A racy period drama featuring royal palace intrigue in 18th-century England and an autobiographical look at 1970s Mexico made their debut on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.
" The Favourite," by Greek-born director Yorgos Lanthimos, stars Olivia Colman as Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland, and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as two rival, scheming court insiders who both end up in bed with the monarch.
The film shows Anne as a fragile woman who "doesn't know if anybody genuinely loves her" and who has "too much power and too much time on her hands," said Colman, who is also due to play Queen Elizabeth II in the upcoming third series of " The Crown."
Unusually for a period drama, its dialogues are filled with profanities and references to sex, and, through the use of slow motion and wide-angle lenses, it casts a satirical, grotesque look on court shenanigans from 300 years ago.
The director said the film is based on true events.
"[Sometimes we feel] as though we invented sex, but we didn't, it's been around for a long time [and] it was awfully fun having sex with Emma Stone," Colman quipped in a press conference with Lanthimos and her co-stars.
"Roma" is a return to Spanish-language film-making for Alfonso Cuaron, five years after the 3D Hollywood blockbuster "Gravity," which also debuted in Venice and won him an Oscar as best director.
Shot in black and white, partly in an exact replica of Cuaron's childhood home, it is an ode to female resilience which also touches upon the issues of class divisions and political violence in early 1970s Mexico.
The central character, inspired by Cuaron's childhood nanny, is played by Yalitza Aparicio, a non-professional actress whose performance wowed critics and put her in good stead for a festival prize.