Venice's Wall of Shame Names Its Meanest Critic — SkimNews
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- Ridateci i soldi is a chipboard wall erected next to the Palazzo del Cinema at Venice, where attendees scribble withering complaints about films under the festival's blessing, a 30-year tradition that serves as an institutional anti-hype mechanism.
- Festival director Alberto Barbera personally hands out the Coppa Codacons — a wooden sculpture carved by artist Ferdinando Codognotto and sponsored by Italy's consumer watchdog — to the writer of the meanest diatribe each year.
- Cristian Poletti won this year's prize for a review of Andrea Pallaoro's romantic drama The Echo Chamber (scripted by the late Bernardo Bertolucci), suggesting the film might be better titled "The Echo Bathroom" given the abundance of bathing scenes, and likening it to a shampoo advert.
- Gianni Ippoliti, a former football referee and TV presenter who created the wall in the late 1990s, acts as the prize's one-man jury, explaining he launched it in protest against reviews becoming overly enthusiastic.
- Targets on this year's wall included Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard (multiple spoonerism-based wordplays), Paul Schrader's The Basics of Philosophy (accusations too slanderous to print), the DAU Russian biopic (attacked over reports of behind-the-scenes coercion), Luca Guadagnino's seven-hour documentary Joie de Vivre, and a plea that Danny Boyle "please make another movie about drugs."
- Italy-based British critic John Bleasdale attributes the more combative Italian audience response to a cultural tradition where boos count as a legitimate expression of taste — something he says would be unthinkable at Cannes or Berlin, and one prominent example: Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin was booed at Venice.
- Practical gripes also filled the wall — rising costs of accreditation, water taxis, and local accommodation ("Maybe by 2030 we'll have to pay for the oxygen we breathe"), plus queue lengths, uncomfortable seats, and ceiling lights coming on mid-screening.
Why it matters: The wall matters because Venice's prestige cycle — Barbera's Golden Lion, record-standing ovations, critics-grid scores — risks turning every screening into an exercise in self-promotion, and this 30-year tradition formalizes the corrective. With **Poletti** winning for skewering a Bertolucci-scripted Italian drama, and **Ippoliti** acting as sole judge, the wall hands a single consumer-advocate prize more credibility than 150 uniformly glowing reviews, a pointed counterweight as Hollywood studios reportedly retreat from festivals where social-media hype now outperforms critical drubbings.
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