From yet another steamy, movie star-led romance by Luca Guadagnino to the return of a ’80s cult classic, here are all the silver screen releases to look out for at the 81st edition of the film fest
After a quiet 2023 edition, in light of the SAG-AFTRA strikes, the Venice Film Festival is now firmly back on form, with a characteristically starry 81st line-up. On the roster for 2024? Splashy blockbusters, sumptuous dramas, and prestige TV that’ll see the likes of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Lady Gaga, Cate Blanchett, George Clooney, Daniel Craig, Julianne Moore, Jude Law, Tilda Swinton, Monica Bellucci, Winona Ryder, and Jenna Ortega step off their water taxis and glide onto the red carpet. These are the 10 releases not to miss.
Joker: Folie à Deux
This thrillingly batshit, dystopian musical sequel to Todd Phillips’s Golden Lion-winning supervillain origin story sees Lady Gaga’s volatile Harley Quinn join Joaquin Phoenix’s anguished stand-up comic in prison. Add a destructive romance, hallucinatory dance numbers, and supporting turns from Zazie Beetz, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Steve Coogan and Industry’s Ken Leung and Harry Lawtey, and you have a mind-bending, hair-raising thriller which looks destined to waltz straight from the Lido to the 2025 Oscars.
Maria
Pablo Larraín
Speaking of awards attention, a nod seems all but inevitable for Angelina Jolie: In Pablo Larraín’s swooning conclusion to his unofficial trilogy of beguiling and frequently misunderstood cultural icons, beginning with Jackie and Spencer, she transforms into the legendary opera singer Maria Callas as she lived out her final days in 1970s Paris. (After all, both Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart were nominated for their efforts, and came very close to winning.) Expect ravishing costumes, too, and appearances from The Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, and Haluk Bilginer as tycoon Aristotle Onassis, Callas’s lover who eventually left her for Jacqueline Kennedy.
Queer
Yannis Drakoulidis
Luca Guadagnino’s last film, the sweaty, sexy Challengers, had been due to open last year’s Venice Film Festival before being pulled from the line-up in the midst of the Hollywood strikes. Now, the auteur is making up for it with yet another steamy, movie star-led romance penned by Justin Kuritzkes, with costumes by Jonathan Anderson and a throbbing soundtrack courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. An adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novella of the same name, Queer casts Daniel Craig as an American expat chasing a younger man (Outer Banks’s Drew Starkey) in ’40s Mexico City. Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville, and pop star Omar Apollo round out the ensemble, but the beloved British actor and former Bond is, by all accounts, the main attraction, giving a performance that should get him closer to an Oscar than ever before.
Wolfs
George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s first big-screen reunion in 16 years—and over two decades after their delicious match-up in Ocean’s 11—is in this slick action comedy, which sees the industry heavyweights play rival lone-wolf fixers who compete to dispose of a body (Euphoria’s Austin Abrams), only to find that the young man in question is not only alive and well, but also carrying a boatload of drugs. Cue a blood-soaked, madcap, odd-couple romp, breezily helmed by the Spider-Man franchise’s Jon Watts and driven by the pair’s irresistible, unparalleled chemistry.
The Room Next Door
Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature-length foray into English-language cinema, after his two gorgeous shorts The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life, centers on Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as two friends, a war reporter and a novelist, who have starkly different approaches when it comes to writing about death, love, friendship, and the horrors of war. As long-buried resentments slowly rise to the surface, the former also grapples with her painful relationship with her estranged daughter, a theme as Almodóvarian as the wonderfully precise framing, eye-popping interiors, and glorious costumes.
Babygirl
Nicole Kidman—soon to be seen in Netflix’s juicy The Perfect Couple, followed by the deranged second season of Nine Perfect Strangers—leads this A24-produced, psychosexual corporate thriller from Bodies Bodies Bodies’s Halina Reijn. It follows a high-powered CEO who embarks on a sadomasochistic affair with a much younger intern, played by Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson, with Antonio Banderas and Talk to Me’s Sophie Wilde co-starring. Brace yourself for unbearable sexual tension and a close examination of the knotty power structures at play.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara reprising their parts from the ’80s cult classic; the addition of Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega as the former’s snarky daughter; a vampy Monica Bellucci; Willem Dafoe as a police officer and former B-movie action star; wild costumes; surreal dance numbers; gruesome set pieces—Tim Burton’s long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel has it all. Taking the opening-film slot, it’s sure to provide jump scares, big laughs, genuinely emotional moments, and an endless supply of nostalgia.
Disclaimer
Courtesy of Apple TV+
The TV offerings at this year’s festival are impressive, to say the least—they include a Joe Wright-directed account of Mussolini’s rise, and a dystopian sci-fi series from Thomas Vinterberg, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Another Round—but none more so than this seven-part Apple TV+ psychological thriller, which marks Alfonso Cuarón’s first directorial effort since Roma. Based on Renée Knight’s bestseller of the same name and starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Indira Varma, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Squid Game’s Hoyeon, it follows a journalist with a reputation for exposing the transgressions of others who receives a novel from an unknown author, and is shocked to discover that it divulges her darkest secrets. Can she find the writer’s true identity before her whole life implodes? Settle in for what’s guaranteed to be a compulsive watch.
The Brutalist
Courtesy of Venice Film Festival
Vox Lux’s Brady Corbet brings his characteristically cool and exacting eye to this fictional tale of an Auschwitz survivor and American émigré (Adrien Brody) who, after scrambling out of poverty, is entrusted with a large-scale architectural project by a mysterious patron (Guy Pearce). With its three-hour-and-35-minute run-time—which, perhaps thankfully, includes a 15-minute intermission—and a supporting cast which features Felicity Jones, Stacy Martin, Raffey Cassidy, and Joe Alwyn, it’s an ambitious epic which could very well take the festival by storm.
The Order
Courtesy of Venice Film Festival
Justin Kurzel’s explosive take on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s powerful non-fiction tome The Silent Brotherhood: Inside an American Racist Conspiracy, which charts the heinous crimes of the titular white supremacist domestic terror group, places Jude Law in the part of a ’80s FBI agent facing off against the organization’s charismatic leader (Nicholas Hoult). As they prepare to mount a full-blown attack on the government, look out for Alison Oliver, Odessa Young, Jurnee Smollett, and Tye Sheridan in crucial roles, as well as unsettling parallels with our present political landscape.
