Venice 2025: Olivier Assayas lost to the Kremlin and a Jarmusch Jimusch more refined than ever
In competition at the Mostra, Olivier Assayas revealed his adaptation of the Mage du Kremlin, attempted fresco to the antipodes of radical minimalism of the new Jarmusch, Father Mother Sister Brother.
Jude Law in Vladimir Putin: this is one of the major attractions announced in Mage you Kremlinadaptation by Olivier Assayas (With a helping hand to Emmanuel Carrère’s script) of Giuliano Da’s bestseller, weaving fiction and real facts around recent Russian history, from the fall of the USSR to the affirmation of Putinian authoritarianism. All told from behind the scenes of power by a gray eminence, the title “mage”, played by Paul Dano in the film. Well, and Jude Law, then? The actor confirms with this royal role his recent taste for the portraits of men of power or tyrants (the Young Pope From Sorrentino, Henry VIII, Captain Crochet …) and it must be recognized that he has pretty well faded certain expressions characteristic of the President of the Russian Federation, in particular this threatening way of pinching his lips, or this look which punctures his interlocutors, even if the fact that the film is fully played in English seriously limits the feeling of “veracity” of the reconstruction.
Putin is in any case as secondary in this Russian novel. Paul Dano is the hero, and the very monocorded tone that the actor uses during the long confession which serves as a red thread for the film does not help this one to take off: literal and very scrupulous adaptation of the novel, Laugh stomach you kremlin is a succession of didactic and talkative scenes, interspersed with blacksmith and boxes indicating which historical event will be approached during the following twenty minutes (orange revolution, annexation of Crimea …), a collection of illustrative scenes where the main ambition of the characters seems to be to formulate the final aphorism on power, politics or infinite mysteries of the Russian soul. Assayas did not find an angle to his film, nor in a way to translate cinematographically the words of Da Empoli on the immense underground power of the spin doctors. Nor does he find the energy of a big film-dossier which made his Carloswhich had for him to play the card of thriller and action, rather than that of cozy conversations between gentlemen in suit and tie. We sometimes have the impression in front Laugh stomach you kremlin to look at a digest (lasting 2h36 all the same) of a standardized mini-series, responding to the cannons of a globalized and impersonal storytelling.
Laugh stomach you kremlinby Olivier Assayas, with Paul Dano, Jude Law, Alicia Vikander… at the cinema on January 21, 2026.
Cinema in room
Before Assayas, another filmmaker of the same generation and the same universe as him (nourished with rock, avant-garde and new wave), Jim Jarmuschpresented his new film, Father Mother Sister Brothersix years after the laborious zombie comedy The Dead don’t die. In the fresco like Assayas, Jarmusch clearly prefers the little end of the Lorgnette, a cinema in bedroom, minimalist in the last degree, sleek like never, more zen you die. It is a film with sketches, as often in the author of Night on Earth et Coffee and Cigarettes. The first segment, Fathertells the visit of a brother and a sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) to their old father (Tom Waits), living in the depths of New Jersey. Mother Depicted the annual meeting, around a cup of tea and delicious cookies, a Collet mother mounted with Dublin (Charlotte Rampling) and her two daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps). And Sister Brother is devoted to the Parisian stay of a brother and a sister (Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore), who came to empty the apartment of their deceased parents.
One of the principles of the film is to organize more or less audible, more or less perceptible echoes, between each of the sketches. Old family photos on a buffet, debates on tea, coffee or water, the boredom of the family appointments to which one cannot cut, and long silences allowing to probe the distance which has settled between the members of a family over time. With a little (a little bit) of absurd humor to enhance everything. The film seems first as empty as the banal conversations that the characters hold there, as the pieces they occupy, but it would be wrong to blame him, since this is what Jarmusch is looking for: a form of absence, subtraction, a poetry with the Richard Brautigan, a cinema that would be like the surface of the lake that Tom Waits contemplates in his bicoque: Stall, Mineral. You will have to be satisfied, be satisfied to look at the beautiful Volvo Vintage by Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore, at the end of the film, ride a long time in the streets of Paris. Father Mother Sister Brother is a sketch with a line so fine that it is almost invisible. As if the inkwell of Jarmusch was soon empty, but that he wanted to demonstrate that we can still make a drawing with three times nothing.
Father Mother Sister Brotherfrom Jim Jarmusch, with Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling… in the cinema on January 7, 2026.
