World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Venice backtracks and reinstates its jury press conference, Ellen Burstyn collects her Golden Lion, Day 5 premieres roll on with The Echo Chamber, and happy birthday to Martin Freeman and David Arquette.
Morning all — a proper Venice-dominated day today, with a U-turn story and one very well-deserved lifetime honour. Here’s what happened in the world of movies during the last 24 hours.
Venice reverses course on its jury press conference: As mentioned last week, the festival had scrapped its traditional opening jury press conference, citing scheduling conflicts — a decision that arrived awkwardly close to mounting pressure over this year’s Gaza-related open letter. That explanation didn’t hold for long: after swift industry backlash, organisers have now reinstated the press conference after all, walking back plans for a cocktail-hour alternative. Given last year’s equivalent session left then-chair Alexander Payne visibly on the back foot over political questions, it’s hard not to read this as Venice deciding the optics of dodging the room were worse than the optics of sitting in it.
Ellen Burstyn collects her Golden Lion: Yesterday’s ceremony saw Burstyn presented with her Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the second such honour handed out this year after George Clooney received his on opening night. It’s a fitting tribute for an actress whose career stretches back to The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and one that’s gone down warmly among the festival crowd.
The Lido’s premiere carousel keeps turning: Elsewhere on the Lido, Day 5 brought premieres for Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber — with Susan Sarandon, Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli all walking the red carpet — alongside Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Gael García Bernal’s Hombre Al Agua. With the Competition’s 21-strong lineup including buzzy titles from Werner Herzog, Florian Zeller and Robert Pattinson-fronted Primetime still to come, the Golden Lion race remains genuinely wide open ahead of the 12th’s ceremony.
Some late LFF additions: Talking of Primetime, this is just one of a series of additional items announced for this year’s London Film Festival, following the main programme announcement last week. Others include the international Premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the UK premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, the UK premiere of Chris Rock’s Misty Green, the UK premiere of Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Inherit, the European premiere of Jonathan Glazer’s Joy of Joys, the UK premiere of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Everest: The Other Side. Exciting additions to the programme of LFF Screen Talks include Robert Eggers and Javier Bardem. But it is the UK premiere of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime that seemed to set the BFI Social Media alight last night and as there is currently only one screening of this film scheduled, this seems to be the hot ticket for London in early October.
Happy birthday to Martin Freeman and David Arquette: Rounding things off, Happy Birthday today to the Hobbit and Sherlock star Martin Freeman and to Scream franchise regular David Arquette. Both were born on the same day in 1971, making them both 55 today.
That’s all for today. I still have a lot of films to catch up on but more reviews to write!
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