{"id":185789,"date":"2025-08-29T23:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T23:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185789\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T23:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T23:14:09","slug":"venice-film-festival-2025-reviews-bugonia-jay-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185789\/","title":{"rendered":"Venice Film Festival 2025 Reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘Jay Kelly’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCiao! The 82nd annual Venice Film Festival<\/a> is underway and the stars have hit the canals, with this year\u2019s world premieres including Yorgos Lanthimos kidnap thriller \u201cBugonia,\u201d Noah Baumbach\u2019s showbiz dramedy \u201cJay Kelly,\u201d Guillermo del Toro\u2019s lavish adaptation \u201cFrankenstein,\u201d Luca Guadagnino\u2019s college campus thriller \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d and Benny Safdie\u2019s UFC biopic \u201cThe Smashing Machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNew films from Mona Fastvold, Kathryn Bigelow, Paolo Sorrentino, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, Gus Van Sant, Lucrezia Martel, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Nemes and Kaouther Ben Hania are also in the lineup. This year\u2019s jury is headed by Alexander Payne, the director of films like \u201cThe Holdovers,\u201d \u201cElection\u201d and \u201cSideways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVenice often serves as the launch of awards season, coming ahead of an onslaught of other fall festivals including Telluride, Toronto and New York that distributors use to lay the foundation for campaigning in the coming months. <\/p>\n

\n\tSee all of Variety\u2019s reviews from the 2025 Venice Film Festival below. The roundup will be updated throughout the festival to include the most recent reviews.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018No Other Choice\u2019 (dir. Park Chan-wook)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/a> <\/strong>Park Chan-wook\u2019s dazzling murder comedy is a masterclass in controlled chaos. The Korean director of \u201cOldboy,\u201d \u201cThe Handmaiden\u201d and \u201cDecision to Leave\u201d lights up the Venice competition darkly, with a deliriously entertaining satire on the derangement of being downsized.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018At Work\u2019 (dir. Val\u00e9rie Donzelli)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review: <\/a><\/strong>A writer is both inspired and exploited by the gig economy in Val\u00e9rie Donzelli\u2019s perceptive character study. Bastien Bouillon is wonderful as a shambling, self-unmade hero in this French drama, a quiet gem in Venice competition.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018After the Hunt\u2019 (dir. Luca Guadagnino)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review<\/a>:<\/strong> Luca Guadagnino\u2019s sexual-accusation drama plays like a muddled \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d with Julia Roberts as a scheming professor. The film is made with craft and intrigue, yet too much of it leaves us scratching our heads.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018Cover-Up\u2019 (dir. Laura Poitras)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/a><\/strong> Laura Poitras\u2019 enthralling portrait of Seymour Hersh makes you ask, \u201cWhere have all the investigative reporters gone?\u201d Fifty years later, the stories that Hersh reported \u2014 like the My Lai massacre \u2014 now look iconic. But the documentary captures how uncovering corruption is always a mountain to climb.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018Jay Kelly\u2019 (dir. Noah Baumbach)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/a><\/strong> George Clooney plays a version of himself in Noah Baumbach\u2019s lightly diverting but overly soft inside-Hollywood drama. The lead character is a beloved movie star just like Clooney\u2026 except for the cold dark side we don\u2019t quite believe.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018Bugonia\u2019 (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/strong><\/a> Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons descend into a riveting duel in Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 scaldingly topical kidnap thriller. The director is at the top of his visionary nihilistic game in a movie about what\u2019s happening to the world.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018Orphan\u2019 (dir. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Nemes)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/strong><\/a> L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Nemes returns with a heavy dose of sepia-tinted childhood torment. The \u201cSon of Saul\u201d director\u2019s portrait of a 12-year-old boy confronted with ugly family secrets in 1950s Soviet-occupied Hungary is handsomely mounted but narratively inert.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018Memory\u2019 (dir. Vladlena Sandu)\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRead Variety\u2019s review:<\/a> <\/strong>A haunting memorial collage crafted from a child\u2019s experience of war, Ukrainian director Vladlena Sandu\u2019s strikingly illustrated recollections of war-torn Grozny form an anguished, urgent, mesmerizing portrait of self-replicating generational trauma.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u2018La Grazia\u2019 (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)\t<\/p>\n

\n\t Read Variety\u2019s review<\/a>:<\/strong> Paolo Sorrentino opens the Venice Film Festival with a presidential drama more understated than usual for him, and better for it. Toni Servillo plays the president of Italy, who is staid to a fault (just like the movie), though with hidden depths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ciao! The 82nd annual Venice Film Festival is underway and the stars have hit the canals, with this…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":185790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[171,67,132,68,30989],"class_list":{"0":"post-185789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-venice-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115114597890693924","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}