Werner Herzog Wins Venice: Cannes Didn't Deserve It

There is a version of Werner Herzog that would have submitted *Bucking Fastard* to Cannes, accepted the polite applause, and gone home. He didn't. He took it to Venice instead, and if you've spent any time understanding how Herzog operates — which is to say, as a man who has never once made a decision based on what the room wanted — this makes complete sense. Cannes is a performance of prestige. Venice, at least this year, seems to be where the actual work is landing.

The film stars Rooney Mara and Kate Mara as twins, and the casting alone is the kind of move that sounds either genius or deeply chaotic until you remember that Herzog has always been most interesting when he's working at the edge of what an actor thinks they can do. "I've always managed to get the very, very best out of my actors," he told IndieWire, which in Herzog's vocabulary is not a boast — it's a statement of methodology, like explaining gravity. You don't argue with it.

What's happening at this festival season, if you're watching the shape of it rather than the individual films, is a quiet insurrection against the kind of cinema that explains itself. Alex Gibney's *Musk* runs 235 minutes and apparently doesn't apologise for a single one of them. Eric Goode's *Monsters of God* on HBO just delivered a documentary finale so precise — "sometimes it's only the bars that separate the guard from the prisoner" — that it makes most scripted television look embarrassed. Aaron Taylor-Johnson's heist film, 96 minutes, no fat, is Netflix's biggest HBO Max hit right now because somebody finally remembered that lean is its own kind of ambition.

And then there's Ester Expósito circling *Stink Eye*, a Colombian-Spanish co-production that is either the beginning of a very smart post-*Elite* pivot or confirmation that she already knew exactly what she was doing the whole time. My money is on the latter. She has always looked like someone who read the contract twice.

The throughline across all of it — Herzog's twins, Gibney's four hours of Elon, Goode's alligator men, Taylor-Johnson's heist — is that the films worth watching right now are being made by people who decided the audience could keep up.

They're usually right.