Misbegotten Crime Capers And Musical Legends

Father Mother Sister Brother is the hilariously bleak Jim Jarmusch’s offering to the global archive of family tales, this one in triptych form, each family vignette set in a different country. It’s Jarmusch, after all. The notable ensemble cast includes Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Mayim Bialik, Luka Sabat, and Indya Moore, all pictured above, as well as Adam Driver. As professional families go, this cast and its director seemed altogether harmoniously delighted with the turnout and with the response to the film at its August 31 screening, which received a six-minute standing ovation. The smart kids are welcome in Venice.

In the musical maelstrom that exploded in the UK in the 1960s, Marianne Faithfull was the rather posh but, as it turned out, supremely tough aristocratic smart girl who took on the boys, artistically and socially. She survived, first, a relationship with Mick Jagger, and subsequently, years of drug addiction, but she emerged in the late Seventies and built back. Ever the iconoclast, she kept writing, producing and singing throughout an amazing career.

Broken English, the documentary-with-fictional-flourishes premiered in Venice on August 30, and was made in the last years of her life with Faithfull’s full blessing and participation. Its title is taken from Faithfull’s triumphant 1979 album, and its eponymous song, that Faithfull herself called her “masterpiece.” Faithfull died in January of this year, during the production of the film, but not before she she was recorded performing with Nick Cave, which sequence serves as an anchor moment in the film. Above, British actress Suki Waterhouse channels her inner Faithfull with a fan en route into the premiere.

Julia Roberts can brighten up just about any red carpet that she deigns to grace, and her breezy, confident assumption of the August 29 After The Hunt red carpet was no exception. Above, she shows Venice how it’s done in black-on-black harlequin-pattern jacquard, with a train no less. Roberts plays a Yale professor mired in an investigagion of sexual abuse by a close university colleague and friend. The production, directed by Luca Guadagnino and filmed in London and at Cambridge University, will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival in October.

There are heist films, and then there are films that supersede the genre by virtue of their sheer comic invention. The Last Viking is a prime example of the latter. Mads Mikkelsen plays the more-than-slightly mentally torqued Manfred, brother to a recently released convict (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who, to recover his stolen loot, must somehow unpack his brother’s quite tightly layered psychological problems to access where the loot lies. Good, no?

It gets better: Manfred now believes that he’s John Lennon. To get Manfred to remember where he might have put those smouldering millions, his brother resolves “reunite the Beatles” around Manfred with other psychiatric patients who believe that they’re also members of the band. Naturally, all this is carried off with staggering deadpan by the company, with millions in cash in play. Talk about a great Scando-crime-thriller. Pictured above, the highly inventive director/writer of this fine narrative, Anders Thomas Jensen, with his cast, en route into the premiere on August 30.