‘Joker 2,’ ‘Maria,’ ‘Wolfs’ in Venice Lineup
The Venice Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled its official, star-packed lineup for its 81st edition, which runs from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7.
Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 Golden Lion-winning Joker, will also bow in Venice. Joaquin Phoenix, who won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, in the original, returns in the musical sequel, with Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, his love interest and partner in crime. Zazie Beetz, Brendan Gleeson and Catherine Keener co-star.
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Venice favorites Brad Pitt and George Clooney will return to the Lido with Wolfs, an action drama from Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) about two lone-wolf fixers assigned to the same job. The film, an Apple Original Films production that Columbia/Sony will release theatrically worldwide, will screen out of competition, as will Broken Rage, the latest feature from legendary Japanese director Takeshi Kitano.
Angelina Jolie will also descend on Venice for Maria, the new biopic from Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Spencer), in which she stars as famed opera diva Maria Callas. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight penned the screenplay for Maria, whose cast includes Kodi Smit-McPhee, Haluk Bilginer, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher and Valeria Golino. The movie will screen in competition. FilmNation is handling worldwide sales.
The Room Next Door, the English-language feature debut from Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), secured a Venice competition slot. Tilda Swinton plays a war reporter with a strained relationship to her daughter who seeks help from her novelist friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Mathews and Victoria Luengo co-star. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing the film domestically and Warner Bros. has snatched up much of the rest of the world, including Spain, Italy, Germany and the U.K., as well as Latin America and Japan.
As expected, Brady Corbet’s hotly anticipated The Brutalist, a Focus Features title featuring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde and Guy Pearce, will have its world premiere in Venice in competition. Corbet is no stranger to Venice, having screened Vox Lux here in 2018. Justin Kurzel’s new feature, The Order, which follows a group of bank-robbing white supremacists and stars Nicholas Hoult, Jude Law and Tye Sheridan, also secured a Venice competition slot. Vertical has U.S. rights to the film, with Amazon Prime handling it across most of the rest of the world.
Also returning to Venice is Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who will premiere Queer, his adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel, in competition. Daniel Craig stars, alongside Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Drew Starkey and Henrique Zaga, with a script by Guadagnino’s Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. (Challengers was set to open Venice last year before the U.S. actors strike pushed MGM to hold the film for a 2024 release). Queer is financed by Fremantle with CAA Media Finance handling sales, alongside Fremantle and its subsidiary The Apartment.
Dutch director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) will make her Venice competition debut with Babygirl, an erotic thriller for A24 starring Nicole Kidman as a high-powered CEO who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson co-stars, alongside Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde and Jean Reno.
Out of competition, indie provocateur Harmony Korine, whose last feature, Aggro Dr1ft, was a must-attend screening in Venice in 2023, will be back with his latest, Baby Invasion, premiering on the Lido. Aggro Dr1ft used the themes and aesthetics of video game first-person shooters (FPS); it featured Travis Scott as a co-star and was set to a trippy beat by AraabMuzik. Baby Invasion appears to be a further extension of what Korine calls “gamecore.” The project is described as an “ultra-realistic, multiplayer FPS game” about a “group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity” tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful and stripping them bare. This time, U.K. electronic musician Burial provides the soundtrack.
Nonfiction highlights in Venice include Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ music doc One to One: John & Yoko; Asif Kapadia’s 2073; and Separated, the latest from the great Errol Morris (The Fog of War). Certain to attract attention also is G?ran Hugo Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, which documents how Swedish public broadcasters have covered the crisis in the Middle East over three decades; and Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a look at notorious, groundbreaking German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Venice has selected four TV series for its small-screen presentation: Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, Joe Wright’s M. Son of the Century, the Danish dystopian series Families Like Ours from director Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), and the Latin American limited series Los a?os nuevos.
Israeli director Dani Rosenberg (Vanishing Soldier) will screen his new feature, Of Dogs and Men, in Venice’s Horizons sidebar. The drama, shot shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, follows a 16-year-old woman who returns to her kibbutz seeking her lost dog amid a terror spree, navigating horrors while encountering the unfolding disaster beyond the fence in Gaza.
Alex Ross Perry, famed music video director and Her Smell filmmaker, is bringing Pavements, a documentary on seminal American indie band Pavement, to Horizons. Other Horizons highlights include Familiar Touch, from the experimental U.S. director Sarah Friedland; Deepak Rauniyar’s Nepal-set crime drama Pooja, Sir; and Wishing on a Star, the latest from Czech filmmaker Peter Kerekes (107 Mothers).
In the Horizons Extra section, the Egyptian media satire Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo, the debut feature from acclaimed short-film director Khaled Mansour, will have its world premiere, as will King Ivory, John Swab’s drama set in the underworld of fentanyl trafficking, starring Ben Foster.
From Darkness to Light, a documentary from directors Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler about Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust movie The Day the Clown Cried, featuring never-before-seen footage of the legendary lost film, will screen in Venice’s Classics section devoted to docs about cinema.
Long-running festival director Alberto Barbera, who recently extended his contract through 2026, presented the Biennale lineup together with Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who was appointed last year following the election of Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
French star Isabelle Huppert (Elle, The Piano Teacher) will head up this year’s Venice competition jury as president and pick the 2024 Golden Lion winner alongside fellow jury members including directors James Gray, Andrew Haigh, Agnieszka Holland, Kleber Mendon?a Filho, Abderrahmane Sissako, Giuseppe Tornatore and Julia von Heinz; and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.
Venice kicks off Aug. 28 with the world premiere of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s hotly anticipated sequel to his 1988 comedy-horror hit, screening out of competition. The film, which reunites the original Beetlejuice cast, including Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, goes out internationally via Warner Bros. beginning Sept. 4 and in North America on Sept. 6.
L’Orto Americano from veteran Italian director Pupi Avati will close this year’s festival, also out of competition.
Opening Film
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton
Closing Film
L’Orto Americano, dir. Pupi Avati.
In Competition
The Room Next Door, dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Campo di Battaglia (Battleground), dir. Gianni Amelio
Leurs enfants après eux (And Their Children After Them), dir. Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma
The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet
Jouer avec le feu (The Quiet Son), dir. Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Vermiglio, dir. Maura Delpero
Iddu (Sicilian Letters), dir. Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza
Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino
Kj?rlighet (Love), dir. Dag Johan Haugerud
April, dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili
The Order, dir. Justin Kurzel
Maria, dir. Pablo Larraín
Trois amies (Three Friends), dir. Emmanuel Mouret
Kill the Jockey, dir. Luis Ortega
Joker: Folie à Deux, dir. Todd Phillips
Babygirl, dir. Halina Reijn
Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here), dir. Walter Salles
Diva Futura, dir. Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Harvest, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari
Qing chun gui (Youth — Homecoming), dir. Wang Bing
Stranger Eyes, dir. Yeo Siew Hua
Out of Competition (Fiction)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton
L’orto americano (The American Backyard), dir. Pupi Avati
Il tempo che ci vuole, dir. Francesca Comencini
Phantosmia, dir. Lav Diaz
Maldoror, dir. Fabrice du Welz
Broken Rage, dir. Takeshi Kitano
Baby Invasion, dir. Harmony Korine
Cloud, dir. Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Finalement (Finally), dir. Claude Lelouch
Wolfs, dir. Jon Watts
Se posso permettermi Capitolo II, dir. Marco Bellocchio
Allégorie citadine (An Urban Allegory), dir. Alice Rohrwacher, JR
Out of Competition (Non-Fiction)
Apocalipse nos trópicos (Apocalypse in the Tropics), dir. Petra Costa
Bestiari, erbari, lapidari (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries), dir. Massimo D’Anolfi, Martina Parenti
Why War, dir. Amos Gitai
2073, dir. Asif Kapadia
One to One: John & Yoko, dir. Kevin Macdonald, Sam Rice-Edwards
Separated, dir. Errol Morris
Israel Palestina pa svensk TV 1958-1989 (Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989), dir. G?ran Hugo Olsson
Russians at War, dir. Anastasia Trofimova
TWST / Things We Said Today, dir. Andrei Ujic?
Riefenstahl, dir. Andres Veiel
Pisni zemli, shcho povilno (Songs of Slow Burning Earth), dir. Olha Zhurba
Out of Competition (Series)
Disclaimer (Chapters 1 – 7), dir. Alfonso Cuarón
Los a?os nuevos (The New Years) (Ep. 1 – 10), dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen del Amo, Sandra Romero, David Martín de los Santos
Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) (Ep. 1 – 7), dir. Thomas Vinterberg
M – Il figlio del secolo (M – Son of the Century) (Ep. 1 – 8), dir. Joe Wright
Out of Competition (Special Screenings)
Leopardi. The Poet of the Infinity (Part 1 & 2), dir. Sergio Rubini
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, dir. Peter Weir
Beauty Is Not a Sin, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn
Horizons Competition
Nonostante, dir. Valerio Mastandrea
Quiet Life, dir. Alexandros Avranas
Mon inséparable (My Everything), dir. Anne-Sophie Bailly
A?cha, dir. Mehdi Barsaoui
Yin’ād ‘alīku (Happy Holidays), dir. Scandar Copti
Familia, dir. Francesco Costabile
Hemme nin ?ldü?ü günlerden biri (One of Those Days When Hemme Dies), dir. Murat Firato?lu
Familiar Touch, dir. Sarah Friedland
Marco, dir. Jon Gara?o, Aitor Arregi
Carissa, dir. Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar
Wishing on a Star, dir. Péter Kerekes
Mistress Dispeller, dir. Elizabeth Lo
Anul nou care n-a fost (The New Year That Never Came), dir. Bogdan Mure?anu
Pooja, Sir, dir. Deepak Rauniyar
Al klavim veanashim (Of Dogs and Men), dir. Dani Rosenberg
Pavements, dir. Alex Ross Perry
Happyend, dir. Neo Sora
L’attachement (The Ties That Bind Us), dir. Carine Tardieu
Diciannove (Nineteen), dir. Giovanni Tortorici
Horizons Short Films In Competition
Neredeyse kesinlikle yanl?? (Almost Certainly False), dir. Cansu Baydar
Shadows, dir. Rand Beiruty
Il burattino e la balena, dir. Roberto Catani
Duyao mao (The Poison Cat), dir. Tian Guan
Nime baz, nime basteh (Ajar), dir. Atefeh Jalali
Three Keenings, dir. Oliver McGoldrick
Minha m?e é uma vaca (My Mother Is a Cow), dir. Moara Passoni
René va alla guerra (René Goes to War), dir. Mariachiara Pernisa, Luca Ferri, Morgan Menegazzo
James, dir. Andres Rodríguez
O, dir. Rúnar Rúnarsson
Who Loves the Sun, dir. Arshia Shakiba
Moon Lake, dir. Jeannie Sui Wonders
Marion, dir. Joe Weiland, Constantine Finn
Horizons Short Films Out of Competition
F II – Lo stupore del mondo, dir. Alessandro Rak
Horizons Extra
September 5, dir. Tim Fehlbaum
Vittoria, dir. Alessandro Cassigoli, Casey Kauffman
Le mohican (The Mohican), dir. Frédéric Farrucci
Al bahs an manfaz i khoroug al sayed Rambo (Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo), dir. Khaled Mansour
La storia del Frank e della Nina, dir. Paola Randi
Shahed (The Witness), dir. Nader Saeivar
After Party, dir. Vojtěch Strakaty
Edge of Night, dir. Türker Süer
King Ivory, dir. John Swab
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