Venice Opens First: Danny Boyle Picks a Fight

By Dua Mifsud

---

The Venice Film Festival opens with Danny Boyle's *Ink* — a film about how British tabloid *The Sun* made Rupert Murdoch into the architect of right-wing media as we know it — and the choice is either very brave or very obvious depending on how cynical you're feeling at 9pm on a Tuesday. I'm feeling both.

Robert Pattinson gave GQ what might be the most Robert Pattinson interview of his career: a new role as global ambassador for Jaeger-LeCoultre, a Batman sequel somewhere in the pipeline, and a comment about perfecting his Chris Hansen voice that I've now read four times and still can't fully place. He said he's "definitely taking a vacation" at the end of this year. He said it the way someone says it who will absolutely not take a vacation. He'll be at three festivals by October. He'll be in a bespoke suit holding a very beautiful watch. He'll look like he hasn't slept since 2019 and somehow that will be the point.

Meanwhile Kenneth Lonergan — who directed *Manchester by the Sea* and has therefore earned the right to say difficult things in public — stepped in to defend Mark Ruffalo against antisemitism accusations, noting that Ruffalo has been vocal about Israel "long before the Gaza war." Whether that defence lands depends entirely on where you're reading it, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes film Twitter spiral for forty-eight hours and accomplishes nothing in any direction.

Netflix's September slate is live. Ryan Reynolds' *Green Lantern* is apparently enjoying some kind of cultural re-evaluation — Decider called it "strangely important" in 2026, which is either sincere criticism or the most generous thing anyone has ever written about that film. I lean toward the latter but I'm open to being convinced. The bar for "important" has been shifting for years and I've stopped pretending I know exactly where it sits now.

The Helsinki Love & Anarchy Film Festival unveiled its full lineup and its motto — "Together in Love and Anarchy" — which sounds like something you'd print on a tote bag at a Vivienne Westwood retrospective, but I mean that as a compliment. Festivals that refuse to take political positions are just cinemas with better canapés.

*Ink* opens Venice on Wednesday. Murdoch as subject, Boyle as director, a red carpet full of stars with politics "looming in the background" — their words, not mine.

Politics doesn't loom. It's always already in the room. The festival just decided to name it this year.