VENICE, Sept 3 \u2014 The first woman to win the Academy Award for best director, Kathryn Bigelow, is back at the Venice Film Festival yesterday with a new White House thriller that Netflix hopes will find Oscar glory.<\/p>\n
The highly anticipated A House of Dynamite from the American director is one of 21 films competing for the top Golden Lion prize for best film on Saturday at the world\u2019s oldest film festival.<\/p>\n
The American director, who won the directing prize at the Oscars in 2010 for The Hurt Locker, focuses once again on geopolitics in her latest film, which focuses on a missile threat to the White House and stars Idris Elba.<\/p>\n
It has been eight years since Bigelow\u2019s last feature, Detroit about the 1967 riot in the US city, making the premiere of A House of Dynamite yesterday evening one of the highlights of the festival.<\/p>\n
Netflix, which produced the film, is banking on it as an Oscar contender.<\/p>\n
It is one of three films from the streaming platform at Venice this year, along with Noah Baumbach\u2019s comedy Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney as a Hollywood star with an identity crisis, and the big-budget Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro starring Oscar Isaac.<\/p>\n
Also premiering yesterday was Dead Man\u2019s Wire from Gus Van Sant\u2014the director of Good Will Hunting and Drugstore Cowboy\u2014who similarly has been out of the spotlight in recent years.<\/p>\n
The American director\u2019s first movie since 2018 centres on a real-life hostage drama at a loan agency, with Bill Skarsgard and Al Pacino.<\/p>\n
Van Sant is also due to receive a Passion for Film award from the festival and Campari spirits, an award that \u201chonors those who turn passion into a driving creative force\u201d.<\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s festival saw the premiere of The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson, a film about real-life mixed martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr, a pioneer in the sport who competed in the 1990s and 2000s.<\/p>\n
The Hollywood Reporter called the film from director Benny Safdie \u201ca compellingly gritty and offbeat biopic\u201d.<\/p>\n
Also receiving mostly positive reviews from critics was The Testament of Ann Lee from Mona Fastvold about the founder of the radical Shakers religious sect in the 1700s.<\/p>\n
Packed with music, singing and dance, the feature was co-written by Fastvold and partner Brady Corbet, who used Venice last year to launch The Brutalist that went on to win three Oscars, including a best actor award for Adrien Brody. \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VENICE, Sept 3 \u2014 The first woman to win the Academy Award for best director, Kathryn Bigelow, is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[30292,434,18,117,30707,30706,19,17,30293,30705,21428],"class_list":{"0":"post-40204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-a-house-of-dynamite","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-golden-lion-prize","13":"tag-idris-elba","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-kathryn-bigelow","17":"tag-netflix-oscar-contender","18":"tag-venice-film-festival-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}