You can always spot the moment when these great festivals lose their steam. The hustle bustle roles on to greener pastures as the business side of things comes to an end. Those who keep track of such things note that at Venice this tends to happen a little earlier than elsewhere.

This festival is the oldest in the world, it's credited for having shown its pretenders exactly how it's done, and yet Venice has slipped from the rankings in recent times, and this is largely down to the time of year it takes place. It might seem, at times, that the Academy Awards are a 365 day affair. Indeed, L.A.'s most coveted envelopes are usually still waiting to be licked when news of "the next Little Miss Sunshine" is heard from Sundance. However, by the time the movie world descends on the Lido, things are genuinely about to heat up. 

Toronto, Telluride and, most recently, New York have become robust contenders for awards season's hottest titles but it's been Venice's genteel principles which have held it back. Putting last year's opener- and subsequent Oscar smash- Gravity to one side, the commercialism of other top brass festivals is really yet to take off. It's a problem for the old dame, no doubt about it, and yet for punters and critics at least, it remains this festival's greatest charm. The commercial side simply pales in comparison to what goes on in other parts of the world and the short ques and manageable program are testament to that. It's because of all this that Venice stands apart but,as evidence suggests, it's the exact same reason why it's losing its draw.

Keaton and Norton in Birdman

Even without a cathartic standout moment this year, the standard has been strong. Birdman slayed critics for all the right reasons and, despite leaving empty handed here on Saturday night, will surely glide into awards season feeling battle hardened and tall. 99 homes showed us that Ramin Bahrani still has a few more gears to climb; Hungry Hearts subverted our indie expectations and, somewhat controversially, went home with both of the acting gongs. The Italians examined politics, the mafia and mamas, as they tend to do, and The Look of Silence (winner of the Grand Jury prize) confirmed that director/monk Joshua Oppenheimer is taking documentary making into pastures unknown. Some of these will surely kit out their mantelpieces in the coming months and yet the festival's big winner- and for what it's worth, the best that this writer has seen- will probably not get a look in in at all.

To say that Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence was the most uplifting picture in competition says a lot about what we've seen this past week. It's a masterpiece of absurdist comedy which packs plenty of laughs to go with its human tenderness and monstrous hammer blow at the end. A fine winner if ever there was one, but the organizers must still be stewing over the titles which didn't show. Eyelashes are alleged to have been fluttered in the direction of David Fincher (Gone Girl) and Paul Thomas Anderson in the last few months. PTA picked up best director here two years ago for The Master so it must have been a prickly one to swallow for the selection committee to see Inherent Vice join Fincher and co at New York's ever growing Autumn contender.

Andersson picks up the Golden Lion (Reuters: Tony Gentile)

With the bloated whale that is Toronto, alongside Telluride and now New York, the early Autumn market has become increasingly competitive in recent years and if it is to keep its status, this godfather (apologies) of the festival circuit will surely need to up its game. This means a greater emphasis on commerce; on markets; and perhaps a bigger scale too. This would surely mean a move to a new home away from the decadence of the Lido's Palazzo Del Cinema and Excelsior hotel. Necessary, for sure, but no doubt a terrible shame.

These surroundings, all things considered, remain heavy with class. Compared to the dog-eat-dog queue system and cavernous screening rooms in Cannes, the theaters here are simply stunning; the press rooms and conference halls too. Movie stars glide off shiny Vapparettos as clammy journalists with little to no Italian (guilty) shuffle awkwardly next to pristine suited men. They say the city's sinking but if it's bourgeois spectacle you're after, this grand event still stands on its own. Cannes strives on commercialism and controversy just as much as its caliber; Berlin prides itself on a more populist setup and scale; but this place has managed to hold onto something which the cream of movieland seems to have forgotten: Its principles.

Morning press screening at the Salle Grande

The city holds a place in the cinematic pantheon for a number of reasons. Indeed, many film makers have found strange things in its endless narrow alleyways and chalky blue canals- Dirk Bogarde flaking on the beach in Visconti's Death in Venice; Donald Sutherland losing his marbles in Roeg's Don't Look Now or, for readers of a certain age, a particularly spooky level of Tomb Raider 2. The beauty of such Unesco quilted surroundings almost borders on the tedious at times. Stanley Kubrick once wrote that making a film can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park. You feel that even the most bog-standard photographer would capture something splendid under similar circumstances here. 

Will these dignified old school aesthetics be enough to keep em coming? Or is the old dog just not cut out for such new tricks? Time, of course, will tell, but we won't be barging the life-rafts just yet.

Roy Andersson closes out (for now) his absurdist trilogy on 'what it's like to be a human being' with another masterfully crafted series of deadpan, drip-dried, comedy vignettes. Armed with a characteristic jet black wit; the odd unexpected hook to the stomach; and an impeccable eye for cinematic detail; the 71 year old director has found a warm defiant humanity amdst all that overcast Scandinavian gloom. 

We open, as they do in that part of the world, with a few short gags about death. We see a daft looking fella take in a natural history exhibit; and a canteen deciding what to do with a dead man's food; before happening upon our two downtrodden leads. Sam and Jonathon (Nils Westblom & Holger Anderson respectfully) are a pair of traveling joke shop salesmen who stumble about town, flogging their wares. They appear relatively chuffed with their current haul, all things considered, but no one else in town seems to feel the same.

This act provides a point of focus from scene to scene but Andersson's films have always been more of a variety show. We get a tremendous musical bar scene in 1943; a hands-on dance instructor groping one of her troupe;  and a cavalry filled cafe as prince Charles XII heads off to war. We might laugh at, instead of with, these miserable souls, but the real shake of watching this film is that, like it or not, you see yourself up there too. 

Anderson hones a particular brand of humour which seems both ornate and absurd. Had they been born on that particularly chilly peninsula, it's the sort of stuff you might expect the Pythons to have done. However, unlike the Python's (all due respect), Anderson happens to be a top level aestheticist too. His lovingly hand crafted sets express a mad, tragic gloom. His colour palette recalls over-boiled cabbage and his cast look like they've never seen a warm sunny day. 

It's all counterpointed beautifully to the marching tones of Glory Glory Hallelujah. It's a simple and effective underscore, which plays throughout, but Andersson uses it in a way to provide the film's last blow. Without giving too much away, the director brazenly holds a mirror up to any lingering colonialist guilt but also to those who remain blissfully ignorant to it. The image alone is an absolute jaw-dropper; but the sweep from humour to depravity is utterly profound.

The director has managed just 6 feature films in the last 45 years but he assured us this week that, thankfully, Pigeon will not be the last. With this trilogy he has shown a standard of technique and artistry which is rarely seen on screen. Funny; life affirming; tragic; sublime. In fewer words: A masterpiece. The Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion might have just turned a snotty shade of green. 

 

After one of the most bizarre career slumps in recent memory, David Gordon Green is back doing what we all knew he did best. This isn't the one-stop return to earlier glories which we hoped it might have been but it does represent another finely taken stride.

Manglehorn stars a resurgent 74 year old Al Pacino as a lonesome locksmith in love with a cat. He lives a solitary life in his rundown home; writing endless letters to an unresponsive old flame, while his wealthy son stays distant. He passes the time playing slots and eating dinner in fluorescent lit bars and sterile restaurants until a friendly bank clerk finds a way to squeeze into his life.

It's an enjoyable watch thanks to Pacino's old pro performance, and it does bare Gordon Green's quiet Texan stamp, but a vague, nagging unresolved feeling remains that we never really knew this man. When used well, ambiguity can be one of cinema's most powerful weapons, but Green's super stylized rhythyms here work more to distract then enhance and a pretentious grand reveal late on does little to excite.

Green displays some of his more recent, less palatable tastes here- heavy dreamlike editing; an overuse of monologue-but he has returned to sort of scrap yard film making which once saw him hailed as American independent cinema's next big star. With Manglehorn, alongside Joe and Prince Avalanche (prize winners over the last two years in Venice and Berlin respectfully), however, the Texan is certainly back on track.  

Manglehorn is not the George Washington successor we still find ourselves pining for today, but it does suggest that we might not have to hold our breath much longer.

Tahir Rahim stars as an Armenian man who is stricken from his family home in Mardin, Turkey at the beginning of the Armenian genocide. We follow his brutal odyssey around the globe as he attempts to re unite with his two twin daughters. It doesn't have the class of Fatih Akin's earlier efforts by any means but this is still an ambitious, wide reaching, old school, sweeping epic which keeps the director's humanist passions burning at its core. 

The story charts a classic hero's quest. We meet Nazaret Manoogian as he is lifted from his home and separated from his loving wife and daughters. Nazaret must first survive gruelling labour and death squads in the Mesopotanian dessert before tragedy, and luck, intervene. Our hero finds work in a soap factory nearby as the situation gradually begins to settle down but when news of his daughters finally does arrive, he sets on a rather epic search to find them.



Heroes on such quests often harbor an ability which separates him from the rest, but Nazaret's, at first glance, doesn't seem like much of an ability at all. At one point early on, in the Mesopotamian dessert, he and a group of Armenian men are captured by a Turkish death squad and most of the group are slaughtered. Nazaret gets off with just a bad neck wound but it is enough to rob him of his voice. In other circumstances this would be a hindrance and, of course, it often holds him back, but Akin twists it the other way, turning our hero into a sort of silent witness to this tragically untold story. We watch an empire crumble into a thousand warring voices, but it is the man who cannot speak who guides us.

Many critics, it would seem, have been disappointed by the film's obvious efforts for wider appeal. Nazaret and the other Armenians speak English despite the fact that in the film, as far as I can tell, three other languages are spoken. The violence is shocking but it is painted in broad bloody strokes and, it must be said, this is not the only instance of an uncharacteristic heavy hand.

Simon Arkabian- one of the films leads, of Armenian descent- stated that this is not just the first film which  tackles the subject to have a potential for wide appeal; it is the first film to tackle the genocide full stop. It's difficult to say whether we are given a true sense of what went on but it is still an old-school gripping watch. We can only hope The Cut will not be the defining film on this atrocity, but if it can pry open that floodgate, even the tiniest bit, then it is surely worthwhile. We assume better is still to come from Fatih Akin, but his latest still demands a watch.

Three days into this year's Venice film festival and things are finally starting to clear. The San Polo alleyways seem that bit less narrow; the fruit and veg guys that bit easier to find. Over in the Salle Darsena, however, we found Documentary film maker Joshua Oppenheimer clearing up some smoke of a much darker kind.

Oppenheimer pillaged film festivals and newspaper copy the world over last year with The Act of Killing, his horrifying expose of Indonesia's U.S. supported slaughter of roughly one million supposed communists. Using his status as an American film maker, he convinced the aging death squad killers to get in front of the camera and re-enact the atrocities. The results were harrowing; unique; sensational. His follow up was shot a few years before that film's release, and it serves as the correct accompaniment to it.

The Look of Silence follows a local spectacles salesman called Adi. We learn that Adi lost his brother to the old regime but, having been born after the slaughter, he has been somewhat blinded to the horrors. Adi's brother's murder, we learn, was infamous amongst the militia men for the sheer scale of its brutality and so it was only a matter of time before it came on Oppenheimer's radar. When he eventually learned of this horrendous event, the director decided to track Adi down, reveal it to him, and then document the brave man's efforts to confront the men involved. 

Headstrong, dignified Adi only seeks some modicum of emotional resolution, so he calls upon those responsible armed with just his optical prescription test. The murderers themselves wish to see things clearer, not knowing that this unassuming optician seeks the same thing too; a central metaphor so neat it's almost difficult to believe.

Praise for this film will not be difficult to find so I will finish on a far less fashionable point. It can be difficult to get a real idea of the level of exploitation a documentary film has reached. How those involved put themselves in such positions of risk when the film maker, it would seem, has so little to lose? Adi was present in the press conference, looking shell-shocked but dignified, fielding questions on his family and loss in the most decadent room imaginable. The man has had to uproot his family and leave his country as Oppenheimer sits next to him, practically beaming, happily referencing his recent brush with the academy awards. 

His films, of course, will do an enormous amount of good, but there was just something there which did not sit right. The final question came when a reporter asked what his next project would be. The director stayed silent until the moderator repeated it: Oppenheimer then grinned from ear to ear "I heard, I bowed". Very few films will ever achieve what these remarkable documentaries have done, but perhaps we should look a little closer, that glistening transparency might just be murkier than we think.

Lets take a moment and think back to Venice 2003 and we find a young director from Mexico with his first feature in the English language. It's a gloomy examination of human suffering titled 21 Grams. Skip forward to today and we're back on the Lido. In the time which passed, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has become one of the most respected directors in world cinema and, up until this week, his films have followed 21 Grams' same gloomy line. However, if the director’s career to this point has played to the bleak tones of a sinking Titanic quintet, his latest outing walks to the brash beat of free flowing jazz.

Birdman stars Michael Keaton as Rikkan Thomson; a goofy and deranged version of Keaton himself. Rikkan is a franchise actor of a certain age who hopes to reclaim artistic clout by writing, starring and directing in a Broadway play. We find him pouring his heart, soul and wallet into the production but of course, it’s driving him mad. The trope might sound a touch cliche, but what separates Birdman’s story arc from others which have come before is that our hero is haunted by the superhero role he's trying to leave behind. Voices are heard; powers envisioned; and everyone around him helps to twist the psychological knife.

Ed Norton lays waste to all sorts of scenery as one of those talented thesp-with-integrity types. Emma Stone does the rehab daughter; Zach Galifianakis does the long suffering agent; Andrea Riseborough does the want-away lover; each playing their respective parts in Keaton’s mental demise. 

An wild marvel of raw technical achievement; the film plays out entirely within the confines of the play’s production and, roughly, within the confines of the theatre itself. The setting is uncomfortably tight and claustrophobic, and it’s in these confines that master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki plays his greatest trick card. 

There are some flashy Saul Bass looking credits at the beginning and a brief dream sequence late on but, apart from that, this 119m film is presented as one single flowing take. There’s a bit of scene stitching afoot- some good, some bad- but for a full-on jarring single-shot experience, Birdman emphatically pulls it off. Cameras float through windows in an otherworldly fashion, the story arc loosely jumping and skipping through time.

Add to all that the surrealist lighting; the flawless choreography; and the rattle of Antonio Sanchez' jazz drum score and you have a film not just of visual sophistication, but a remarkably singular experience too. 

In 2003 this fine director gave us a film with its eyes pointed down. 

He has returned this week with a boot through the saloon door. Big swingin' dick and all.