After a balmy European summer, cinephiles and Hollywood’s colossal stars will soon descend on Italy’s Lido di Venezia for the 2024 Venice International Film Festival. The 81st International edition will resurrect the week-long affair to its former glory after the historic SAG-AFTRA writer’s and actor’s strike led to a scaled-back procession in 2023. Both in competition and out of competition, it’s truly the screen that will deliver the most memorable performances given the calibre of talent featured in this year’s schedule. (Though the airport looks at Marco Polo, the off-duty street style around the canals and the exemplary fashion and “method dressing” on the red carpet are worthy shows of their own.)
Opening the event will be Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega kicking off the starry season in vampy looks from the likes of Rodarte and Thom Browne, if their press tour is anything to go by. Elsewhere, the crème de la crème of the industry will converge in the lagoon city, including Australian icons Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. On the other end of the spectrum, nascent starlets like Sydney-born actress Sophie Wilde and BAFTA Rising Star nominee Harris Dickinson will get their dues (and name in lights!) for their respective portrayals.
From erotic dramas to psychological thrillers and book-to-movie adaptations aplenty, we bring you must-see films premiering at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival ahead.
The Films To Watch From The 2024 Venice International Film Festival
Joker: Folie à Deux
Prepare to venture back into the twisted psyche of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck (a.k.a The Joker) as Todd Haynes’ dark interpretation of Gotham will return to screens at the Venice International Film Festival. Unlike any comic book film adaption we’ve ever seen before, the highly anticipated sequel, titled Joker 2: Folie À Deux, promises two things; Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn and a musical premise.
As per a recent interview with the director, the follow-up was developed by Phoenix’s dream to see the sadistic Joker in a Broadway-esque variety show format. In lieu of action scenes and a face-off against Batman, the sequel will dive deeper into the protagonist’s mental illness and delusions of grandeur as he undergoes treatment at the fictional Arkham State Hospital. It’s there that he meets Gaga’s Harley Quinn, who begins as a music therapist before embracing and enabling the Joker’s perverse imagination.
Through a “musical madness”, the pair journey through song in an attempt to liberate themselves and fellow prisoners. With the first film grossing over a billion dollars at the box office, the unexpected encore will be expected to hit all the high notes. Watch the trailer below.
Maria
In Angelina Jolie’s first role in three years, the movie star invites audiences to a night at the opera in Pablo Larraín’s Maria. The biopic will render the story of American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, who is long regarded to be the most influential operatic voice of the 20th Century, on the big screen. Jolie, who trained for six months to embody the singer, will take a starring turn with technical prowess as an Academy Award-winning performer under the spotlight.
Larraín, who most recently directed the Princess Diana-focused biopic Spencer starring Kristen Stewart, revealed that the film will take place in Paris in the 70s and focus on the later years of her life. Dubbed a temperamental prima donna and a “Tigress” by the press, the life of one of the world’s forgotten divas will be a dramatic crescendo for Jolie. (Interestingly, Carras was in an affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis before he left her for Jackie Kennedy, the subject of Larraín’s other biopic starring Natalie Portman.)
Wolfs
Brad Pitt and George Clooney will reunite after completing the Oceans trilogy with the last instalment of the Las Vegas heist drama in 2007 and starring in the Coen brother’s Burn After Reading in 2008. Helmed by Jon Watts, who has directed all of Marvel’s Tom Holland-led Spidermans, Wolfs is an action-comedy about two “fixers” who are booked to clean and cover up the same murder. Taking place over one snowy night in New York, Pitt and Clooney’s quarter-century of friendship will emerge through bantered dialogue, overlapping chit-chat and hilarious physical comedy.
Queer
After exploring young and in-love cannibals tracing through the midwest of Reagan’s America in Bones & All and delivering the sweatiest and most seductive ménage à trois with this year’s Challengers, Luca Guadagnino returns with the latest instalment in the queer canon. Aptly titled Queer, the Italian filmmaker will deliver the essence of 2017’s Call Your Name in the latest release adapted from the 1985 novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs. Like in Timothée Chalamet’s breakout, Queer follows the burgeoning relationship between two men, Daniel Craig’s ‘William Lee’ and Drew Starkey’s ‘Eugene Allerton’.
In one of his first roles since putting down James Bond’s shaken martini (the other being the Knives Out follow-up), Craig will lead the film as an American expatriate living in Mexico City after fleeing New Orleans due to a drug bust. It’s there he meets Starkey’s young former Navy officer turned addict. As Guadagnino himself declared, “The sex scenes in Queer are numerous and quite scandalous”. LOEWE and JW Anderson’s Jonathan Anderson has also designed costumes for the film.
Babygirl
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, The Iron Claw, A Murder at the End of the World) will front A24’s latest release, an erotic drama titled Babygirl. Directed by Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Halina Reijn, the kinky and oh-so-titillating thriller will follow a high-powered CEO who threatens to ruin her career and so much more after beginning a torrid and risqué sexual affair with a much younger intern. Reijn promises the film to be “really hot”, while Kidman paints the nuances of power dynamics and forbidden romances with more complexity. Speaking of the more graphic scenes, Kidman revealed filming those segments left her “ragged”.
“At some point, I was like, I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said. “This is something you do and hide in your home videos. It is not a thing that normally is going to be seen by the world.” Given this is the actress that starred in Stanley Krubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, head Kidman’s warning and proceed with caution. Australia’s Sophie Wilde and Antonio Banderas round out the cast.
The Order
We’ve seen Nicholas Hoult portray Russian Emperor Peter III in The Great, a skeletal war boy in Mad Max: Fury Road and a Manchester teen in Skins, but in the new dramatic thriller The Order, we’ll view him in a completely different light. Directed by Australia’s Justin Kurzel, the new release adapts Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground which delivers an inside look into the most dangerous radical-right hate group to emerge since the Ku Klux Klan. Hoult is the white supremacist group’s charismatic leader, with Jude Law starring opposite him as an FBI agent investigating the faction’s increasingly violent terrorist activities. Despite being set in 1983, the themes echo the state of the current political landscape.
The Room Next Door
In Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-speaking feature film, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore flex the breath of their character work in a stylish yet chilling drama. The Room Next Door will see estranged friends reunite under strange circumstances after years of separation. Having taken different paths after working at the same magazine, their rekindling takes unpredictable twists as Swinton’s Martha begins to mould herself in the image of Moore’s Ingrid. Perhaps an ode to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychological horror Persona or 1992’s campier take Single White Female, Almodóvar has kept much of this film’s synopsis under wraps.
“The film talks about the unlimited cruelty of wars, the two different ways these two writers have of approaching and writing about reality, also about death, and how friendship and sexual pleasure can be the best allies to deal with horror,” he said in a statement. “It also talks about the pleasure of waking up to birds bringing a new day at a house built on a natural reserve in New England, where the two friends live in an extraordinary and awkwardly sweet situation.”
The Brutalist
Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet will deliver the stirring story of a fictional Auschwitz survivor who seeks refuge in post-war America following the liberation of concentration camps toward the end of the Holocaust. Adrian Brody leads the project as Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth. Initially living in poverty, his lot in life is changed forever when he is awarded a contract by a mysterious benefactor and charming industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Designing the American dream, Tóth is tasked with “creating a grand modernist monument and help shape the landscape of the country he now calls home,” as the film’s logline reveals. Spanning 30 years, the film also sees Felicity Jones star as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, Joe Alwyn and Raffey Cassidy.
Horizon: An American Saga (Part 1 & 2)
A film 36 years in the making, Yellowstone’s Kevin Costner will return to his beloved Western genre with a multi-part epic titled Horizon: An American Saga. With Costner winning seven Academy Awards with the 1990 Frontier-era historical drama Dances with Wolves, the first of a slated four-chapter volume will showcase the complicated expansion of the American West before and after the Civil War. Exploring themes of manifest destiny and settler colonialism, the three-hour-long dramas will star Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi and Luke Wilson.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
It’s showtime—Tim Burton will debut his long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel at the Venice International Film Festival with the gothic stylings of the film cast deliciously on display over the blood-red carpet. Following the 1988 cult classic, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara reprise their iconic roles as Betelgeuse (a.k.a the ghost with the most, babe), Lydia Deetz and Delia Deetz respectively. Joined by Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega—who plays Ryder’s daughter—Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe and Justin Theroux, the realms between the living and the dead will once again open up for a bout of horrifying, hilarious and cinematic haunting. Try and get Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” out of your head after this screening.
Disclaimer
Alfonso Cuarón will preview his third written and directed television series, Apple TV+’s Disclaimer, during the festival. The revenge thriller starring Cate Blanchett is based on Renée Knight’s 2017 novel of the same name. Blanchett stars as acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft who has made her career “revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others,” as per the logline. “When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realise she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets. As Catherine races to uncover the writer’s true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys both her own life and her relationships with her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).” Exploring the concept of Schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune, the audience will be bound to experience a sudden adrenaline shot over each of the seven episodes.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA International.