What a difference a year makes.
After being the first major film festival to navigate the choppy waters of programming huge world premieres at a time when most actors were on strike last year, the Venice Film Festival is back for its 81st edition with a lineup of showy projects. This time, stars like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, and Lady Gaga can actually come out to the Lido to support them.
Focusing on the 21 competition titles (down two from last year), the most expected entrants were Luca Guadanigno’s “Queer,” Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” (his first English-language feature). Led by Daniel Craig, Jolie, and Tilda Swinton, respectively, each film arrives with awards hopes baked in already — especially considering the filmmakers’ track records with directing Oscar-nominated performances. While “The Room Next Door” furthers Almodóvar’s long-running relationship with distributor Sony Pictures Classics, neither “Queer” nor “Maria” have a U.S. distributor yet.
And it seems like fewer distributors than usual are set to show up. Though films from Searchlight Pictures, Focus Features, and Netflix like “Poor Things,” “Tàr,” and “The Power of the Dog” were all big winners at Venice in recent years, none of those studios have major projects world-premiering at the festival.
Meanwhile, Venice continues to be a huge launchpad for Warner Bros., which has “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opening the festival out of competition, and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the follow-up to the 2019 Golden Lion winner “Joker,” trying its hand as a competition title again.
As for surprise films, look no further than “The Brutalist,” the long-awaited third feature from actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet, who won a couple of awards at Venice in 2015 for his debut film “The Childhood of a Leader.” Though, given the director’s history with the festival, his return is not quite the part that comes as a shock — it’s more the 215-minute running time (with 15-minute intermission) for the post-WWII film starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. That compelled Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera, during Tuesday morning’s presser, to remind prospective attendees to check films’ lengths as they make their schedules. Many command a commitment of more than two hours.
Meanwhile, the Nicole Kidman-Harris Dickinson-led A24 film “Babygirl,” Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s first film since her American breakout “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” will compete. Both Reijn and Corbet have been in orbit of awards attention (the latter with Natalie Portman’s vehicle “Vox Lux”), so a welcome reception for their films at Venice this year could be just what they need for more peer recognition. A24 has “Babygirl” dated December 20; there’s no U.S. distributor, meanwhile, for “The Brutalist,” though Focus has international rights through its deal with parent company Universal.
Looking at the wider lineup, some tiny trends include Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Love” and Wang Bing’s “Youth – Homecoming” — both competition titles — each one entry from larger series the directors are working on. (Wang Bing’s “Youth – Spring,” the first of the two docs, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023.) And there are two films related to The Beatles in Venice’s nonfiction lineup: Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ “One to One: John & Yoko” and Andrei Ujica’s “Things We Said Today.” There are also, of course, five Italian films in competition, including “Diva Futura” from director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt, and “Battlefield” from past Golden Lion winner Gianni Amelio (“The Way We Laughed” from 1998).
But films are not the only exciting part of the festival this year. Venice’s Series ever-more-prominent Series section, out of competition, boasts the world premieres of new shows from Oscar winners Alfonso Cuarón (“Disclaimer”) and Thomas Vinterberg (“Families Like Ours”) and BAFTA winner Joe Wright (“M. Son of the Century”).
More buzzy titles include “Wolfs” with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, which Sony and Apple TV+ hope will be a fall blockbuster, plus new projects from Asif Kapadia, Errol Morris, Harmony Korine, Alex Ross Perry, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Nicolas Winding Refn, and more.
And whither papal election thriller “Conclave,” given the festival’s proximity to the Focus Oscar contender’s Vatican setting? Right now, that film is slated to have a premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival along with other films like “We Live in Time,” “Nightbitch,” and “The End,” which are likely to make the fall festival rounds. American production “Conclave,” the latest from Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger, was pegged by TIFF as an “international premiere.” Which suggests it will show up at Telluride.
Still unannounced are the premiere plans for films like Neon’s “The Actor,” starring André Holland from “Anomalisa” filmmaker Duke Johnson. Or Amazon/MGM’s “Hedda,” Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda Gabler” adaptation with Tessa Thompson. There have also been no fall festival announcements for highly anticipated films like Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” or Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2,” so there is much to look forward to even past the usual award season launchpads like Venice.
