The Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival was awarded to the only film in competition directed by a female filmmaker: Danish-Egyptian director May el-Touchy’s Woman UnKnown. This stylish portrayal of post-World War II Denmark centers on a maid whose past during the Nazi occupation threatens to unravel her future. The film raises significant awareness about the plight of women in a bygone era, depicting a time when women went largely invisible and unseen. Leading act

David Thomson, one of the most celebrated writers on the movies, made the subject of his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, his skepticism about the very art form to which he’s dedicated his career. Cinema, he writes, is almost too powerful: the forcefulness of the big screen image, and the beautiful movie stars upon them, suspend our critical faculties and create dangerous illusions, and spring from a deeply corrupt industry themselves (although, he’s mainly referring t

The 2026 Venice Film Festival gets underway with both uncertainty and cautious optimism Despite the justified criticism of this year’s competition line-up, sight unseen, the opening few days of Venice always deliver. With the curators knowing that Wednesday-to-Thursday is the short window where the festival has maximum industry and press attention, before Telluride and Toronto kick off, us lucky folk in the press corps get to see three or four of the year’s most significant