San Bartolomeo II, Venice, May 2012

A follow-up post on the Venice Film Festival, from The Guardian: 

The storm arrived at the Venice film festival on Monday lunchtime. Thunder cracked, bunting billowed and the walkways ran with water. If festival director Alberto Barbera required a fitting backdrop for his promised tougher, more urgent slate of pictures, the conditions could not have been more perfect. The mood had been set by back-to-back morning screenings of Something in the Air, a heady tale of leftist insurrection, and Disconnect, in which cyber-culture was cast as the villain. The day's other films told tales of abandoned children, the Libyan uprising and the parlous state of the US housing market. Even inside the cinemas, there was little shelter from the storm... "Instead of trying to become bigger, like most other festivals, we are going the other way by becoming more relevant and exclusive," Barbera explained this week. "There is no automatic entry to Venice – not even for established film-makers...Elsewhere, there have been mixed fortunes for the two most hotly-anticipated pictures at this year's festival. Where Paul Thomas Anderson's 1950s-set drama The Master made its debut to rapturous applause, Terrence Malick's To the Wonder – an elliptical account of a romance turned sour – bowed out to a chorus of boos.It remains to be seen whether the response will hurt To the Wonder's chances of winning the festival's crowning Golden Lion award this weekend: the director's previous work, The Tree of Life, weathered a similar barrage at last year's Cannes film festival and still went on to take the top prize. (UPDATE: The Golden Lion was won by Pieta directed by Kim Ki-duk)