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Italian director Paolo Virzí has frequently chosen choral structures for his movies, often with excellent results, amongst which excels The Human Capital (2014), and such model is selected again for his last film, Dry (Siccità), premiered at 79th Venice Film Festival, where it also bagged a minor prize.

A dystopic Rome, without water after three rainless years and with the river Tiber completely dry, is the desolate set where the sad comedies of pathetic characters of even drier lives are staged. They run after each other, brush against each other and are relate with each other in parched days and nights filled with different sorrows, separate yet linked and intertwined, made even more dire by the start of a pandemic caused by the proliferation of ever-present bugs. And everybody is waiting for the refreshing rain that could quench the soul and clean the bodies, allowing the rebirth of whatever humanity might have remained in the hearts of the characters, like the small plant that is cared for, thrown away and salvaged by one of the main characters in the movie.

Dry is a bold movie, for the evident references to the Covid-19 pandemic, which might have easily made it banal, and an interesting one, for the cinematography and the soundtrack; the director is well supported by a cast of some of the best Italian actors and actresses, that are able to catch and keep the viewers' attention even when, and it happens frequently, the script, the product of four writers (maybe too many!), tends to run dry as well, like it reflects the torrid climate that leaves the characters gasping.

Italian cinema, both with its comedies as well as with its neo-realistic roots, historically has not given much attention to dystopic tales, much closer to other regions' filmographies, and in this context Paolo Virzí's latest movie surely represents an interesting and innovative effort. The basic idea behind the movie is good and the movie itself is enjoyable to watch and offers quite enough food for thought. Yet, it struggles to coordinate all the stories it choses to tell, that sometimes remain hanged to strings too thin and dry to allow the film narrative lifeblood to run smoothly and sufficiently nourish all the movie's characters and subplots. Hence, the director is forced to choose forced twists that, as a consequence, become obvious and that in the end take away some merit from a movie that, for the way it has been crafted, directed and acted, could have been something better and could have left the spectator with something more than just a striking balance of humor and sadness, a remarkable cinematography, with the excellent special effects of the dry Tiber and the amazing lighting, and the great, even if not homogeneous, cast's performances.

Strange are the days when a man marries a hologram, or when the first interaction many people have in the morning is with a virtual assistant with a name terribly similar to the protagonist of Titane, Julia Ducournau' second movie after the critically acclaimed Raw, to which it amply refers, from the opening scene to the Garance Marillier's character to the warped father-daughter relationship.

In these strange days, maybe it is not very less strange that a film like Titane unexpectedly and controversially wins the Palm d'Or at Cannes, the first movie since The Piano to bring the top prize to a female director.

With a titanium plate implanted in her skull after a car accident as a young girl, Alexia develops a very particular attraction to cars, that she fosters by becoming a dancer at supercharged muscle car motor shows and a magnet for their toxic machismo. After one last show, Alexia brutally kills one of her excessively intrusive admirers, before entering the car she was provocatively dancing on and having an intercourse with it. Soon after, she discovers her pregnancy and goes on a gruesome killing spree involving one of her colleagues and her party in addition to burning her parents' house after locking them in.

Now wanted by the police, Alexia changes her appearance and pose as Adrien, vanished ten years earlier as a boy. Vincent, the firefighters commander and father of the boy, distraught by his ageing, which he tries to combat with steroids, and unable to accept his son disappearance, takes Alexia in, forcing everybody to accept her as his lost son. Once again in the macho environment of extreme firefighting, Alexia struggles to keep her cover and develops a closer bond with Vincent, who badly needs it to hang on to his illusion. With her pregnancy and female nature more and more difficult to hide, Alexia leans more on Vincent, who lovingly supports her till the controversial delivery that ends the movie.

With poignant performances from Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon, Titane is not an easy movie to watch, deliberately punching the viewer in the stomach in order to speak to the mind, but is it a film worth watching in days like these, at least by those who believe art is not only the perfect balance of Botticelli's Birth of Venus or the mesmerising stillness of Leonardo's Mona Lisa but also the shattered world of Picasso's Guernica or the unbearable pain of Munch's The Scream.

Titane is the second full-feature movie of Julia Ducournau, after Raw (2016) and Junior, her debut short film at Cannes in 2011. The daughter of a gynaecologist and dermatologist, she admits that her family played a major role in her fascination with flesh and bodies, which she uses, often brutally, to represent the turbulences of lost souls. Compared to directors like David Cronenberg or David Lynch, Julia Ducournau has shown a peculiar personal style in the stories she narrates and the way she films then and is definitely a director to follow with attention.

At a time when TV series are incredibly popular, stretching sometimes over years a plot that, if properly and honestly narrated, would hardly last the canonical 90 minutes of a feature film, it is only refreshing, and a source of hope in the power and future of filmmaking, that a visionary and independent project such as Boyhood found a producer and the appreciation it deserves, with various awards collected across the world, at the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Berlin, Golden Globes amongst others.

Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, release 33 years after his death, officially holds the record for the longest movie production time in history at 48 years, but the last Welles' credited film, and few others that took years to finish, differ substantially from Boyhood which, since inception, was thought to be not only filmed but developed over a 12-year period. The only parallel that can be fairly made is with Michael Winterbottom's Everyday, shot over five years to allow for the natural ageing of the protagonists. With Boyhood, Richard Linklater realises what even one of the most innovative and visionary directors, Lars von Trier, only envisioned with his Dimension project, launched in 1991 as a film to be shot for 3' every year over a 33-year period, with a few days of shooting each year, only to be abandoned after only 6 years and released as a 27-minute short film in 2010.

Linklater instead was able to reach the end of his project, and thankfully so since the final output is one of the most significant movies of the last few years and leaves an indelible mark on filmmaking. Filmed only few days every year, Boyhood was a true work-in-progress, as the script was only loosely structured at the beginning and left open to be filled with elements of the actors' lives, such as the family background of Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and the director himself, as well as adapted to the natural growth of the actors and the world around. Boyhood follows Mason, a boy from Texas beautifully and naturally played by Austin-born Eller Coltrane, from age six till he goes to college twelve years later.

With the phantom of The Truman Show hovering above Boyhood, the film is not only a come-of-age excellent movie, as it might be viewed with a superficial eye, but a very delicate and yet deep study of life as it unfolds for most people, and this reflects in the natural involvement that the audience experiences during the almost three hours of the film and the familiarity that oozes from the characters and their developments.

Richard Linklater is not new to film projects that have a vision that goes beyond a short-term horizon, as proven by the (so far) trilogy of Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), featuring as well Ethan Hawke. However, as challenging as that project was, it was still a relatively traditional series, or sequels, while Boyhood is unprecedented and probably the closest thing to the adherence of life and art to have reached the silver screen.