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Wonder what movies we’ll be talking about during this upcoming Oscar season? A handy cheat-sheet every year is the lineup of the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 28 and is the first of several high-profile fall festivals. Even the 2023 edition, which was hampered by a lack of stars due to the then-ongoing actors’ strike, debuted the likes of “Poor Things,” “Ferrari,” “Evil Does Not Exist” and “Green Border.” But now that the actors and writers have gotten new contracts, this year’s Venice will be filled with plenty of buzzy premieres. But which films, sight unseen, look the most intriguing?
Putting together a list of 10 promising festival movies is always a difficult task. You’re going on gut feelings and personal preference. For instance, maybe you’re someone who is waiting anxiously for the Venice opener “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Perhaps you’re excited about “Wolfs,” which reunites “Ocean’s Eleven” stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Kiyoshi Kurosawa fans will no doubt want to hear how his latest thriller “Clouds” is. Well, those movies, and many others, missed the cut, which just speaks to the amount of possible bangers Venice might have on tap. Listed alphabetically, here are the films that have most piqued my interest.
“Babygirl”
Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn likes making audiences uncomfortable. Her feature debut, 2019’s “Instinct,” was about a prison therapist inexorably drawn to the dangerous rapist she’s meant to be treating. Then Reijn returned with “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a horror-satire that was like an Agatha Christie murder-mystery combined with a commentary on Generation Z. I don’t think she’s pulling any punches for her third feature, an erotic thriller that, according to Variety, “examines power dynamics and sexuality in the workplace.” Nicole Kidman stars in “Babygirl” as a CEO who starts a highly inappropriate affair with a young intern at her company (Harris Dickinson). This isn’t the first time this year that Kidman has played a woman pursuing a younger love interest, although “Babygirl” looks to be much darker and more button-pushing than her Netflix rom-com “A Family Affair.”
“The Brutalist”
For those who love their arthouse fare to be epic in length, filmmaker Brady Corbet has excellent news for you. As the follow-up to his maximalist pop-star portrait “Vox Lux,” he will be unveiling “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour (including intermission) drama, which, according to IndieWire, concerns “a Hungarian Jew [played by Adrien Brody] who survived Auschwitz before emigrating to America. On U.S. soil after years of poverty, he’s entrusted by a patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), with a gigantic architectural project.” Expect comparisons to “The Fountainhead” for a film that also features Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola. Corbet is known for pursuing challenging subject matter, and this ambitious undertaking sounds no different.
“Harvest”
More than a decade ago, one of the hot regional film movements was the Greek Weird Wave, whose most famous member was Yorgos Lanthimos, who went on to worldwide success. But one of his friends and colleagues during that era was Athina Rachel Tsangari, who made a splash with her second feature, the Venice competition title “Attenberg,” a twisted, oddly touching coming-of-age tale. (Her lead, Ariane Labed, took home the festival’s Best Actress prize.) Sadly, Tsangari has only made one feature since then—the 2015 examination of masculinity, “Chevalier”—but at last, she returns with this adaptation of the Jim Crace novel about a tiny English village that starts experiencing unsettling occurrences. Caleb Landry Jones leads the cast of “Harvest,” which may not be as starry as many of the Venice premieres but could be a creepy stunner.
“I’m Still Here”
Awards season loves a good comeback story. Sony Pictures Classics is certainly positioning Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles as a candidate this year. He earned acclaim in the late 1990s and early 21st century thanks to delicate dramas like “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” but he hasn’t made a feature since 2012’s disappointing “On the Road.” Salles is back with “I’m Still Here,” based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, a housewife who took on the Brazilian military regime in the 1960s after her husband, a congressman, was disappeared. Based on Paiva’s son’s memoir, “I’m Still Here” will star Fernanda Torres, with “Central Station” Oscar nominee Fernanda Montenegro playing Eunice Paiva as an older woman. This has the potential to be the sort of emotional powerhouse that audiences and Academy voters flock to.
“Joker: Folie à Deux”
The original “Joker” started its awards-season campaign at Venice in 2019, taking home the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, on the way to earning more than a billion dollars worldwide and winning two Oscars, including Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix. Critically, though, the film received a wide range of reviews, with some praising “Joker’s” grownup tone and magnetic central performance while others despised its pseudo-Scorsese nihilism. I was a fan, so I’m intrigued by this much-hyped sequel, which like its predecessor will premiere in competition on the Lido. This time, Phoenix is joined by Lady Gaga, who plays the Joker’s equally troubled love interest Harley Quinn. “Joker: Folie à Deux” will be a musical, so no one can accuse this sequel of lacking in ambition. I’m expecting this follow-up film to be equally divisive—I can’t wait to see where I land.
“Maria”
Angelina Jolie will debut her latest directorial effort, “Without Blood,” which stars Salma Hayek and Demian Bichir, at the Toronto Film Festival. But before then, she’ll be in front of the camera at Venice for “Maria,” the newest biopic from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. Like his “Jackie” and “Spencer,” this will focus on a famous woman in the midst of crisis: acclaimed opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her tumultuous life. Both Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart received Best Actress nominations for their portrayals in Larraín’s films, so Oscar prognosticators will be curious to see how Academy Award-winner Jolie comports herself as Callas. She hasn’t been nominated since 2008’s “Changeling” and this looks to be her most high-profile dramatic role since her poorly-received 2015 marital drama “By the Sea,” in which she co-starred alongside her now-ex-husband Brad Pitt.
“Pavements”
Pavement was one of the most important bands of the 1990s, a greatly influential indie-rock group whose epochal albums like “Slanted and Enchanted” dazzled with their shimmering guitar and quizzical/poetic lyrics. They were critics’ darlings, not multiplatinum sensations, so it’s probably not a surprise that a movie about them will also be pretty idiosyncratic. Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who previously made the scabrous, moving fictional rock portrait “Her Smell,” was approached by frontman Stephen Malkmus to do a sorta-documentary, sorta-love story narrative based around the group’s music. So what exactly is “Pavements”? According to Perry, “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical. … You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [‘Renaldo and Clara’] and put them all in a blender.” “Pavements” will feature footage from the band’s recent reunion tour, but also include actors like Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones and Fred Hechinger. Like their terrific body of work, this movie sounds incredibly cool.
“Queer”
A year ago, Luca Guadagnino was supposed to debut “Challengers” at Venice. But because of the actors’ strike, the studio pulled the film from its opening-night slot, delaying its release until early 2024. The Oscar-nominated director is back on the Lido with another love story, this time based on William S. Burroughs’ novel, about an American war vet (Daniel Craig) living in Mexico pursuing a younger serviceman (Drew Starkey) in the 1940s. “Queer” reunites Guadagnino with several of his “Challengers” collaborators, including screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Few contemporary filmmakers do romance as beautifully as Guadagnino, and Craig is already building buzz for a possible first Oscar nomination.
“The Room Next Door”
In recent times, decorated Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has dipped his toe into English-language filmmaking with his shorts “The Human Voice” and “Strange Way of Life.” Now, he’s made his first feature in English, reuniting with “Human Voice” star Tilda Swinton for “The Room Next Door,” in which she plays a mother engaged in a contentious relationship with her daughter (Julianne Moore). For cinephiles, the team-up of those three luminaries—announced through a tantalizing Instagram post—was reason for excitement, but considering “The Room Next Door” was shot this spring, most of us assumed we wouldn’t see the film until next year. Instead, Almodóvar will be back in Venice, where he won Best Screenplay for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in 1988 and a Career Golden Lion in 2019.
“Separated”
Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris tends to make his best films when he’s angry or impassioned, whether exonerating falsely accused killer Randall Dale Adams in “The Thin Blue Line” or grilling former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for “The Fog of War.” As Morris explained last year, his new film is “about the separation of families—including parents and children—on the Mexico-U.S. border by the Trump administration.” Called “Separated,” the documentary couldn’t be more timely at a moment when Trump is promising mass deportations if reelected president, and I expect it to be an enraging, sobering portrait. Morris has praised journalist Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book on the topic, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his film draws inspiration from Soboroff’s reporting. There are several intriguing documentaries at this year’s Venice—including the latest installment of Wang Bing’s “Youth” series about migrant workers in China—but I can imagine “Separated” might provoke major headlines.
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