much that many of the big names stayed away. Those who did come to Venice, including Adam Driver, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola – some thanks to interim agreements with the US writers’ and actors’ guildsthat have cast a critical spotlight on film business practices. And after a sluggish start, there was a rich crop of major films that made you glad to be on the Lido. So Venice retains its claim to be a formidable A-list festival – yet not a truly international one.
‘A wild, witty and audacious performance’: Emma Stone and Kathryn Hunter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Victorian fantasy Poor Things.Still, even with its mainstream slant, the Venice selection had vigour. The competition wasn’t exactly brimming with experimental invention, but then we did have Yorgos Lanthimos’s much-awaited, the Greek director’s most joyously outre work yet. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel, it’s a Victorian fantasy about a young woman reanimated by a Frankenstein-like surgeon .
, by German cameraman turned director Timm Kröger. An eerie Alpine mystery involving quantum theory, doppelgangers on skis and a jazz-singing femme fatale, it’s fabulously shot in black and white and resembles Thomas Mann’srewritten by Philip K Dick and filmed by Orson Welles. Cult status awaits. There was also genre-bending from French conceptualist Bertrand Bonello.