What to watch out for at the Venice Film Festival 2024
It’s red carpet time again, as another awards season begins in earnest today with the 81st annual Venice Film Festival. Venice is the oldest marquee festival event in the cinema industry calendar, predating Cannes by over a decade. But it has a history of showcasing a wider variety of European-made films than its rival events across the Alps.
Things have changed somewhat in recent years, as bigger-name American movies have made their way into the main competition. The 2022 event featured the premiere of the experimental Marilyn Monroe horror-biopic Blonde and Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Last year went bigger with David Fincher’s thriller The Killer and Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. The latter generated one of the festival’s biggest stories when controversy arose over the prosthetics Bradley Cooper used while playing Bernstein, which equated to an antisemitic stereotype in the eyes of some.
The previous seven editions of the festival have also seen Hollywood films scoop its biggest prize, the Golden Lion, on five occasions. This trend runs contrary to the decade that preceded it, during which there was a run of six successive competitions without an American winner.
One of these Hollywood triumphs was the Todd Phillips movie Joker, in which Joaquin Phoenix transformed the most notorious Batman villain into a profoundly sympathetic character. Phillips is back in competition at Venice again with Phoenix by his side, and this time, Lady Gaga has joined the party.
Star sequels: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Joker 2
2024 might go down as the year of the sequel at Venice, with the two headline screenings both follow-up movies to modern classics.
Tim Burton has finally recalled his character Betelgeuse from the afterlife, with Michael Keaton returning in the titular role of Burton’s sequel to the 1988 cult horror comedy Beetlejuice. Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara reprise their roles, as do Lydia and Delia Deetz. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t exactly Golden Lion material, though, and Burton’s movie premieres out of competition on Wednesday, August 28th, in the Palabiennale of the Biennale di Venezia.
On the other hand, Phillips is trying his hand at winning a second Golden Lion by submitting his sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, for the big prize. Lady Gaga stars as Joker Phoenix’s love interest, Harley Quinn, and Harry Lawtey joins the supporting cast as legendary Gotham City prosecutor Harvey Dent. The film screens on Wednesday, September 4th at 7.45pm, in the Palabiennale.
Both Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Joker: Folie à Deux are open to the public, although tickets aren’t available online at the moment and will naturally be extremely difficult to get hold of. Still, there are plenty more movies, both in and out of competition, which are worth watching. Or, for the majority of us who aren’t anywhere near Venice, it is worth keeping an eye on for the reactions of their first audiences.
The best of the rest
Two other ones to watch in the main festival competition are Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel Queer and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s drama film Harvest. Queer stars Daniel Craig as an American fleeing prison for drug possession in 1940s Mexico City, who falls for a younger man played by Drew Starkey. Harvest, meanwhile, features Harry Melling as the mayor of a remote English village in the Middle Ages during a period of social change.
Fans of 1990s alt rockers Pavement will be delighted to hear that a biopic of their band is premiering at Venice, in the secondary Orizzonti competition. Alex Rose Perry looks to have taken the biographical music drama in weird and wonderful directions befitting Pavement themselves. His film Pavements combines documentary footage with dramatised scenes and cuttings from the band’s previous jukebox movie Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical.
Out of the competition, one of the most intriguing watches looks to be Asif Kapadia’s time-travelling documentary, 2073. How exactly a documentary can be set in a dystopian future 50 years from now remains to be seen. But if any documentary filmmaker can do it, Kapadia can.
