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Wry and melancholic, “Nonostante” (or “Feeling Better”) is a ghost story of sorts – one that rather uniquely decentralizes the hereafter. Instead, filmmaker Valerio Mastandrea imagines a very present-tense purgatory, following the comings and goings and general doldrums of a group of coma patients caught between life and death. Or, more to the point, she follows the souls of this motley group, torn from everyday life but still bound to this world by intubated and inert bodies, then left to wander the halls of a long-term care facility waiting to either wake-up or expire or maybe fall in love, whichever should come first.

Chief among them – though this lead, like every other character, goes nameless – is an ornery sort played by Mastandrea himself. Now marking his second outing behind camera, Mastandrea is already a popular Italian star and lead of last year’s record-breaking smash hit “There’s Still Tomorrow.” But even...

The 81st Venice International Film Festival has announced the opening night films for its Horizons and Horizons Extra competition sections.

Nonostante, the second feature from Italian director Valerio Mastandrea (2018’s Ride) will open the Horizons competition section on August 28. The Horizons Extra competition section will kick off on August 29 with September 5, Tim Fehlbaum’s historical drama about the 1972 Munich Olympics starring Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Ben Chaplin.

September 5 focuses on a sports broadcasting team who suddenly find themselves covering a hostage crisis when the Palestinian militant organization Black September infiltrates the Olympic Village, kills two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and takes the other nine hostage. The Teacher’s Lounge breakout Leonie Benesch also co-stars. Fehlbaum is best known for his sci-fi features Hell (2011) and The Colony (2021).

September 5 was produced by BerghausWöbke Filmproduktion and Projected Picture Works, in co-production with Constantin Film and Erf Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion. Fehlbaum,...

"You can't beat them with a normal car." "Yes we can... if you drive it." Yet another racing movie on the horizon. Lionsgate Movies has unveiled an official trailer for Race For Glory: Audi vs Lancia, formerly known as simply 2 Win (all of these titles are bad). This project is an Italy / UK / Ireland co-production directed by an Italian filmmaker, and starring, co-written by, and produced by the Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio. Inspired by true events that occurred during the fierce rivalry between Germany (Audi) and Italy (Lancia) at the 1983 Rally World Championships. Race For Glory stars Riccardo Scamarcio as rally driver Cesare Fiorio, Volker Bruch as racing champion Walter Röhrl, with Katie Clarkson-Hill, Esther Garrel, Giorgio Montanini, Gianmaria Martini, Haley Bennett, and featuring Daniel Brühl as the German engineer Roland Gumpert, founder of the sports car manufacturer Apollo Automobil. This is being dumped in theaters and on VOD at...

Updated with latest: The Venice Film Festival began August 30 with opening-night movie Comandante, an Italian World War II drama, kicking off a lineup for the venerable fest’s 80th edition that includes world premieres of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, David Fincher’s The Killer, Ava DuVernay’s Origins, and new films from lightning-rod directors Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Luc Besson.

Deadline is on the ground to watch all the key films. Below is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year awarded Laura Poitras’ documentary All The Beauty and the Bloodshed its Golden Lion for best film.

Click on the film titles below to read the reviews in full, and keep checking back as we add more movies throughout the fest, which runs through September 9.

Adagio

Section: Competition

Director: Stefano Sollima

Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino,...

Your staying power with Pietro Castellitto’s genre-adjacent non-thriller Enea will depend on your appetite for well-heeled Romans blathering on tirelessly about the encroaching emptiness inside them. An overlong, windy film that purports to investigate the hypocrisy, shallowness and moral decay of wealthy Italians but feels too embedded in that world to have much bite, this is a soulless bit of self-indulgence that seems far too pleased with itself. It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.

The writer-director-lead actor’s father, Sergio Castellitto, among his many screen credits starred for three seasons in the psychotherapist role on the Italian version of In Treatment. That provides a winking in-joke for domestic audiences in his casting here as another shrink, Celeste, the title character’s despondent father, who generally has his head too deep in books to look at life.

“I feel like there’s a sort of mouth over the city, ready to eat us up,” says Enea, sophisticated young nightclubber, tennis champion and coke dealer; if anyone is trying to swallow the Eternal City whole, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mother hosts a television chat show about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the city’s most exclusive sports club, the city’s most exclusive parties and, even more thrillingly, rendezvous with the criminal classes, homespun proletarians to a man. “You need to marry Eva, have a child with her, make her happy. If you have no one to kiss, you go crazy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and family man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of work and with the company he keeps, Giordano isn’t going to last that long.