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Russian director refuses to denounce lead actor despite criticism from Ukraine

Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, about physicist Lev Landau, stars Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has refused to speak out against Putin’s war The director of a controversial new Russian film has said “everyone pays for his own choice” when asked about his lead’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine. In film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which premiered at the Venice film festival on Wednesday, Greek-Russian star conductor Teodor Currentzis plays the eponymously nicknamed protagonist, Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist Lev Landau. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Philip Oltermann in Venice9 Sept

DAU review – Ilya Krzhanovsky’s crazed Soviet inferno reaches its central character

Venice film festival: The director’s bleak epic project about the scientist Lev Landau finally focuses on the genius maudit who inspired the series How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father? Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction. Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences coexist with his self-questioning obsession with his own genius and loneliness. It would be vulgar and irrelevant to wonder if Khrzhanovsky, like any artist, is in fact working on a self-portrait. But you surely can’t work on a (still unfinished) project like this without a strong personal connection. Here, at all events, is the latest Dau iteration, a more conventionally conceived biopic about Lev Landau (although we don’t see him getting the Nobel – perhaps that’s a separate film). Apparently this is the feature that Khrzhanovsky originally envisioned before the creative Big Bang that created the Dau multimedia universe. His first offshoot picture DAU. Natasha (2020) was about two women who work in the canteen of Dau’s research institute, a place drenched in sexual tension and political paranoia and violence. The next film to come was the grisly epic DAU. Degeneration (2020), set in the late 60s with Dau himself – still here a peripheral character – on his deathbed. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Peter Bradshaw9 Sept

Call My Agent! The Movie review – the gang get back together and c’est formidable

The screwball French comedy is back as a film that actually works, thanks to putting Andréa and Noémie at the heart of chaotic events and bringing all the old faces back At last: a beloved-TV-show-to-film-spinoff that doesn’t suck! The original French series is a screwball-speed office comedy about a boutique Parisian talent agency, and was a ratings and critical success in its homeland when it started back in 2015. Its acquisition by Netflix grew the audience internationally and spawned a stable full of remakes across Europe and Asia. In the meantime, several members of the original French cast have become proper stars in their own right, especially Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, and this sequel, set five years on, is smart to put these two at the heart of the latest instalment. And of course, there are the obligatory turns from properly famous actors playing themselves, including Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne, Laurent Lafitte and some guy named George Clooney, best known these days for appearances on vaporettos in the Venice lagoon. Like many great sitcoms, this one always understood that failure, rather than success, keeps the wider narrative arc more interesting and relatable. So the last episode of the series left the gang at talent agency ASK (which stood for Agence Samuel Kerr, after the founder, who died in the first episode), dispersed to new gigs and careers; the band, in effect, broke up. Five years on, the stars have aligned to bring them all back together to work on Andréa (Cottin) and Noémie’s (Calamy) new film project, so the title Call My Agent! The Movie works on more than one level. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Leslie Felperin9 Sept

The rise of hairy young women: ‘I know people who dye their armpit hair, so it stands out more’

When Phoebe Bridgers appeared at Venice international film festival with unshaven legs this weekend, it shouldn’t have made headlines – but did. What do young women make of the current expectations around depilation? In 2026, female body hair feels as if it should be the least of anyone’s concerns. But although we may think we’ve come a long way since Julia Roberts’ unshaven underarm caused a furore at the 1999 London premiere of Notting Hill, depilation remains a staple of many women’s grooming routines – and when singer turned actor Phoebe Bridgers made her Venice film festival debut last weekend, her unshaven legs still made headlines. Even so, her au naturel look may signal that attitudes are changing – particularly among younger generations. Vogue decreed that “rather than undermining the femininity of the look, unapologetic hair sharpened it”, and pictures of the 32-year-old’s hair-covered calves were generally praised by fans. But what do other gen Z and millennial women make of the decision to ditch the razor? Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Leah Harper8 Sept

State handouts, 10,000 lasers – and Trump’s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk film

Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering children Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0. The result clocks in at just under four hours and presents a comprehensive answer to how on earth one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. It is shocking less for any individual new pieces of information Gibney has unearthed than for its totality. Here are six things the film tells us: Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Philip Oltermann in Venice8 Sept