“The Hand Of God”
Interestingly picked up by Netflix for release this December, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino is known for his aesthetic excess. The man behind both “The Great Beauty” and “The Young Pope” returns to Venice with “The Hand of God,” an experience and sensibility forward film “that aims, stylistically, to avoid the traps of conventional autobiography.” Set in Naples in the 1980s, the auteur’s newest is a coming of age tale of idolatry, following the teenage Fabietto Schisa, who fawns at the arrival of football star Maradonna, whose very presence seems to enliven the city’s pride. Heartbreaking and liberating, all the same, Sorrentino considers his latest project his most “movingly personal” movie yet.
“The Last Duel”
Thanks to pandemic release days, Sir Ridley Scott finds himself with 2 chances to climb up to the Oscar podium this year, the first being “The Last Duel,” starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck. Based on Eric Jager’s acclaimed book of the same name and co-penned by Damon, Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener (“Enough Said”), the subject matter of Scott’s film alone is sure to attract attention. Set in 14th-century France, Comer’s character accuses Driver’s of rape, and her husband (played by Damon) subsequently challenges him to trial by combat—the last legally sanctioned duel in France. Considering the history of many involved, regardless of critical reception, Scott’s latest is sure to find swords unsheathed in the online discourse.
“Last Night in Soho”
“If you could go back in time, would you?” begins Edgar Wright’s statement about his latest genre-pushing flick. A psychological exercise on the pitfalls of nostalgia, “Last Night in Soho” is a love letter to a place that its director has “haunted for most of [his] adult life.” Starring Thomasin McKenzie as an aspiring fashion designer named Eloise, she finds herself able to travel back to the 1960s after encountering radiant, amateur performer Sandi (Anya Taylor-Joy). Also starring Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, and Terence Stamp, ‘Soho’ seems to have a dash of every ingredient audiences love about Edgar Wright movies, reaching back into the center of his own London-set universe to spin a cautionary tale of danger and darkness.
“The Lost Daughter”
The much-anticipated directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal, “The Lost Daughter,” follows Leda (Olivia Colman), a woman on vacation who becomes obsessively consumed by watching a young mother and her daughter on the sandy beachside. Gyllenhaal found herself utterly taken by Italian author Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, feeling as though “Some secret piece of my experience as a mother, as a lover, as a woman in the world, was being spoken out loud for the first time.” The incredibly talented Jessie Buckley (“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) plays young Leda in flashbacks, Gyllenhall’s film examining secret pains of the past and their less than favorable consequences.