Everything you need to know about this year’s Biennale line-up, from Oscar hopefuls to brand-new blockbusters
Both the starting gun for awards season and the most glamorous film festival on the calendar – sorry, Cannes – the Venice International Film Festival takes over the city’s pencil-thin Lido this week for ten days of red carpets, premieres, and hopefully a few future classics. It wears its glitz with effortless elan, as A-listers like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Daniel Craig, glide in and out of the festival via vintage speed boats just as they’ve done since the days of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
Unless you’re lucky enough to be Venetian, scoring a ticket to the movies themselves is not an easy business. But there’s plenty of good reasons to keep an eye out for the films that are making their bow at the Biennale – with a Joker sequel, Craig’s Queer and (very separate) appearances from Jolie and Brad Pitt.
It all gets underway on Wednesday, August 28, with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the festival opener, closing ten days later on Saturday, September 7.
When Venice selected Joker, a superhero movie from the Hangover director, to play in competition in 2019, it seemed batty. But director Todd Phillips had the last laugh walking away with the Golden Lion, with a film that was less men in tights and more homage to The King of Comedy. The sequel, starring Lady Gaga opposite Joaquin Phoenix, is the most anticipated film of the fest. We can’t wait to get a load of this. Bigger, battier and with blockbuster tunes.
If you caught his astute and unsettling debut The Childhood of a Leader, you’ll know that Brady Corbet is a filmmaker with serious chops. His latest, a competition hopeful at the fest, stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones as an émigrée architect and his wife who flee post-war Europe for a new life in America. Following the couple over 30 years and co-starring Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn, it should be another intimate but epic snapshot of a world in flux.
It’s Daniel Craig as you’ve never seen him – or at least, not since his last film… and several of the ones before that. In truth, the Liverpudlian star has always been far more than just a Walther PPK and a tux, and his CV comes packed with daring and boundary-pushing roles from way back in his Love Is the Devil days. Still, it’s fair to say that his starring role in Luca Guadagnino’s William S Burroughs adaptation will be a conversation starter. Craig plays American expat Lee, who falls hard for an ex-sailor (Outer Banks’ Drew Starkey) in 1940s Mexico City.
Lawrence Valin’s Little Jaffna could be the breakout hit of Venice. Likely to be compared (favourably) to Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’Or winning Dheepan, it features Tamil Tigers using their guerilla fighting know-how to survive in France. But where Dheepan was up against racist bigots, Valin rather more interestingly shows the Sri Lankan conflict as a proxy war in Paris. Finally, a fresh take on the land of baguettes (sorry Emily) that’s more curry western than French New Wave.
Director Athina Rachel Tsangari made her name as part of the Greek Weird Wave. Now she’s following in the footsteps of contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos by venturing into English-language filmmaking. Harvest is based on Jim Crace’s 2013 bestseller which used archaic language when describing an ancient British village strained by the disparity between rich and poor and so scapegoats a trio of strangers. Starring king of weird Caleb Landry Jones, expect psychological drama, darkness and angst.
Who would have guessed at the start of Pablo Larraín’s stellar directorial career in Chile that he would be the go-to-guy for movies reinventing the lives of slighted women. Now after Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021) comes Maria, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, and starring Angelina Jolie as the American-born Greek soprano living out her final years in 1970s Paris. We know Jolie’s career has been ailing, but who better to play the misunderstood diva than a misunderstood diva?
The rumour is that Venice head honcho Alberto Barbera loved Love so much, he persuaded Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud to change the order of his loosely connected trilogy (Sex, Dreams and Love) so he could play this light comedy in competition. It also means we can say, almost straight-faced, that Love is better than Sex (which debuted in Berlin). Norway’s finest actress Andrea Bræn Hovig is the doctor committing to casual sex after giving up on love.
The Biennale is turning on the juice to see what shakes loose with a curtain raiser that has Tim Burton returning to Winter River, Connecticut, for a Beetlejuice sequel 36 years on. Can the ooky auteur deliver an update to match his terrific Addams Family spinoff Wednesday? He’s got Wednesday star Jenny Ortega to help with that, as well as returning stars Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara and Michael Keaton as impish agent of chaos Betelgeuse.
Alfonso Cuarón’s first foray into long-form telly gets a prestige slot at the festival to match its high-gloss sheen. And with Cate Blanchett leading a cast that also boasts Kevin Kline, unexpectedly, as a crusty English gent on the hunt for revenge, and below-the-line talent including GOAT cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, and Finneas O’Connell as composer, it should look and sound great. A mystery-thriller that spans 20 years and two countries, it’s based on a bestseller by British documentary-maker and novelist Renée Knight.
From Festen to The Hunt, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg is a past master at family stories with pained hearts, and his first TV drama looks like repeating the trick. Set in a near-future Denmark where nationhood has been swept away by rising tides, it follows Laura, a loved-up high-school student who is caught between her divorced parents and her new boyfriend when thelooks to scatter them all across Europe. A love story – romantic and familial – and a perceptive look at the migrant and climate crises, it has all the makings of an arresting small-screen debut.
Here’s what landed (and what didn’t) from last year’s Venice line-up.
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