Rafa Sales Ross

Featuring new movies from Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola and more
Emma Stone in "Poor Things"
The glitzy Venice Film Festival has spruced up its reputation over the last few years by populating the red carpet with some of the most prestigious stars working in cinema today. Just last year the festival served as the backdrop for one of the juiciest celebrity scandals of the season during the world premiere of Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, an event that turned Florence Pugh holding an Ap...

It’s hard to encapsulate the cinema of a particular filmmaker in just one word, but if one were to try their hand at it with Mexican maverick Michel Franco, a word that’d come to mind is violence. The filmmaker’s work is built upon the looming expectation of violent transgression, society standing flimsy atop the fragile idea of cordiality. Such benevolence, sustained by the centuries-old notion of polite society, is easier to break within the intimate confines of the family home, a sentiment...

In his latest documentary, the American master Frederick Wiseman observes the routines of the Troisgros family and their three fine dining restaurants in France.
A day in the life of a restaurateur and Frederick Wiseman’s latest film begin in the same way: at the food market. Fingers carefully peruse fresh produce as if valuable rarities, men debate the merits of Moroccan mint and wild strawberries with the eagerness and attentiveness of connoisseurs, and greet the farmers with the warm famil...

Goran Stolevski's third feature is a story of queer solidarity in Northern Macedonia that doesn't quite come together.
Stepping into the household of healthcare worker Dita (Anamaria Marinca) can be a little disorienting at first. Nameless people bust in and out of rooms in loud, overlapping conversations, a frenzied state that only helps blur the lines between the relationships that co-exist within the large residence they all share in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje.
We get to know t...

Over the past six decades, much has been said about the iconic relationship between Elvis and Priscilla Presley, the royal family of American rock’n’roll. With her adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 book Elvis and Me, Sofia Coppola finally flips the coin on a relationship often told unilaterally through a beautiful encompassing of the dreams and desires of a teenage girl.

The question of whether or not technology has killed the classic crime thriller has popped in and out of the discourse as the years saw pocket watches morph into sci-fi-looking gadgets capable of getting one both dinner and a first-class ticket to Dubai in the space of a couple of minutes. Directors who have solidified their careers through portrayals of mafiosos, gangsters, and assassins held tightly to the period film as a chance to continue working with the story beats that work so well wi...

You didn’t expect French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello to make a conventional sci-fi, did you? Good, because “The Beast” is far from it. It all starts in 2044 with beautiful actress Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) in desperate need of a job. To get it, she’ll have to conform to the new normal in this quasi-dystopian society where the frigid efficiency of AI has deemed human emotions unproductive and downright dangerous.
The solution to this nagging little human problem is simple: to eliminate the futile...

Time is a relative construct stretched to the limits of elasticity by Saverio Constanzo with the period drama “Finally Dawn.” The bloated 140-minute runtime begins at a cinema in Rome in 1953 as three women watch the final scene of a saccharine war drama, the light of the big screen coming to reveal a mother and two daughters, one donning the beauty of a Hollywood starlet and the other the beauty of a traditional Italian woman, with big blue eyes framed by thick curly hair.
Venice Film Festiv...

Before “Maestro” plunges into the sharp monochrome of its first chapter, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein relays to a camera crew how he can still feel the presence of his wife within the walls and gardens of their beautiful countryside manor. “I miss her so much,” he says, the passage of time denounced by the sprawling maze of wrinkles that frames his youthful blue eyes.
Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch
It is a poignant opening to Cooper’s attempt at chron...

For a few beautiful years in the early 2000s, Michael Pitt’s spine-chilling blue eyes wreaked havoc in world cinema, from Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” to Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” Then, due to quite a few controversies, the actor stepped away from the limelight, taking on smaller projects here and there and leaving an abyssal gap in the industry: a blue-eyed menace whose presence in any given film immediately signaled some form of psychological torture.

A parent’s desire to trap their offspring in perpetual childhood is not a foreign concept to Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, whose 2009 psychological drama “Dogtooth” chronicled the dysfunctional routine of a wealthy businessman, his meek wife, and their severely infantilized adult children. The reason for the children’s folie a troix is as simple as it is bleak: the trio has been kept within the tight confinements of their family house all their lives, the world outside their fence shaped ...

A parent’s desire to trap their offspring in perpetual childhood is not a foreign concept to Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, whose 2009 psychological drama “Dogtooth” chronicled the dysfunctional routine of a wealthy businessman, his meek wife, and their severely infantilized adult children. The reason for the children’s folie a troix is as simple as it is bleak: the trio has been kept within the tight confinements of their family house all their lives, the world outside their fence shaped ...

British author Roald Dahl has long been referred to as one of the best storytellers for children of the 20th century, a seemingly flattering but objectively flawed observation. Dahl is, after all, not just one of the best storytellers for children of the 20th century. He is one of the best storytellers of the 20th century period.
This sentiment guides many cinematic Dahl adaptations, whether or not they come wrapped as children’s films. The past three generations each got a Willy Wonka, with ...

Michael Mann’s take on the life of the Ferrari founder is more feels than thrills
Ferrari premieres in theaters December 25. This review is based on a screening of the film at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
Is Adam Driver the greatest non-Italian Italian movie star of his generation? Less than two years after Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci saw him playing a successful Florentine businessman whose career was greatly boosted by a witty wife he once loved but has grown to no longer ...

At first glance, it might seem like Pablo Larraín’s last two films share only a couple of superficial commonalities: they are both biopics in the sense they tell stories of real-life people, Princess Diana in 2021’s “Spencer” and Augusto Pinochet in 2023’s “El Conde”; and they have both premiered in competition at the glitzy Venice Film Festival.
Alas, scratch the surface and both films stand as an unlikely diptych about dysfunctional families dealing with the generational sins that have made...