The Venice Film Festival has become synonymous with the Oscar launch. If you have a movie with awards season pretensions — think La La Land, The Shape of Water, Poor Things or The Brutalist — you take it to the Lido.
This year feels different. Politics, not awards campaigns, has taken center stage. Venice’s 83rd edition is packed with films focused on right-wing media moguls and the crackdown on immigration, on the conflicts in Israel, Iran and Russia, on the abuses of capitalism and the rise of authoritarian power. The lineup, according to artistic director Alberto Barbera, is Venice’s “most political ever.”
It all kicks off with Ink, Danny Boyle’s opening-night drama about Rupert Murdoch and his 1969 acquisition of The Sun, the tabloid whose combination of sex-scandal sensationalism and right-wing populism became the playbook for the New York Post and Fox News. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, with Jack O’Connell as Sun editor Larry Lamb.
‘Musk’
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
