Luca Guadagnino‘s two-part, 435-minute Joie de Vivre is an upper — a devotional, deep-dive embrace of the life and lore of the great Bernardo Bertolucci as interpreted by the feelings and insights of fans, friends and former coilleagues.

It’s now unspooling at the Venice Film Festival, and I have mineral-bathed my way through all of it, you bet.

I will always adore the best Bertolucci films for their sensual beauty and occasional perversities, but also Bertolucci himself for having said that “conformity is the worst of all diseases.”

Joie de Vivre‘s roster of Bertolucci keepers are Before the Revolution (’64), The Conformist (’70), Last Tango in Paris (’72), 1900 (’76), La Luna (’79), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (’81), The Last Emperor (’87), The Sheltering Sky (’90) and Me and You (’12 — Io e te).

Honestly? I’ve never even seen Me and You, and I was right there at the 2012 Cannes Film festival when it premiered.

Joie de Vivre was filmed over a period of four years. Luca used two dps — Sayombuh Mukdeeprom for the 35mm sequences and Simone D’Arcangelo for digital/iPhone cinematography of the many interviews. Part One roughly runs three hours, and Part Two runs four or thereabouts.

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Guadagnino is fully present in his chats with the illustrious James Gray, Martin Scorsese, Mark Cousins, “Harmin'” Armond White, producer Jeremy Thomas, Bertolucci himself finally entering the fray at the 26-minute mark, the late Jean-Louis Trintignant, Fabian Girard, Margot Robbie, David Cronenberg, Amazon’s Scott Foundas, Oyku Sofuo, Kirill Sennibrenikov, Muriel Jude, Catherine Breillat, Alfonso Cuaron and the eternally vivid Debra Winger.

I adored the emotional and spiritual places that Joie de Vivre took me to and reminded me of. It’s a great “hang out and contemplate the abundant blessings of great cinema and the wonderfully rich journey of BB with fascinating friends” film. Or a fond family gathering that relishes the wonder of a life fully and exuberantly lived…a life that wasn’t all fun and games. This is basically a warm and massage-y ensemble piece.

And by the standard of any tribute doc, Guadagnino, whose Bertolucci credentials are unimpeachable (he first met BB in the mid ’90s and became a solemn and devotional friend starting around the turn of the century), shows real artistic and judgmental balls by openly stating early on that he’s not a fan of Little Buddha (’93) and Stealing Beauty (’96), and by ignoring Besieged (’98) and, most glaringly, The Dreamers (’03) altogether.

Guadagnino is in effect saying these films may just as well have never happened. How would Bertolucci feel about this if he was afforded an opportunity to stream Joie de Vivre in heaven? Perhaps he’d accept this judgment and perhaps not. But Guadagnino certainly hasn’t made Joie de Vivre in the spirit of obsequiousness. This is what’s known in the documentary tribute game as serious integrity.

Imagine a Martin Scorsese tribute doc that more or less concludes with an appreciation of The Wolf of Wall Street and in so doing ignores Hugo, Silence, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. (The more I’ve thought about it, the more certain I am that Flower Moon is Scorsese’s worst film ever.) Now that the subject is on the table I’m recalling how in George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey, director George Stevens, Jr. not only ignored The Only Game in Town (’69 — an understandable omission) but also The Talk of the Town (’42).

I became a wee bit concerned after the 1900 section at the beginning of Part Two, but The Last Emperor section steers the film back into the groove, and then the appearance of a mostly white-haired Debra Winger and The Sheltering Sky really and truly bring the joy. (I so loved footage of Winger bickering on-set moment with Bertolucci — part of the glory of Winger is that she’s never been a day at the beach.) And Joie de Vivre‘s closing montage is one of the greatest cinematic highs I’ve ever experienced in this vein. The lush and disciplined vibe of this finale and the closing credits and the uptempo music are so wonderful.

In the third paragraph of his 9.8.26 review of Luca Guadagnino‘s two-part, 435-minute Joie de Vivre, an affectionate, deep-dive embrace of the life and lore of Bernardo Bertolucci, IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio steps in it.

One, Lattanzio states that “Bertolucci’s legacy among younger viewers is primarily stained by the ugly details of his behind-the-scenes pas de troix with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider on the set of 1971’s sexually explosive Last Tango in Paris.” Correction — if Lattanzio had wanted to be fair and accurate he would have written that Bertolucci’s rep has been stained by woke-bullshit mythology — a willfully non-factual, wholly fictionalized misunderstanding of the particulars behind the butter-lube anal rape scene. This is the “ugly”, and it’s not HE’s opinion — it’s 100% provable.

Two, Lattanzio quotes a Joie de Vivre passage in which film scholar Mark Cousins states “that he can’t forgive Bertolucci for springing on Schneider that the scene would include an unscripted, simulated sexual assault.” Complete bullshit — everything but the actual lubing and penetration is described in the French-language script, which again I have in my possession and have read…Paul exerting male power and dominance, Jeanne being flipped over on her stomach (to what end?…to what purpose if not an expression of sexual domination and a likely intent to sexually violate?) and her yells of protest…it’s all there on the page.

On 3.18.25 I posted about having read Tango‘s original 201-page, French-language shooting draft. I posted excerpts from same. The scene of violation is right there in black and white.

Brando’s Paul pulling Jeanne’s pants down and lubricating her anus with butter and entering her…this is NOT described in the shooting draft. But the bulk or main thrust of the scene — symbolic sexual dominance by Paul and an aching, anguished discomfort on Jeanne’s part — is unmistakably written down.

Three, Brando and Bertolucci clearly erred on the side of cruelty by not telling Schneider about the butter being used as lube and their intention to show her being anally violated. They should have told her the entire plan and trusted her to perform it realistically. But Bertolucci wanted her to express surprise and rage. He wanted that extra dimension of spontaneous emotional violation. Which obviously was inconsiderate manipulation on his part. But most of what the scene showed — most of what it was about — was clearly written in the shooting script.

Fourth and finally, Lattanzio calls Tango a 1971 film — Tango world-premiered on 10.14.72 at the 1972 New York Film Festival, and then opened commercially at Manhattan’s Trans-Lux East on 2.1.73.

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During several on-camera exchanges with comedian, documentarian and You Can See Everything co-director Nathan Fielder, convicted and now-imprisoned Theranos conwoman Elizabeth Holmes never even slightly modified her spiel — not a fraction of an inch, not a millimeter! Theranos looked right into Fielder’s eyes (as he looked into hers) as she recited her “who, me?…pure as the driven snow” narrative, earnestly insisting blah blah.

It’s dead obvious that the 43-year-old Fielder (who co-directed the 174-minute doc with Lance Oppenheim) doesn’t believe a word of this crap, and yet he’s obliged to maintain eye contact and patiently nod while saying “okay…good chat” is order to keep the rapport ball in the air.

I’ve been coping with massive FOMO currents since You Can See Everything premiered in Telluride last Sunday (9.6). This “whoa!” doc has clearly, inescapably been the thing to see and react to, and I can’t get at it…no one at the Venice Film Festival can. (Ditto attendees at the about-to-launch Toronto Film Festival…right?) Everyone has to simply cool their jets until A24’s theatrical release on Friday, 10.16.26, or roughly five and a half weeks hence.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond: “The film’s second half starts with [Holmes’] incarceration, and it doesn’t end there as crowd-pleasing twists are just getting started in this thing when we jump [back in] two years later. It was at this point I thought, ‘Okay, she’s in prison, no place left to go with this.’ Wrong. This is where it really gets good as the mystery of Elizabeth Holmes and her not-to-be-trusted Billy goes to new levels, and Fielder and Oppenheim manage to find an astonishingly clever second act that we won’t spoil here.”

THR‘s Scott Feinberg, Variety‘s Clayton Davis and others have suggested that a Best Picture Oscar nomination may be in the cards.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “A one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus” that “overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness until it brings you into the enigmatic space where all those things meet”.

Scattered boos greeted Florian Zeller’s Bunker as an 8:30 am Tuesday screening ended inside the Sala Darsena. I didn’t feel quite that negatively about this generally well-written, marital-discord, paranoia-plagued, existential malaise drama starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz.

I did, however, feel betrayed by the ending, and sometimes that’s enough to deposit a slight taste of ash.

This is a shame because I’d been “with” Bunker for the most part. Portions had vaguely reminded me of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s La Notte (’62), an existential void piece about a fraying marriage (Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau) and a general sense of drainage.

The general Bunker theme has to do with blocked or sidestepped emotions while the protagonists sense malice and are looking to keep out the riff-raff. Bardem, a wealthy architect, is enraged, for example, that a working-class neighbor (Stephen Graham) wants to build a window into a wall separating their properties. Less apartness and alienation, more occasional signs of reassurance…right?

The adult viewer knows there’s no way out of this hellcave, of course — Cruz is totally committed to being sullen and pissed off while Bardem is intuitively persuaded that Cruz, a book-publishing editor, is discreetly having it off a youngish writer named Jeremy (Patrick Schwarzenegger).

Alas, Zeller screws up by pasting a happy ending on it. He uses a melodramatic ending that ends on a tidy note of positivity and optimism. In a phrase, the film cops out. Hence the boos.

The best Bunker scene is a zoom call between Bardem and a prospective tech billionaire client, played by a fat-faced Paul Dano. Bardem asks “why build a hideaway bunker on Hawaii, which is basically a grim, paranoid act”? Dano, surprised by Bardem’s naivete, replies “do you have kids? Do you follow the news? Are you aware of the vast gulf between the super-wealthy and everyone else? If things go really wrong, I don’t want to end up with my head on a spike.”

Friendo: “The whole movie is a rather tidy sentimental conceit. It’s about privileged people who’ve forgotten how to appreciate their lives and each other, and is basically a Frank Capra movie. The Dano character, like all professional doomsayers, is basically a piece of shit. So why shouldn’t it end happily?”

HE to friendo: “Well, it certainly doesn’t feel the least bit Capra-esque during most of the running time. It feels Antonioni-ish, to me at least. And then comes that absurd ending, concluding with Bardem’s character attaining clarity as to whether or not to work for Dano, and deciding that it’s better to seek light rather than “live”, so to speak, in an underground fortress.

One thing I’m fairly certain of, and that’s that the family’s gray-coated Abyssinian cat is a CG thing. No cat ever poses or sits still for a camera like this one does. Pretty good job of cat fakery, I have to say.

The first peek at Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial (Neon) happens during the 2026 New York Film Festival (Alice Tully Hall) on 10.5.26. But the opening day is on Friday, 12.25.26.

An efficiently cut teaser…you can feel the uh-oh undercurrent.

Andrew Garfield has the most flamboyant role as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, but the central protagonist is played by Yura Borisov. Yura was a baldie in Anora, but he has hair in Artificial — keep this in mind. And Cooper Hoffman, who plays OpenAI board chairman Greg Brockman, wears a tennis-ball coif.

The other night I was recalling HE’s 8.18.24 review of Doug Liman and Matt Damon‘s The Instigators — easily one of the best and nost uproariously original genre films ever made, as well as one of the most unustly dismissed flicks of the 2020s.

The review was titled “Deadpan Screwball! Liman’s ‘Instigators’ is Boston Noir Meets Keystone Cops.”

Last night I finally caught Doug Liman, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck’s The Instigators (Apple+, 8.9), and during the first 20 minutes I knew for a fact that the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers (critics plus Joe Popcorn) had been mostly clueless and certainly small-minded in their pissy reactions.

For this downbeat Boston noir comedy is a true American original —- The Friends of Eddie Coyle meets deadpan screwball fatalism.

The only thing that doesn’t work is the title. If it was my show I’d call it I’ve Been Waiting All My Life To Fuck Up Like This.**

Despite the downish tone of this heist-gone-wrong ensemble chase thriller, it’s fundamentally a low-key noir comedy…sardonic sarcasm meets “fuck our lousy luck and Jesus, have we fucked things up or what?” meets a kind of loser Keystone Cops squad of half-assed, not-smart-enough “bad” but not altogether disreputable guys, principally played by Damon (who produced through Artists Equity) and Affleck (who co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean). Their performances are sweet, sublime, spot-on.

I was truly delighted by this existential crime sitcom, which is darkly hilarious without ever quite announcing that’s a hah-hah “comedy”. It’s certainly too smart and cool for the idiots out there who hate the idea of mixing humor and loser-stamped noir. It almost delivers the same kind of tonal balancing act that Pulp Fiction was about.

And the supporting cast is aces — Hong Chau, Paul Walter Hauser, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Jack Harlow, etc.

** Stolen from Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone‘s screenplay for Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78).

Alex Gibney‘s Musk, which I saw last night, includes a ten-minute intermission. This is apparently why the running time was initially misidentified — without intermission it runs 225 minutes but 235 minutes with it.

During the ten-minute break I got up and stretched and tapped out the following: “Elon Musk is obviously an ego beast, but all things considered he’s not been altogether malicious. He’s basically been a pushy, edgy, energetically self-aggrandizing ayehole who, if one ignores the personal-psychological stuff, has been quite the marketing dynamo in terms of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/X and other business realms. But DOGE…holey moley.”

Tapped out moments after Musk ended just shy of midnight: “Musk is about as brutal as you might expect. Justifiably brutal. Gibney primarily goes in for the kill during part 2. The DOGE + Trump-servitude stuff is concisely delivered and fairly awful to reconsider. Elon is basically a marketer, a bullshitter. Limited skill set. Elon isn’t wrong in his despising of the woke mind virus, but what he’s wrought is arguably worse. And no one is coming back from Mars alive.

“Musk is a malignant visionary, no question. In line with this, Gibney’s film swamps your mind and leaves you feeling a bit woozy.”

The least surprising material informs how Musk, now 55, has been a profligate seed-spreader over the years (14 acknowledged kids thus far, but probably a few more tucked away on the side), and how his devotion to his own legend has never allowed much room for any kind of semi-conventional husband-wife relationship. He couldn’t care less about finding-your-soulmate stuff.

During his 2021 SNL monologue, Musk said that given all his accomplishents and innovations, “did you also think I was gonna be a chill, normal dude?”

I guess I’d kinda half-forgotten that Musk stole credit for Tesla, which Martin Eberhard co-founded 22 years ago, by blotting out Eberhard’s memory in every conceivable way. But this kind of ruthlessness is almost to be expected from a guy like Musk, right? (Of course he threw Eberhard down the well!) I’d also kinda forgotten about the Tesla battery-swap fraud, but now I’m up on it, I guess.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “Once you start piecing together Musk’s scandals and cut corners and slipshod management, you see that he’s a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers.

“There’s no question that the Tesla, as he finally designed it, is a strong and beautiful car, and that Musk’s early advocacy of electric vehicles was a positive force in the world. But his rocket program is increasingly mired in a kind of sci-fi stasis. (His fixation on Mars is right out of the cheesy ’50s.)

“And when Musk took over Twitter, which he had to borrow so much to buy that he wound up slashing the company to ribbons, it was a lesson in atrocious management (which he camouflaged as a testament to free speech), and he then applied that experience — as if it were a positive prototype — to his slashing of the government under Trump. He was out to make destruction look cool. Increasingly, though, his ventures began to seem like they were about little more than Elon’s simulated glory.”

But again, didn’t everyone start to absorb and digest all this stuff a few years ago? Smart, comprehensive and vigorous as it is, Gibney’s Musk is basically just a long, detailed, visually punchy recap.

Alex Gibney statement: “In classic cinema, directors are taught to pay attention to framing a master shot that defines the coverage. In public discourse, Elon Musk has learned how to craft his own master shots which, in turn, have defined his image.

“According to his favored biographers and legions of on-line followers, he is a modern Leonardo da Vinci, who seems to have the answer to every question and is hard at work trying to save the planet and allow humankind to become a multiplanetary species. In Musk, I chose to re-tell a familiar biographical tale but to forgo the master. Instead, I explored it from different angles that showed the master shot to be an illusion, and revealed a more disturbing truth.

“Musk reframes the story of the tech titan as the 21st century reincarnation of the confidence man. By subverting Musk’s favorite tropes of video gaming and simulations, the film conveys the dangers of becoming like the ‘Game Master’ in Ready Player One. It’s a tale of power and its abuse, but shot from a low angle — the angle of Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Instead of being mesmerized by the floating visage of the wizard, Toto saw the shuffling feet at the bottom of the curtain which, once tugged away, revealed levers and gears operated by an ordinary man desperate to project his power.”

The damp, drizzly (heavier?) Venice deluge starts Wednesday morning and is expected to persist until Friday. No overflowing flood waters, please. Grim up, tough it out. All things must pass.

An hour ago (Monday midnight) I emerged from Alex Gibney‘s 3-hour, 55-minute Musk…”a definitive and unvarnished examination”, as the copy says. I can’t say much until after the big premiere (Sala Grande?).

It’s now 12:50 am. There’s a double-header tomorrow morning — Florian Zeller‘s Bunker at 8:30 am, and then Casey Affleck‘s Company at 11:15 am.

Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s Flesh Impact, which I saw last evening, is a high-style, ultra-confident 25-minute short about a century-old, vitally alive Marilyn Monroe (Ellen Burstyn).

We meet this intrepid survivor as she steps out on a bare stage to audition for the role of the slutty, thrill-seeking Carol Cutrere (a role played by Joanne Woodward in Sidney Lumet‘s 66-year-old The Fugitive Kind) in Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending.”

Monroe, who identities herself only as “Norma” or “Norma Jean”, is told she’s a bit old for the part. She starts to audition anyway, not with Cutrere’s lines but by recalling random, fleeting recollections of her life…some of the episodes she experienced as a child but mostly during her late ’40s, 1950s and early ’60s heyday.

A Lee Strasberg anecdote, a sage observation passed along by ex-husband Arthur Miller, a memory of walking around the 20th Century Fox lot in a see-through negligee, a recollection of a Los Angeles orphanage she lived in at age 11, an accusation that she helped to kill Clark Gable after working with him on The Misfits….that line of misty country.

And the 93-year-old Burstyn is transcendent. Really. She doesn’t channel the tragic, broken Monroe of legend but literally shoots her into 2026…not so much an aging spirited ditzoid as a spiritually open vessel…sharing whatever comes into her head with a certain unruffled pride and candor.

It’s a fascinating performance because Gyllenhaal and Burstyn have really gotten hold of a fresh and fascinating Monroe idea…how she might look and sound if she never left the earth in August of ’62…Marilyn not only recalling her highlights and heartaches but sharing this and that impression of how she felt at the time and what was really going on.

It sounds cliche-ish to announce that Burstyn’s Monroe radiates a special glow, a commanding vulnerability, a becoming fearlessness. But she really effing does.

And the director for whom she’s auditioning (Peter Sarsgard) never challenges her. He just listens and smiles and goes along with it. At most he might be thinking he’s listening to an unstable, delusional actress who needs to be humored or at least tolerated.

But we, the viewers, are totally down with Marilyn having survived all these decades and still showing the old moxie. It’s a delicious fantasy.

“Billy Wilder said I had flesh impact,” Monroe says. A belief, she recalls, that her movie-screen presence conveyed a palpable, physical, you-are-there eroticism. “Like you could reach out and touch me,” she recalls. “And everybody did.”

In the service of an ostensibly compassionate motive, Andrew Dominik‘s four-year-old Blonde sullied Monroe’s image…it probably subjected her to more humiliation that she ever experienced in actuality.

Flesh Impact restores her dignity and then some.

Ms. Burstyn accepts her Venice Film Festival Golden Lion award around the 29-minute mark:

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In a chat last weekend with The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez in Venice, The Basics of Philosophy director-writer Paul Schrader explained the genesis of Three Guns At Dawn, his forthcoming drama that will forego the use of flesh-and-blood actors in favor of AI synthies.

Schrader: “I had originally written it about three black brothers, all of whom are bad guys: a corrupt cop, a drug dealer, and a sexual criminal. And they were all trying to kill each other, and Antoine Fuqua was going to produce it.”

“We sent it out to actors, and no black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good black people. And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need black actors.

“Some people say AI is coming. Some people say it’s here. People are upset about it, and I can understand why.”

Best portion of the article: “Schrader compared their predicament to portrait painters confronting the invention of photography in the 19th century. ‘It’s like portrait painters saying, ‘We have to stop photography, or we’re going to be out of a job.’ And the answer is, ‘You are out of a job.’”

Late last night I spoke briefly to my 38-year-old son Jett, and the first thing out of his mouth was “have you seen Primetime?” I explained that I’d tried very hard to see this reality-driven film (A24, 9.25), but that life, circumstance, the Venice Film festival press ticket reservation system, and the Venice vaporetto bureaucracy had pooled forces against me.

Vaguely irked by his interest, I texted Jett the following a couple of hours ago (Monday, 9.7):

“What exactly is the big deal with you and your fellow Millennials (not to mention Zoomers) about Primetime? I’m still coasting on the high of having recently seen Martin McDonagah‘s Wild Horse Nine, easily one of the year’s finest films and sure to be Oscar-nommed, along with Danny Boyle‘s wild-ass Ink, and all you want to hear about is effing Primetime.

“Yeah, I know — Wild Horse Nine and Ink are about boomers, and boomers are anathema to you and yours. But what else is going on here?

“Is it because the original Chris Hansen show, To Catch A Predator (2004-2008), was about exposing sexual criminals (i.e., pedophiles), and that any and all exposures and prosecutions of same quickens your generational pulse? Is it because Primetime presents an older cis white male (Robert Pattinson‘s Hansen) as ethically flawed, which fits in with the general Zoomer-Millennial belief that ALL older cis white males are not only tedious and problematic but should probably be marginalized if not shunned? Is it because the 40-year-old RPatz not only stars but produces and you’re going “whoo-whoo…one of our own!”?

“I’m not looking to diminish Primetime. It doesn’t seem to be a problematic film at all. It’s actually supposed to be pretty good. But from what I’ve heard, it’s not exactly a cinematic landmark either. I’m just wondering why you’re so hot and bothered.”