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Venice Film Festival Diary: 'Black Souls,' 'Heaven Knows What,' 'Goodnight Mommy'
6 hours ago
The dark days of Venice continue. It’s not easy starting your morning with a film called “Black Souls” but someone has to do it. Italian director Francisco Munzi’s tale of a Calabrian family embroiled in the mafia gave me a stomach ache, partly because of the sense of dread it successfully exported from the opening shot, and partly because it never quite achieves what it seems to be going for. Luigi and Rocco Carbone are two middle-aged brothers running a mob business in Milan. Luigi (Marco Leonardi) is your typically good-looking, fun-loving tough guy, a sort of Calabrian Sonny Corleone. The lean, bespectacled Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta) runs the business side and aspires to normality and respectability, with a pretty northern wife (Barbora Bobulova) and young daughter. The odd man out is their elder brother Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), who has remained on the Calabrian hilltop farm, raising goats, and »
- Tom Christie
Al Pacino Debuts Venice Films from David Gordon Green and Barry Levinson
14 hours ago
Can there be too much Al Pacino? Not in Venice, apparently, where he was the man of day three with two major films premiering – Barry Levinson’s “The Humbling” and David Gordon Green’s “Manglehorn.” But as much as I love the guy, after his two performances as old, sad, deranged men I was ready to kill myself and after the two press conferences I was ready to kill him. “The Humbling” is based on the Philip Roth novel, to which Pacino long-ago bought the rights. You can understand that, given that the lead character, Simon Axler, is an aging – and fading -- star of the Broadway theater who is no longer always sure of what is real and what is acting. As with all things Axler/Pacino, this confusion is rather epic, resulting in a swan dive into the orchestra pit that lands him first in a hospital and then a mental institution. »
- Tom Christie
2 articles