‘We are seeing a new maturity’: how ‘extended reality’ is coming of age at the Venice film festival

At the festival’s pioneering immersive section, a ‘seamless evolution’ of VR and mainstream film-making is revolutionising narrative

Mother review – Noomi Rapace is a fanatical Mother Teresa full of fury

Rapace plays the canonised Kolkata nun with hard-bitten intensity in a complex, lurid story that veers between faithful telling and bouts of fun

From Frankenstein to Putin, monsters are stalking the Venice film festival

Artistic director says monsters are ‘fil rouge’ this year, as Guillermo del Toro unveils his vision of Shelley’s classic

Going nuclear: Kathryn Bigelow back in geopolitical territory with atomic thriller

A House of Dynamite, told from perspective of White House officials, will premiere at Venice before Netflix rollout

Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough review – a candid portrait of a literary one-off

Paul Sng’s documentary finds the Trainspotting author as funny, sharp and unrepentant as ever – from boyhood in Leith to globetrotting fame and a hallucinogenic trip in Canada

The Toxic Avenger review – strong cast struggles to revive stale horror franchise

Peter Dinklage does his best as a humble nerd transformed into a bulbous monster wreaking vengeance on his bullies, but this is dismal schlock

‘These are moist times we live in’: the strange, sticky world of Australian film-maker Philip Brophy

Brophy’s short films Salt, Saliva, Sperm & Sweat and No Dance have been restored for a whole new generation of twisted moviegoers

Little Trouble Girls review – monstrous choirmaster spikes a sublime Catholic coming-of-age tale

Utterly absorbing Slovenian debut reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening, and proves that no teacher can be as cruel as a music teacher

Concessions review – moviegoer melancholy for Michael Madsen’s final film

Madsen cameos as a stuntman visiting a smalltown movie theatre on its last day before closing down in this amiable, bittersweet story for cinephiles

The Memory Blocks review – playful and purposeful exploration of developmental disorders

Andrew Kötting’s complex docu-essay about his daughter Eden, who has Joubert syndrome, refuses conventional grammar

Beast of War review – a gung-ho second world war movie, with a great white twist

Kiah Roache-Turner’s latest splatterific effort is a blast, following a squadron of Australian troops who must try to survive ‘a pissed-off 20-foot fish’ in the Timor Sea

‘Our director is a madman’: a century on, Gloria Swanson’s disastrous film Queen Kelly is finished

The Hollywood icon played a convent girl falling for a prince in this bizarre film directed by Erich von Stroheim. Decades after it was abandoned, Queen Kelly will now be shown at the Venice film festival

One More Shot review – what if you could turn back time … via a magical tequila?

This Australian time-loop comedy starring Emily Browning, Aisha Dee and Ashley Zukerman is pleasingly derivative

Mare’s Nest review – an opaque, challenging reflection on the end of the world

Ben Rivers’s cine-poem, based on Don DeLillo’s climate crisis play The Word for Snow, follows a child’s strange encounters as she wanders in a postapocalyptic world devoid of adults

The Birthday Party review – Willem Dafoe is the life and soul as menacing Onassis-alike

A charismatic Dafoe commands the screen as a Greek alpha-patriarch, throwing a claustrophobic celebration for his second favourite child