Golden Lions, Dead Cuts: Cinema's Week in Full
Dances With Wolves gets a 4K director's cut premiering at Locarno, and there is something genuinely moving about a film from 1990 being trusted to a new generation through a Swiss festival rather than an algorithm.
George Clooney is getting a Golden Lion at Venice, which is the kind of announcement that makes you feel two things simultaneously — genuine warmth for a man who has been quietly excellent across four decades, and a faint suspicion that lifetime achievement honours exist partly to remind everyone that the lifetime isn't over yet. He earned it. *Michael Clayton* alone is enough. The fact that he's one of three people ever nominated in six Oscar categories is the kind of trivia that sounds invented until you look it up. Venice made the right call.
Meanwhile, Kevin Costner is doing something more interesting than being celebrated — he's being restored. *Dances With Wolves* gets a 4K director's cut premiering at Locarno, and there is something genuinely moving about a film from 1990 being trusted to a new generation through a Swiss festival rather than an algorithm. The Locarno programmers talk about "cinema of the past with an eye to new generations," which sounds like a press release until you consider that most twenty-year-olds have never seen *Dances With Wolves* at any size. Now they might. That matters more than any streaming drop.
The story I keep turning over, though, is older. *The Prisoner* — the 1967 British series, Patrick McGoohan, surrealist, politically furious, brilliantly unresolved — ended with a finale so chaotic and confrontational that its lead star had to physically go into hiding from enraged viewers. Not go quiet on social media. Actually hide. The show asked audiences to sit inside a mystery without receiving the satisfying key to unlock it, and people lost their minds. Half a century later, that finale is considered one of the boldest things ever put on British television. The fans who wanted McGoohan's head eventually became the people who understood why he did it.
There's a version of that story playing out right now with the *Supergirl* wreckage — DC apparently ran a "bakeoff" between Craig Gillespie's cut and their own, chose their version, watched it underperform, and now everyone is writing postmortems. The detail that kills me is not the box office. It's that the trouble was visible months before release and the machine kept moving anyway. That's not a creative failure. That's a structural one.
Some films survive their institutional betrayal. Others become cautionary footnotes.
The Golden Lion is for the ones who threaded the needle.
