Harry Styles, his affair and the cannibals of America

These are the questions about the thriller "Don't Worry Darling" that have been moving the web for months: Did director Olivia Wilde and her leading actor Harry Styles really only meet on the set? Or is the new guy responsible for Shia LaBeouf not getting the lead role? Why is a director allowed to have an affair with her leading actor, but a director not with his leading lady? Why did the film's female star, Florence Pugh, gushed about Wilde as her "idol" on Instagram when filming began, but then started posting less and less? Actually, every star is contractually obliged to permanently advertise their upcoming films on social media. what happened there?

All these important questions are not answered here. But they show how important "Don't Worry Darling" is to the production company Warner Bros., otherwise the PR department wouldn't have put so much effort into getting the network excited. Unlike upcoming Warner hopes Black Adam and Barbie and Shazam, Darling actually wants to say something. The only question is: what?

We are in America's Roaring Fifties, when men rode to work in big sleds in the morning, women did a little housework first and then soaked up cool cocktails and hot gossip in the country club. You expect Doris Day to turn the corner at any moment.

We're also in a sprawling cottage community, and the only weird thing about it is that it seems to be in the middle of the desert, like Los Alamos, where the Americans developed the first atomic bomb. (A Venice documentary, A Compassionate Spy, tells the story of the only one of the spies who leaked the atomic formula to the Soviets who didn't get caught).

The remoteness doesn't bother Alice (Florence Pugh), who just wants to make life as comfortable as possible for her husband Jack (Harry Styles) once he gets home from his heavy work (which she doesn't even know exactly what he does). . It's as if she's memorized the infamous "Handbook for the Good Housewife" from the dystopian film The Stepford Wives.

The place in "Darling" is not called Stepford, but Victory - like the mysterious company where all men seem to make their good money. Their boss, a charismatic Steve Jobs guy, throws occasional parties for his employees, where he gets them in the mood for soon to rule the world. So everything is in order, even black people are already integrated in an exemplary manner – and yet it is precisely a black housewife who makes Alice suspect that everything is not as it seems.

Of course Alice is not called Alice for nothing and so she goes down the rabbit hole. What she discovers is a cross between "Stepford" and "Truman Show". Yes, Olivia Wilde's second directorial effort has something to say about the dangers of America First nationalism and emancipation rollback and getting lost in a megaverse. One is startled, shudders a little and moves on to the next film in Venice.

The second Warner film on the Lido gets to your kidneys more. "Bones and All" is initially an idiomatic expression, as in "He ate the whole fish, bones and all"), but it takes on a much darker meaning in Luca Guadagnino's film: 18-year-old Maren can't stay anywhere long - because she is cannibal. Wherever her appetite has just overwhelmed her, she has to leave quickly. It's a lonely life, she can only confide in people of her own species - of which there are quite a few, they recognize each other by their smell and have the iron law not to eat each other.

You can read a lot into “Bones”. It's a puberty story about the girl who feels she doesn't belong anywhere. Maren (Taylor Russell) and her diner, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), experience the kind of loneliness that used to embrace gay people before coming out; It's not for nothing that Guadagnino became famous five years ago with "Call Me By Your Name". And of course it's a road movie through America, in which its two blood-soaked characters still exude the most humanity. That's what's really frightening about this film, its dark romance that you can hardly resist.

"The Banshees of Inisherin" is at first glance a film about rustic guys in remote areas, like the Ealing company liked to shoot in the 1950s. You can't be much more remote than Inisherin, the small island off the Irish coast, you're in your early twenties and don't let the Irish civil war raging on the mainland disturb you. It all begins when the fiddler Colm breaks the friendship with the dairy farmer Pádraic - for reasons never fully understood - and it's not long before the local banshee predicts that there will soon be two deaths on the island.

Martin McDonagh, the Londoner with Irish roots, who landed one of the biggest surprise hits in a long time with "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" five years ago (also premiered in Venice), revels in the Irish soul, in whiskey, harshness and hillbilly. It's a delight to watch Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon walk face-to-face with Irish stubbornness. And you begin to realize that this Inisherin is Ireland in miniature, where decades-old friends can become implacable enemies for petty reasons, and the only chance of survival is to leave the country.