It is the film of the show and will be one of the films of the year. Universal is planning to try to take it to the Oscars and, at least as far as lead actor Adrien Brody is concerned, there seems to be a good chance. It is the story of an invented architect, a Jew from the Bauhaus school who, having survived the concentration camps, arrives in America and there begins the second part of his life, between grandiose works and the legacy of what happened to him. 

How the trauma suffered enters into art and life, and how architecture is told (as a great undertaking of men struggling to shape something immense), is what makes this film exceptional. The soft air, the staging with expressive colours and a tone both quiet and full of rhythm and tension are a real achievement. Brady Corbet is a creature of the Venice Film Festival: they are the ones who discovered and enhanced him, and with this film he becomes one of the world's great auteurs.

There is one incontrovertible fact about this film: it is a work of cinema craftsmanship of the highest level. There is a small 1950s Mexican village reconstructed in Cinecittà, lit, filmed and composed in its shots according to a pictorial iconography of the time (Edward Hopper but also the hyperrealists) that is incredible. Not because of its verisimilitude, but because it is a place shaped to say something about the person moving inside, it is not realistic but expressionistic. 

The protagonist is a man looking for someone to connect with deeply, dazed and hallucinated by alcohol and drugs. This someone finds him and with him he goes in search of a plant that apparently can enable telepathy. The visual effects, the style of storytelling and the work with Daniel Craig on the performance (the best of his life, no doubt) are first-rate. Queer is a work of art of our time, and as such it is savage and brutal. It may not please, but it cannot leave one indifferent. The jury decided not to give it an award, and that is a fault they will have to live with.

The film that won the Golden Lion is a great film by Pedro Almodóvar. A patently senile one, which does not have the constant visual flare-ups and provocative acting of his better-known works, but it is a film of dialogue, of people thinking about death (their own and that of mankind). It sounds like something terrible and depressing, but instead the strength lies in how Almodóvar tells the story of these people walking towards the end, destroyed by cancer but also aware of climate change, refusing to live as if they were going to the gallows. 

 ‘There are many ways to live a tragedy’ is the key phrase uttered by Julianne Moore, but more than anything else the visual choices speak. Because, like all great film artists, even in a very talky film, Pedro Almodóvar says the most interesting things with images. For example when he makes a passing not a sad moment of resigned acceptance of the end, but a moment of triumph, through an almost pictorial composition.

Unregulated South American cinema about a drunken jockey on whom the underworld has staked everything and who fails the race. Persecuted, on the run, in love and addicted to drugs, he must become a woman and then become a man again to come to his senses. It's all laughs in this 90-minute film, which combines the visual dimension of Wes Anderson with the humour of Aki Kaurismäki but is at the same time strongly Argentinean. 

It is by Luis Ortega, and features a pair of phenomenal actresses: Mariana Di Girolamo (already admired in Ema) and Úrsula Corberó (seen in The House of Paper). It is refreshing cinema that makes humour, says intelligent things and blurs the boundaries between good and bad, sexuality, triumph and defeat, to tell of a person who saves himself by understanding women.

Lasting only 60 minutes, this folly by Takeshi Kitano is an exercise in style that could only succeed for him. In the first 30 minutes the story is told of a hired killer, who receives assignments through anonymous envelopes, is framed by the police and forced to infiltrate the underworld to act as an informer. In the second 30 minutes, the exact same story is told, repeating it almost scene by scene, but in a totally demented manner. 

As always, when Takeshi Kitano decides to make people laugh with his goofy humour, you can be sure that you will laugh a lot, but this film is also the best synthesis of his entire career, which has always been divided between very serious films and a demented humour that reaches heights of intentional stupidity that no one else can imagine.

This is a series by Alfonso Cuarón starring Kevin Kline and Cate Blanchett about a woman who receives a book at home that contains the story of something that happened to her decades before and that she has kept hidden. Who did it and why is the whole point. Disclaimer will go on Apple TV+ later this year and those who see it will discover, for the umpteenth time, that Alfonso Cuarón is a staging genius. 

This story, which takes place on two timelines (the present and the past of that story), is a film of light, in which every event takes place at a precise moment of the day because it has to have that light there, and in which a drowning seems to have come out of a Turner painting. The abysses of people are always expressed by the environments, the houses, the towns, the beaches and this incredible air you breathe, full of sex and the will to live. There is a great plot as in all series, but the relationship with the natural sunlight is what creates a mood of ecstasy.

This is the second TV series that impressed in Venice, based on the novel by Antonio Scurati. It recounts the first five years of Fascism, from its birth to the seizure of power and the Matteotti murder. Luca Marinelli plays Mussolini and it was directed by Joe Wright with his usual passion for furious editing as a way of saying everything that words cannot express. The choice made was the boldest possible: to make Mussolini talk to the audience, to make him break the fourth wall to confide, joke and pleasure. 

This is a series that never denies the horrors, but makes Mussolini likeable, almost likeable. And the Italians liked him, and how! The successful feat is that it can both explain what was attractive and show Mussolini's nefariousness, moral abjection, betrayals, but also his total incapacity. More than a giant, he is a dwarf that events have brought to power. The most daring, risky and arrogant Italian production of the year, and also the most successful.