‘Humanity is facing a reckoning’: Venice film festival shrugs off the glamour to take aim at politics
Stars waved as usual from the city’s water taxis, but there was a repeated focus on films that help audiences interpret a chaotic world
Meet your descendants – and your future self! A trip to Venice film festival’s extended reality island
A flourishing lineup of immersive storytelling experiments are taking visitors into novels, nightclubs and outer space
Erupcja review – Charli xcx gives acting a trial run in shallow friendship drama
The star fails to make much of an impression in a slight and unpolished project filmed in Warsaw over the Brat summer of 2024
The Voice of Hind Rajab review – provocative docufiction is fierce, urgent and heart-shattering
In an audacious move, director Kaouther Ben Hania reconstructs the killing of the five-year-old in Gaza using her real voice as she is bombarded by the Israeli army
From Knives Out 3 to Soderbergh: 10 films to look out for at the Toronto film festival 2025
Stars including Daniel Craig, Michaela Coel, Keanu Reeves and Channing Tatum to present latest films to big audiences
The Voice of Hind Rajab gets 23-minute ovation at Venice film festival
Film about five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza leaves much of audience and many journalists sobbing
Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Mescal, Lynne Ramsay and George Clooney set for London film festival
The festival marks the return of Day-Lewis to the screen in a film directed by his son, while a roster of urgent political films also form part of this year’s slate
Dead Man’s Wire review – Gus Van Sant calls the shots with surreal true-crime thriller
Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in this gripping take on the events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage
A House of Dynamite review – Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear endgame thriller is a terrifying, white-knuckle comeback
Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts star in this immaculately constructed nightmare procedural that ticks down the minutes from an atomic bomb’s launch to its detonation
The Smashing Machine review – Dwayne Johnson only possible casting as crisis-riddled UFC champ Mark Kerr
Former pro wrestler Johnson takes on the role of man-mountain Kerr who goes into meltdown when the unthinkable happens – he loses
The Testament of Ann Lee review – strikingly strange portrait of radically ecstatic Shaker leader
Amanda Seyfried plays the 18th-century missionary who took her radical message to the New World, in Mona Fastvold’s elusive film
Kim Novak’s Vertigo review – the dizzying demands on Hitchcock’s leading lady
An intensely personal interview of the 92-year-old Hollywood star delivers showstopping moments for fans of the golden age of movies
My Tennis Maestro review – unforced errors keep Italian coming-of-age comedy from grand slam
Pierfrancesco Favino is a robust lead as a teenage tennis hopeful’s charming yet flawed new coach in a film that’s too long and too indecisive to stand up to recent big hitters
Frankenstein review – Guillermo del Toro reanimates a classic as a monstrously beautiful melodrama
Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as the freethinking anatomist and his creature as Mary Shelley’s story is reimagined with bombast in the director’s unmistakable visual style
Pompei: Below the Clouds review – a ghostly yet luminous cinematic mosaic of Naples crowns a superb trio
There is a real end-of-days quality to Gianfranco Rosi’s utterly distinctive documentary of war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis in an uneasy city