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.

Director Paul Schrader joins a group of films in this year’s Venice Main Competition that are concerned with the destruction of our planet’s environment via greed and over-exploitation with his latest film First Reformed. Maybe they are trying to tell us something.

Actor Matt Damon might be in danger of over-exposure if such a thing were possible in today’s Hollywood.  The very much “in demand” actor appears as a leading character in two films screening in the main competition in Venice this year Alexander Payne’s Downsizing and George Clooney’s Suburbicom.Actor Matt Damon might be in danger of over-exposure if such a thing were possible in today’s Hollywood.  

CANNES: Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is back in competition in Cannes with The Wild Pear Tree four years after winning the Palme d’Or with his Winter Sleep. The film is a coproduction between Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Sweden and Qatar although this is no pudding with Ceylan’s unmistakable style undiluted by the complexities of a seven country coproduction.