photocall for her film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” hashtagging her photo on Instagram #Sustainable #ShareYourLooks.

First impression? A very understated Versace, but more luxe than what was being produced when the brand was owned by Capri Holdings, before being acquired by Prada in April. And the rewearing was social media gold.

Shailene Woodley wore a look straight off the runway from Celine’s new creative director Michael Rider at a daytime photocall for 1970s-set action thriller “Motor City.” The white draped dress and chubby fur seemed more appropriate for Motor City in February than the Lido in August, but I’m guessing method dressing was the point.

Elsewhere in the Venice fashion universe, LVMH-backed Tiffany & Co. went all in on its new Bird on a Rock collection, bejeweling a famous flock including Goth, Seyfried and more. Giorgio Armani unveiled its 50-year anniversary archive project Armani Archivio with some very well-dressed guests, including Cate Blanchett. The project rolled out online cataloguing 57 looks, and will culminate in a capsule collection of recreations first arriving in select stores in Europe, and then debuting in the U.S. in L.A. on Oct. 18 at the Academy Museum Gala.

Miu Miu threw a party where Emma Corrin, Alexa Chung and others wore the fall collection’s headlining bullet bras, and Tom Ford’s new creative director Haider Ackermann staged a very cinematic-looking soiree with his muse and the new face of the brand’s Black Orchid Reserve fragrance, Tilda Swinton, wearing the fall 2025 runway collection’s best dress with silvery scales. Diane Von Furstenberg hosted her 16th annual DVF Awards honoring extraordinary women, with Kim Kardashian making fashion news in an ethereal gray jumpsuit not by DVF, but by Glenn Martens, straight off his first Maison Margiela couture runway in July.

And that was all before the premiere of Sofia Coppola’s new Marc Jacobs documentary, “Marc by Sofia,” and the happy news that the incredibly talented Diotima designer Rachel Scott is taking the helm at the New York brand Proenza Schouler now that designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez are heading up design at Loewe. It’s going to be a long month!

Vogue’s Insider Pick

Ending months of speculation, Chloe Malle was tapped as the new Vogue U.S. head of editorial content on Tuesday.

The choice makes a lot of sense. A proud “nepo baby,” as she told The New York Times, Malle is the daughter of the late French film director Louis Malle and beloved “Murphy Brown” made-for-TV journalist Candice Bergen. She grew up in Beverly Hills and New York City, and is at home in the Hollywood scene, which is essential for any editor of a modern glossy, particularly Vogue as it plans to bring mega event Vogue World to L.A. in October. 

She’s equally as comfortable in the halls of power in New York, where she’s worked for the magazine since 2011, helping to juice online traffic and the weddings section at Vogue.com, and penning this summer’s feature on the Bezos-Sanchez extravaganza.

Last year, Malle also launched the amusing Dogue by Vogue. The digital magazine devoted to fabulous canines brought a much needed sense of humor to the hallowed fashion institution, and it’s that spirit of irreverence I hope we see more of under Malle’s leadership. Fashion needs it.

She’s already planning changes, including moving from a monthly publication model to one centered around special events and cultural moments, in the hope that future print copies of Vogue will become collector’s items akin to The World of Interiors. But Anna Wintour, of course, is going nowhere; she’ll be just down the hall continuing to oversee Malle and all the Vogue titles globally. 

Attention Aspiring Venice Filmmakers

Kaitlyn Dever, Meghann Fahy, Allison Janney, Issa Rae, Jenny Slate and Cannes Grand Prix winner Payal Kapadia will lead the jury for the 10th edition of Through Her Lens: The Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program, Sept. 16–18 in New York.

The program gives U.S.-based women and nonbinary filmmakers funding, support and development opportunities. The event brings together emerging talent and industry pros for three days of workshops and conversations covering script development, directing, music composition and costume design. (Warner Bros. CEO Pamela Abdy, actor/producer Lucy Liu and costume designer Colleen Atwood are on tap.)

As part of the process, the filmmakers work on refining their projects before delivering a live pitch to the jury, and one team is awarded full financing to produce a short film with support from Tribeca Studios, while four additional teams receive development grants. 

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The post Venice Film Festival Fashionpalooza Heralds Knockout Appearances From Greta Lee, Shailene Woodley and More appeared first on TheWrap.

“That’s the unfair thing of being at a festival, is having to say this is better than that. It’s not,” Payne said when asked during a press conference why “Hind Rajab,” a critical favorite at the festival, didn’t win the Golden Lion. “As a jury, we treasure both of those films equally, each for its own reason. And we wish both of those films a long and important life, and we hope that the support of the awards we’ve given tonight will help them, each in its own way.”

Payne continued diplomatically, indicating that “Father Mother Sister Brother” — which stars Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver — wasn’t exactly the far and away winner.

“Look, if we had voted the day before, the day later, it might have been different … As I say, we treasure and value and protect both films equally in our hearts. And if one had to receive one prize [over] the other, it’s for .000001% of having to make some kind of decision,” he added.

Rumors began swirling on social media on Saturday that there was tension in the jury room over deliberations for the Golden Lion, with some unfounded allegations that a member of the jury threatened to quit when it became clear “Hind Rajab” wouldn’t win the Golden Lion.

But Payne said that never happened. “One of my jurors threatened to quit? I did?! No, did someone threaten to quit? No. I think we know … not to believe everything we read online,” he clarified.

Hania’s film follows the events that led up to the death of five-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian child who lived in the Gaza Strip, using real audio from her emergency call. Rajab died alongside six of her family members after the Israeli military invaded the Strip.

Hind and her family were attempting to flee the city by car when they came under military fire. Her calls for help ended amid gunfire. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) were able to eventually reach the vehicle and confirmed the deaths of everyone inside, along with two paramedics who attempted to rescue Hind.

“The [Israeli] occupation deliberately targeted the Red Crescent crew despite obtaining prior coordination to allow the ambulance to arrive at the scene to rescue the child Hind,” the PRCS said in a statement at the time.

In reviewing the film for TheWrap, critic Ben Croll wrote that the Tunisian filmmaker renders the world “with unbearable clarity. … Setting raw audio against meticulously staged reenactments, her hybrid docufiction gives searing form to the most wrenching material, recreating in real-time the final hours of a six-year-old girl in Gaza.” 

Croll also noted that when the movie screened, it “drew the most effusive reaction I’ve ever witnessed at the Venice Film Festival – this time from a crowd with no stake in the film. At its Wednesday morning press screening, applause thundered through the credits, breaking only when attendees collapsed into full-body sobs.”

The post Venice Jury President Alexander Payne Denies Rumors Juror Threatened to Quit Over ‘Voice of Hind Rajab’ Snub appeared first on TheWrap.

That 2015 Cannes-turned-Oscar winner cut a new path through darkness by emphasizing radical subjectivity, resolving longstanding tensions about aestheticizing the Holocaust by focusing on one man’s intense and acute first-person experience of Auschwitz. Nemes’ formal bet clearly paid off – so much so that he attempted to replicate it on an even grander scale with his 2018 end-of-the-old-world follow-up, “Sunset.” Only there he went bust, setting the stage, perhaps, for an art-house rebrand. 

Enter “Orphan.” 

Centering on questions of legacy and paternity – of nature versus nurture, in other words – Nemes’ latest film unfolds as an intensely aestheticized experience, a gold-hued tableau that treats the old Every Frame a Painting adage as a challenge to meet, 24 times a second. Echoing its own narrative, which follows a young boy torn between two radically different father figures, “Orphan” ultimately works best as a kind of formal-pivot sizzle reel, trading the narrow depths of field and skillfully wrought chaos of Nemes’ earlier work for a sweeping, storybook style more evocative of Guillermo del Toro than anyone else. 

Well, almost anyone. For at heart this is also a boy’s-own adventure about an urchin coming of age in a sprawling, sinister world, staged at great scale on Central European backlots. Which makes “Orphan” an unexpected companion to Roman Polanski’s “Oliver Twist,” of all things.  Mind you, the comparison flatters Polanski far more than Nemes, who never quite manages to thread his own torrid fable with the same wonder, whimsy, melancholy, and malice common to all the films the Hungarian filmmaker so clearly looked to for inspiration. 

We follow 12-year-old Andor (Bojtorján Barabas) as he crisscrosses 1950s Budapest, a city scarred by the genocide not a decade prior and still reeling from the failed anti-Soviet uprising of the previous year. Born — so far as he can tell — to Jewish parents, the boy also inherits the fresh weight of their historical trauma. His mother, Klára (Andrea Waskovics), now lives with survivor’s guilt, while his father, Hirsch (played by no one), never lived long enough to share it. What’s a boy to do but take to the streets, and shuls and squats of his hometown, trying to make sense of the wider world and his place therein. 

But little is ever settled in a Mitteleuropa metropolis still struggling to redefine itself. The remaining Jewish families hold their city at arm’s length, unsure whether to fully reclaim it or to sever the bond by springing for a one-way ticket west. Meanwhile, the last remaining radicals – nearly all of them students – find themselves picked off one by one as communist authorities snuff out the last embers of the dashed 1956 revolution. 

Though the style shifts, Nemes retains the blinkered POV of his earlier work. We see the world through Andor’s bemusement, explaining the choice to leave certain narrative elements opaque, but not odd lack any tonal variance, at least until the bulldog butcher Berend (Gregory Gadebois) muscles into the story, brandishing disturbingly credible claims of paternity. 

Berend’s a lout, certainly, but also the man who hid Klára during the war. A lush, yes, but also a native Magyar whose name could grant the boy social acceptance and the family a new kind of stability otherwise out of reach. All things considered, Andor could do worse for a surrogate father – especially one who might be his biological pop as well. After all, it’s not like the lug’s a killer. Or is he? And just what happened to the butcher’s previous child? 

Nemes never tips his hand, focusing instead on the boy’s uncertainty as this boisterous intruder takes root in his daily life. Drawn in part from the filmmaker’s own family history, “Orphan” pivots from a picture-book of midcentury malaise to a sepia-polished fairy tale, otherwise lacking magic and majesty. Once more it strikes the same somber note again and again as it follows a boy’s first, faltering encounter with the ogre now calling himself Dad.

Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘Orphan’ Review: László Nemes’ Period Epic Is Slow as Molasses appeared first on TheWrap.

Julian Schnabel’s pretentious new opus “In the Hand of Dante” stars Oscar Isaac as real-life journalist, novelist and poet Nick Tosches, who gets sucked into a criminal conspiracy to steal a manuscript of “The Divine Comedy,” allegedly written in Dante Alighieri’s own handwriting. In flashbacks, Isaac also plays Dante himself, who struggles to complete his epic trilogy while coming to terms with his exile, his spiritual failings and his loveless marriage. Lots of people get killed. Lots of navels also get gazed.

Tosches wrote the novel “In the Hand of Dante” himself, and Schnabel’s film treats that source material like brazen self-insert fan-fiction. To hear Schnabel tell it, Nick Tosches was a brilliant, bold, hunky iconoclast who stuck it to the man and slept with sexy ladies. He may also have been the living reincarnation of Dante himself, or maybe he just thought he was. Either way you could fill the whole screen with nothing more than this protagonist’s ego.

Schnabel’s films are usually full of visual splendor. “In the Hand of Dante” is no exception, although it’s the only one that offers little else. The director of such bewitching and beautiful dramas as “At Eternity’s Gate,” “Before Night Falls” and “Basquiat” is fascinated with the inner worlds of history’s greatest artists, and he translates that beauty to the screen with astounding visual clarity. “In the Hand of Dante” is another feast for the eyes, courtesy of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (“Fury”), but in this film the artist’s inner world is his also outer world. The author’s subconscious is literal reality. That, or reality and fiction have hopelessly merged, depending on your interpretation.

Either way it’s presented with such bloviating seriousness that it can’t be taken seriously, on the surface or in its heart. The crime plot is so cheesy and pulpy it’s practically curdled, the historical plot might as well take place in a whole other universe. The spirituality might be profound if it wasn’t so self-aggrandizing, and the romance is unconvincing at best. We’re told that this love story is so powerful it transcends time and space. We’ll have to take Schnabel’s word on that, since it never reads on camera.

Which is not to say that “In the Hand of Dante” is without wit or humor. Gerard Butler plays a queer yet violently homophobic gangster named Louie, who accompanies Tosches on his journey and kills nearly everyone they meet. Louie may be evil incarnate but he approaches Tosches’ world like Han Solo approaches Luke Skywalker’s in “Star Wars,” with a welcome and refreshing lack of interest, making all the heavy-handed mythologizing easier for the audience to digest. But Louie is just a sidebar in Tosches’ journey, and once the film moves past him there’s nothing relatable about it. (Also let’s be honest, the fact that the mass murdering bigot is one of this movie’s most relatable characters isn’t a point in its favor.)

Isaac knows how to captivate, even when his material is obtuse, but this material is very, very obtuse, which makes his job visibly harder than usual. You’ll find John Malkovich working wonders as a corrupt art dealer who never leaves his desk, but that’s more of a plot point than a character. Martin Scorsese, one of the most Catholic filmmakers in history, cameos as Dante’s Jewish spiritual advisor who gives the author — and his Catholicism — his official seal of religious approval. I am not qualified to unpack all that baggage, but I know it’s piled high.

Then of course there’s Gal Gadot, whose mission to prove her charismatic turn in the first “Wonder Woman” was a fluke continues to be successful. She spends most of the film looking and sounding sleepy, which just makes us want to take a nap too. At least she doesn’t have a musical number this time.

“In the Hand of Dante” is an absurd film, maybe even intentionally absurdist, but the thick, soupy fog of self-importance obscures Schnabel’s vision. We’re watching a movie that dangles between solemn camp and artistic tragedy, and I’m not sure where Julian Schnabel wants it to fall, but either option would be unfortunate. The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary. You can boldly make the greatest movie of all time and you can boldly walk face-first into brick wall. At least Schnabel’s wall has pretty pictures on it.

The post ‘In the Hand of Dante’ Review: Oscar Isaac’s Julian Schnabel Collab Is Too Self-Serious to Be Taken Seriously appeared first on TheWrap.

François Ozon, by contrast, is anything but inert. For decades he has worked at a relentless clip, writing, directing, producing and promoting a new film each year, now bringing his latest to Venice. And yet entrusting France’s most-read modern novel to its most prolific filmmaker is less obvious than it first appears. Camus’ work endures precisely because of its elusive (and allusive) quality – its celebrated interiority more conducive to interpretation than to adaptation. 

Ozon’s canniest move is to fold decades of reappraisal into his own version, staying faithful both to the text and to the long discourse it has inspired. Just don’t expect a listless affair: This is a more sensual update, grounded in the one worldly pleasure that pierces Meursault’s armor of indifference. (One can faintly hear the beleaguered Fritz Lang of “Contempt” caterwauling about the concession: “It’s existentialism … with sex!” What can I say, the formula works.) 

So too does Ozon’s ongoing partnership with Benjamin Voisin, first struck in 2020’s “Summer of 85” and now put to radically different use. His Meursault plays less like a Gallic Tom Ripley than a fatalist ideologue – carried away by the unbearable lightness of being, and duty-bound to speak that truth, whatever the cost. His only conviction is that everything’s phooey, and as a clear-eyed witness to the colonial apartheid of 1930s French Algeria, he’s not entirely off-base. 

While Ozon hews closely to the original narrative – tracking Meursault across two chapters, first drifting into an impassive romance with typist Marie (Rebecca Marder), then standing trial for a murder the colonial courts might otherwise ignore were it not for his destabilizing lack of affect –“The Stranger” shades this world with a moral indictment absent from Camus’ text. At best it was latent in the original novel, which spoke in a 1940s vernacular, reducing all locals to the label of “Arabs,” even as it later inspired a wealth of post-colonial reappraisals and companion works, most notably Algerian author Kamel Daoud’s much-acclaimed “The Meursault Investigation.” 

The filmmaker borrows from both Camus and Daoud, placing his hypocrisy-averse protagonist against the larger hypocrisy of an apartheid regime, while carving out more room for an Algerian perspective. Two previously anonymous figures – siblings Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) – are now granted first names and inner lives, though the narrative still casts them as victims: she of Meursault’s brutish neighbor, Sintès (Pierre Lotin), and he, of course, of Meursault himself. Yet Ozon uses these familiar plot points to deepen the psychology of his antihero. When Meursault gazes passively at the world around him, what else can he perceive but a justice system tilted in his favor — until, all of a sudden, it isn’t.  

One can sense Ozon’s creative glee in cracking open a sacred text, yielding a film that plays like a handsome reissue with his notes and asides scribbled in the margins. At the pivotal moment, when a half-drunk, sun-dazed Meursault stumbles onto Moussa on the beach, the two men appraise each other almost tenderly, or at least with a reciprocal desire that echoes Ozon’s sensual instincts, folding in the queer re-readings long attached to the novel. The encounter jolts us – especially given Meursault’s evident eagerness for Marie – and perhaps it jolts him too. Maybe that’s why, with the sun bearing down, the Frenchman pulls out a gun. 

Or maybe not. Maybe we can never really know, least of all when trying to impose logic under the harsh light of a legal system forever searching for order in chaos. Arrested for killing a second-class citizen, Meursault finds not his crime but his very affect on trial. Sound familiar? If the echo to “Anatomy of a Fall” feels faint, Ozon drives the point home with a sly cameo from that film’s “Hot Lawyer,” Swann Arlaud, a metatextual wink to a novel whose intellectual legacy remains as agile as ever. 

And yet, for all its cerebral flourishes, “The Stranger” offers no shortage of simpler pleasures: the coal-and-ash textures conjured by DP Manu Dacosse, the unforced intimacy between Voisin and Marder, the welcome turns from Gallic stalwarts like Arlaud and Leos Carax mainstay Denis Lavant. Taken individually, they lend color and heft; taken together, they shape one of Ozon’s richest and most satisfying works in years — that rarest of literary adaptations, one that honors a foundational text precisely by finding something new to say.

The post ‘The Stranger’ Review: François Ozon Deepens the Psychology of Camus’ Antihero appeared first on TheWrap.

But few films could be more unsparingly intimate than “Remake,” and it’s no spoiler to say why: before we’re five minutes in, he’s bluntly shared the gut-punch purpose of this project. To quote his narration, which is spoken directly to his son Adrian, it’s “to convince myself that you were alive, but also to convince myself that you’re gone.”

“Remake” is designed much like all of McElwee’s deceptively quiet films, with a notable distinction. This one is a collaboration, of sorts, with Adrian himself. It starts by going back decades, when the director earned indie fame with cultishly beloved docs like “Sherman’s March,” “Time Indefinite” and “In Paraguay.” McElwee typically enlists his friends and family, using his own life as a mirror in which we eventually glimpse something much larger. And as we see in old film clips that hit very differently now, a young Adrian — unusually bright, undeniably adorable — was a stalwart presence in front of his father’s camera. (McElwee also explored their changing relationship in his last film, 2011’s “Photographic Memory.”)

We see Adrian as an ever-smiling newborn, a toddler showing early artistic talent, a little boy enamored with his parents. And then a teen getting kicked out of school, a young man diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a 20something who checks himself into rehab.

But what we also see is that Adrian was, even in his darkest moments, always Adrian. He’d kept hold of his pensive eloquence, his innate gifts and his admiration of his father. He had begun making films as well. So even as McElwee sifts through his own work over the last 25 years, in order to review — if not remake — his family’s life, he’s pulled into his son’s perspective through footage left behind.

When Adrian captures himself skiing alone through a lushly blanketed forest, in a rare moment of peace, it feels as though time stops. When Adrian films his dad with angry impatience, it speeds ahead with wrenching force. And when Adrian turns the camera toward himself, to try and make sense of something bigger than his addictions, it boomerangs.

Obviously, there is no subject more painful than the loss of a child. And it is impossible to imagine how difficult it must have been for McElwee to make this movie at every stage, from inception to edits to completion. Indeed, the topic is so overwhelming that attempts to address other experiences — including a thread about his 1986 breakout “Sherman’s March” — feel more suited to a separate documentary.

As with all his films, though, this one is consistently thoughtful and painstakingly open. Most of his projects have dealt with serious issues, including death. But it’s the inclusion of Adrian’s footage that elevates this beautiful, tragic movie from powerful to profound. As the grief-stricken McElwee reconstructs a timeline that still makes little sense, he questions the purpose of his own career. His son’s evident love and talent, which will live on forever thanks to “Remake,” provide an indelible answer.

The post ‘Remake’ Review: Ross McElwee’s Beautifully Constructed Doc Pays Moving Tribute to His Son appeared first on TheWrap.

Schnabel made his feelings on the matter known during Wednesday’s pre-premiere press conference for “In the Hand of Dante,” in which he insisted that Gadot and Butler’s personal views should not prevent them from promoting the film. “I think there’s no reason to boycott artists,” Schnabel told journalists.

“I selected those actors for their merits as actors, and they did an extraordinary job in the film and that’s about it,” the filmmaker added, suggesting that no more questions be asked about the topic. “I think we should talk about the movie, rather than this issue.”

In conjunction with the start of this year’s Venice Film Festival, an open letter was released by the Venice4Palestine collective urging the festival’s organizers to take a clear stand in condemning Israel’s actions in the ongoing war in Gaza. The letter’s signatories featured filmmakers from across the globe, including Ken Loach, Paolo Sorrentino, Céline Sciamma, Audrey Diwan, and Arab and Tarzan Nasser, as well as actors Charles Dance, Toni Servillo and Jasmine Trinca.

Additional requests were made for the festival to disinvite potential attendees like Butler and Gadot, who have previously supported Israel. Neither was reportedly disinvited from the festival. Nonetheless, neither has traveled to Venice in support of “In the Hand of Dante.”

Based on a 2002 novel by Nick Tosches, Schnabel’s film centers on a handwritten manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” that is found in the Vatican library and eventually makes its way all the way to New York, where its authenticity is tested. In addition to Butler and Gadot, the film’s cast includes Oscar Isaac, John Malkovich, Louis Cancelmi, Sabrina Impacciatore, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, Benjamin Clementine and filmmaker Martin Scorsese.

Earlier in the festival, jury president Alexander Payne chose not to answer a question about his personal stance on the military action in Gaza.

“Quite frankly, I feel a little bit unprepared for that question. I’m here to judge and talk about cinema,” Payne told journalists at a press conference last Wednesday. “My political views, I’m sure, are in agreement with many of yours. But as far as my relationship with the festival and what the industry does, I have to think about that for a while to give you a measured response.”

The Venice Film Festival’s world premiere screening of “In the Hand of Dante” is scheduled for Wednesday night.

The post Julian Schnabel Defends Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler, Says Being Pro-Israel Is ‘No Reason to Boycott Artists’ appeared first on TheWrap.

For the most part, this Netflix film is all tension, all the time. And it makes it clear once again, as if we needed another reminder, just what an accomplished and dynamic filmmaker Bigelow is. With the help of an essential team that includes cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, editor Kirk Baxter, composer Volker Bertelmann and sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson, “A House of Dynamite” manages to be a white-knuckle thriller in which almost all of the onscreen “action” consists of people talking on the phone or staring at screens.  

The setup is brutally simple: A U.S. military base in Alaska picks up a launch somewhere off the coast of Asia. It appears to be a missile of some sort, but we don’t know who launched it, or whether it’s a test or a threat. The U.S. Strategic Command is alerted, as is the White House Situation Room. And when more intel comes in and it appears that some kind of warhead is headed for Chicago and will hit in 19 minutes, every branch of the military and government is in a headlong rush to figure out what is happening, who’s responsible and what to do about it.

Almost all of “A House of Dynamite” takes place in those 19 minutes … but it’s not that simple, and it should hardly come as a surprise to learn that the headlong momentum of those first scenes is not the only trick Bigelow has up her sleeve. In a way, she’s in familiar territory here; as she did in “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” she takes a journalistic approach (working with screenwriter and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim) that allows her to urgently delineate the inner workings of the national security apparatus with a muscularity that is all her own.

But the film has its twists, turns and resets, simultaneously giving the audience more information while also keeping it off balance. It can be riveting and at times repetitive, but it does what it sets out to do: It drops you in the middle of a crisis and it keeps you there.

“A House of Dynamite” is the story of one morning and one event, told in an immersive way that doesn’t stop to supply context or tell us more about these characters than we can figure out in the briefest of conversations. The film is on the clock from its opening moments – but when the clock is about to run out, it backs up and shows us the same 19 minutes from a different perspective.

So the first time we run through the countdown, we watch the soldiers at the 49th Missile Defense Battallion in Fort Greely, Alaska, and the Watch Floor Senior Duty Officer at the White House (Rebecca Ferguson) and the FEMA Director of the Office of National Continuity (Moses Ingram) and the Situation Room senior director (Jason Clarke) and others who go by in a flash, along with more acronyms and military terms than anybody can keep straight (PEOC, USSTRATCOM, SECDEF, GBI and EKV, which I’m sure we all know refers to the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle), though they are all explained quickly with onscreen titles.

The second time around, we start at an undisclosed location in the Indo-Pacific Command, and also track down a national intelligence officer who’s taken her son to a Civil War re-enactment. We hear the President of the United States on the phone but we don’t see him in this version – but when the clock resets again and the film goes through that 19 minutes a third time, Idris Elba’s POTUS is the central figure. Sometimes a conversation we’ve already seen will play out again, but from a different vantage point; sometimes an entirely new viewpoint will drop in, including the dizzying variety of options for nuclear retaliation  contained in the “nuclear football” that never leaves the president’s side.

It’s a lot to take in and a lot to keep straight, but “A House of Dynamite” delivers it with blunt efficiency. When at one point an aide says, “We need to slow down, Mr. President,” the POTUS sums it up nicely: “Time is a luxury we do not have. We are about to lose Chicago, and I do not know why.”

By the time it’s over, Jared Harris has delivered a particularly wrenching performance as the Secretary of Defense, whose daughter is in Chicago, and one of Bertelmann’s best scores has gone from portentous chords to insistent pulses to staccato strings. Ackroyd’s camera pans from faces to screens and back, recalling some of the urgency of last year’s “September 5,” another film that takes place mostly in contained spaces.

There’s gallows humor here, but mostly the film follows grim people trying not to panic. And it delivers a sobering assessment of a world in which some leaders continue to at least speak about using nuclear weapons, and our best lines of defense have a success rate that’s marginally better than a coin toss.   

At one point in the film, the president snaps, “This is insanity!”

“No sir,” says the STRATCOM commander played by Tracy Letts. “It’s reality.”

And it’s Bigelow.

The post ‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Kathryn Bigelow’s Riveting Thriller Is a Nuclear Nightmare appeared first on TheWrap.

The film stars Toni Servillo opposite Anna Ferzetti as a fictional Italian president who spends the waning months of his term contemplating life, his late wife and the ethics of euthanasia.

“Mariano De Santis is the President of the Italian Republic. No connection to any real-life presidents; he is entirely a product of the author’s imagination. A widower and a Catholic, he has a daughter, Dorotea, a legal scholar like himself. As his term draws to a close, amid uneventful days, two final duties arise: deciding on two delicate petitions for a presidential pardon,” per the logline. True moral dilemmas, which become tangled, in ways that seem impossible to unravel, with his private life. Driven by doubt, he will have to decide. And, with a deep sense of responsibility, that is exactly what this remarkable Italian President will do.”

In his positive review for TheWrap, William Bibbiani called the film “a robust inhalation of clean air, and a long, invigorating exhale afterwards. This is cinema as oxygen.”

“La Grazia” is a Fremantle film produced by The Apartment, in association with Numero 10 and PiperFilm. Producers were Annamaria Morelli, Andrea Scrosati, Massimiliano Orfei, Luisa Borella, Davide Novelli and Sorrentino.

The movie hits theaters on Dec. 5.

The post ‘La Grazia’ Set for December Theatrical Release After Venice Premiere appeared first on TheWrap.

The event toasted what’s sure to be a lively season as plenty of prestige films were unveiled in late August and early September at the fall film festivals — Venice chief among them.

As Pond put it in his latest piece running down the first half of Venice and Telluride, “Some of the high-profile films that have premiered so far still have some work to do before they can be considered top awards players, but others came out of the gate with a bang, and plenty may be on the fence as Best Picture hopefuls but are definitely in the mix for other categories.”

Peruse photos from TheWrap’s event below.

Lawrence Atkinson (DDA Global, CEO) and Joe Utichi (Journalist) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond

Paola Freddi (Film Editor) and Lara dall’Antonia attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

R.J. Cutler (Filmmaker) and Jane Cha Cutler (Producer) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Lawrence Atkinson (DDA Global, CEO), Jo Addy (SOHO House, Global Film Director), and Joe Utichi (Journalist) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

General atmosphere of A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Steve Pond (TheWrap’s Executive Editor, Awards) and Keith Simanton (Senior Film Editor, IMDb) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Jon Rushton (Critical PR Director), Jason Solomons (Producer), Sarah Norget (Film Producer), and Keith Simanton (Senior Film Editor, IMDb) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

General Atmosphere at A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Lawrence Atkinson, Jo Addy (SOHO House, Global Film Director), Joe Utichi (Journalist) and Tiffany Kizito (Senior Manager, Talent Relations and Awards EMEA, Netflix) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Lawrence Atkinson (DDA Global, CEO), Jo Addy (SOHO House, Global Film Director), Joe Utichi (Journalist), Tiffany Kizito (Senior Manager, Talent Relations and Awards, Netflix), Liz Diaz (Netflix, Talent Relations & Awards Manager), Nina Rothe attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, Steve Pond, and Lara dall’Antonia attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Sebastien Cauchon (MUBI Senior Advisor) and guest attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Keith Simanton (Senior Film Editor, IMDb) and Jason Solomons attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Jon Rushton and Steven Raphael attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Lisa Ogdie, Nina Rothe, and Liz Diaz attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Lara dall’Antonia and Filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Anna Bogutskaya (SXSW London) attends A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Steve Pond and Jane Crowther (EIC Hollywood Authentic) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Matthew Sanders (SVP, Film Communications & Development at Fremantle) and Emily Salkin (DDA Global, director) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Eric Lagesse (Pyramide Distribution, CEO) and Sebastien Cauchon attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Joe Utichi (Journalist) and Tiffany Kizito (Senior Manager, Talent Relations and Awards EMEA, Netflix) attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

Guests attend A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

General atmosphere at A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond.

The post A Toast to Awards Season, Hosted by TheWrap’s Steve Pond at the 2025 Venice Film Festival | Photos appeared first on TheWrap.