Venice Film Festival 2023: The 10 Best Films at the Festival

From Emma Stone’s bafflingly brilliant embodiment of a Victorian woman with the brain of an infant, to the mind-boggling costumes, Tony McNamara’s hilarious script, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s virtuosic direction, everything about this madcap picaresque is dazzling. We follow our heroine, the precocious Bella Baxter, as she escapes the home of her guardian and creator (a typically eccentric Willem Dafoe) and sets off on a continent-spanning adventure with a swaggering lothario (a foppish, ridiculous, side-splitting Mark Ruffalo). Cue wild sex, punch-ups on the dance floor, an eye-opening cruise, destitution, and, eventually, a rebirth via a Parisian brothel run by a tattooed, corseted, earlobe-biting madam. Even after that, once Bella returns home, the twists keep coming, and the rug is repeatedly pulled from under us from every different direction. It makes for the weirdest and most joyous coming-of-age saga you’ll see this year.—R.S.

Photo: Sabrina Lantos

It’s a thrill to discover that one of the festival’s most anticipated releases is also one of its best: Sofia Coppola’s candy-colored dramatization of the early life of Priscilla Presley (the rosy-cheeked Cailee Spaeny), which takes us on a whirlwind ride from the 14-year-old’s first meeting with the then-24-year-old Elvis (a magnetic Jacob Elordi), at a party while he was in the midst of his military service in Germany, to her stint as a bored Catholic school girl living with him in Graceland, her marriage, motherhood, and the slow disintegration of her relationship with the king of rock and roll. The costumes are predictably swoon-worthy; the cinematography hazy and dreamy-eyed; and the sets gloriously detailed, eliciting comparisons to both Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides. But it offers more than just aesthetic pleasures: It’s also a terrifying look at the control the musician exerted over his bride, allowing us to see a seemingly familiar story in a whole new light.—R.S.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

 

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