VENICE: The Coen brothers have scored a slot in the main Venice Film Festival competition with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs which despite beginning life as a Netflix series is slated for theatrical release after the festival. 

VENICE: Director Damien Chazelle makes a quantum shift with his Venice competition entry First Manafter his hugely successful, light-hearted homage to the Hollywood musical La La Land. 

VENICE: American indie director Rick Alverson has scored a slot in the Venice competition lineup with his fifth and most ambitious film The Mountain.  His earlier offbeat dark comedies Entertainmentand The Comedy established his reputation as a Sundance regular who did not hesitate to challenge audiences with difficult but nonetheless visually beautiful films.

VENICE: French director Jacques Audiard arrives in the Venice competition with the French, Belgian, Romanian, Spanish coproduction The Sisters Brothersan unusual take on the Western genre. The film is based on the novel by of the same name by Canadian author Patrick deWitt with a script co-authored by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. It is also the first English language film by Audiard who scored critical acclaim with his previous films A Prophet, Dheepan andRust and Bone.

VENICE:American director Brady Corbet arrives in Venice in competition with his second film Vox Luxwhich is a more mature work in the same genre as his first film The Childhood of a Leader. Corbet is interested in examining key events that define their era using fictional characters the just could be modelled on unnamed real life historical figures that we already know.

Director Darren Aronofsky returns to the Lido with mother! in the main competition a film which he describes as having “poured out of him as a fevered dream.” The description is indeed apt and his vision has left both critics and Venice audiences a bit baffled as to what it all means, that is if it means anything at all.

The honourary Italian from Lake Como George Clooney is back on the Lido with a quirky film called Suburbicon with a script by the Coen brothers that he has amended to make it his own.

Director Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a much needed antidote to cynicism in an increasingly cynical world.  This may just be Del Toro’s best film in a decade with nothing compares to it since his 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth.