Venice Festival roundup

Corniest Biopic

Julie Taymor's Frida (the festival's opening film) was a curiosity, a biopic that combined moments of extraordinary visual grace with judderingly banal dialogue. The animated snippets – courtesy of the Brothers Quay – bring Frida Kahlo's paintings magically to life, but the device of having an international cast speaking English, with the kind of Mexican accents you hear in spaghetti Westerns, grates.

Most hermetic Hollywood movie

Hitler appears in Steven Soderbergh's intriguing but largely impenetrable Full Frontal, which isn't so much a movie as a 90-minute doodle. The setting is contemporary LA. Julia Roberts plays an actress playing a journalist – which is one of the less confusing things about the film. Nicky Katt is a hyper-charged Method actor whose stage Hitler employs the schtick of Woody Allen. David Duchovny is a sleazy film producer, Brad Pitt pops up as himself, and Catherine Keener is an alcoholic personnel manager. Shot partly on digital, partly on celluloid, the movie is full of in-jokes at the expense of Hollywood. The tag line is "Everyone needs a release", which is what the film's creepiest character says to the masseuse he asks to pleasure him, and what Soderbergh was clearly craving after shooting a big-budget studio movie such as Ocean's Eleven.

Ripley Revived

John Malkovich (who was also presenting his directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs) and Ray Winstone go some way to salvaging Liliana Cavani's half-baked Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Ripley's Game. Malkovich's sleek, reptilian Tom Ripley is very different to the character as played by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley. Winstone, meanwhile, reprises his "I'm the daddy now" routine as the uncouth English gangster who – for reasons the screenplay never makes quite clear – wants Ripley to kill most of the Russian mafia.

Most Unreliable Seducer's Manual

Dylan Kidd, a struggling New York-based writer-director, left film school a decade ago, and had been trying to make his first feature ever since. The opportunity finally came when he spotted the actor Campbell Scott in a restaurant. "I told him I had a screenplay I wanted him to read. I expected he'd tell me to send it to his agent, which is the usual brush off," he recalled. Instead, Scott exec-produced the movie and enlisted several friends – Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Berkley and Isabella Rossellini among them – to play the key supporting roles in Roger Dodger (pictured), one of the finds of this year's festival.

Scott himself gives a bravura performance as Roger, a cynical advertising copywriter and arch-seducer who tries to teach his 16-year-old nephew from Ohio how to pick up women. What starts as a battle-of-the-sexes comedy grows ever darker and more unsettling. Roger Dodger's real glory isn't the murky, Cassavetes-style camerawork, but the quickfire dialogue, which is reminiscent of the work of Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz in their pomp.