Once again, Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera presents a mouthwateringly calorific menu of awards-bait movies, and a pageant of Hollywood stars about to arrive at the Palazzo del Cinema, kicking off with Tim Burton’s sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The debate about festival gender parity among directors, never a huge priority in Venice, does seem to have receded still further in the memory – but there are brilliant women directors and it’s another festival of alpha-list auteurs and bankable names either side of the camera, both in competition and out – 86-year-old French icon Claude Lelouch is incidentally in the latter list, poignantly giving us his swan song Finalement … Ou La Folie Des Sentiments.
Todd Phillips gives us another French title: Joker: Folie à Deux, with Joaquin Phoenix reprising his much slavered-over role as Joker opposite Lady Gaga – I offered a minority report in finding the first Joker colossally overrated. But we shall see.
Pablo Larraín’s Maria stars a gorgeously cast Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas (how much of an accent will she go for?) living out her final years in 1970s Paris. Luca Guadagnino – having seen his long-delayed tennis sex dramedy Challengers finally emerge from the strike-holdup – now gives us his adaptation of William Burroughs’s 1985 novel Queer, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, perhaps finding the word’s contemporary meaning in its 40s setting and starring Daniel Craig as he becomes euphorically obsessed with a younger man.
And talking of age-gap romance, Dutch film-maker Halina Reijn directs Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, about a turbocharged corporate player who commits an indiscretion with a young intern. (It was disappointing when Kidman did this sort of thing just recently with Zac Efron: we’re hoping for better.)
Pedro Almodóvar gives us his The Room Next Door, what promises to be a characteristically operatic mother-daughter affair starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore: his English language debut feature (we’re not counting his English language short films The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life).
Brady Corbet, who caused much connoisseur swooning with his futurist adventure Vox Lux, returns to Venice with a three-hour-plus epic, in the manner of Ayn Rand, about a troubled architect (Francis Ford Coppola already did a Randian architect extravaganza with his Megalopolis, so we will have to see how this measures up). Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari, from the same generation as Yorgos Lanthimos, presents a drama from the English middle ages: Harvest, starting Caleb Landry Jones, adapted from the Jim Crace novel and produced by Rebecca O’Brien. Revered Georgian film-maker Dea Kulumbegashvili, about whose recent drama Beginnings I was agnostic, comes to the Lido with April, about the ordeal of an obstetrician whose life goes wrong.
Elsewhere, the out of competition list includes Harmony Korine’s home-invasion thriller Baby Invasion and Lav Diaz’s epic Phantosmia weighs in at a chunky four hours and 10 minutes.
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It’s another sexy lineup, perhaps destined in part to prove variable, and the high-profile hubris of the Venice selection always makes its misses very noticeable. But what an enticing selection.