Not to be outdone by Toronto, which just announced a slew of mouth-watering world premieres for their upcoming edition on Tuesday, Venice unveiled today a starry lineup that more than holds its own.
From the competition section alone, the likes of Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Joaquin Phoenix, Penélope Cruz, Gary Oldman, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Gael García Bernal, Gong Li and Catherine Deneuve herself will be expected on the Lido alongside global A-list auteurs including Noah Baumbach, Roy Andersson, Lou Ye and Pablo Larraín. Fans will probably also be camping outside the historic Sala Grande for a glimpse of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet when their new films premiere.
The lineup once again skews Anglophone, with numerous presumed Oscar contenders in the mix. Which is not surprising, considering how ROMA, THE FAVOURITE and A STAR IS BORN all effectively launched their Oscar campaigns in Venice last year.
Do you see any of the titles announced today hogging nominations like those three in six months’ time? Can AD ASTRA break out in a major way like GRAVITY did six years ago? Will Kristen Stewart finally net her first Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Jean Seberg? Is Joaquin Phoenix an Olivia Colman or a Lady Gaga?
The 76th Venice Film Festival runs August 28th – September 7th. The competition awards will be handed out by an international jury under the presidency of Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. See the full lineup below:
Competition
THE TRUTH – dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu (opening night film)
THE PERFECT CANDIDATE – dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour
ABOUT ENDLESSNESS – dir. Roy Andersson
WASP NETWORK – dir. Olivier Assayas
MARRIAGE STORY – dir. Noah Baumbach
GUEST OF HONOUR – dir. Atom Egoyan
AD ASTRA – dir. James Gray
A HERDADE – dir. Tiago Guedes
GLORIA MUNDI – dir. Robert Guédiguian
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS – dir. Ciro Guerra
EMA – dir. Pablo Larraín
SATURDAY FICTION – dir. Lou Ye
MARTIN EDEN – dir. Pietro Marcello
LA MAFIA NON È PIÙ QUELLA DI UNA VOLTA – dir. Franco Maresco
THE PAINTED BIRD – dir. Václav Marhoul
THE MAYOR OF RIONE SANITÀ – dir. Mario Martone
BABYTEETH – dir. Shannon Murphy
JOKER – dir. Todd Phillips
AN OFFICER AND A SPY – dir. Roman Polanski
THE LAUNDROMAT – dir. Steven Soderbergh
NO. 7 CHERRY LANE – dir. Yonfan
Out of competition – Fiction
THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY – dir. Giuseppe Capotondi (closing film)
SEBERG – dir. Benedict Andrews
TO LIVE – dir. Francesca Archibugi
MOSUL- dir. Matthew Michael Carnahan
ADULTS IN THE ROOM – dir. Costas-Gavras
THE KING – dir. David Michod
TUTTO IL MIO FOLLEAMORE – dir. Gabriele Salvatores
Out of competition – Non-Fiction
WOMAN – dir. Yann Arthus-Bertrand
ROGER WATERS US + THEM – dir. Sean Evans, Roger Waters
I DIARI DI ANGELA – NOI DUE CINEASTI– dir. Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi
CITIZEN K – dir. Alex Gibney
CITIZEN ROSI – dir. Didi Gnocchi, Carolina Rosi
THE KINGMAKER – dir. Lauren Greenfield
STATE FUNERAL – dir. Sergei Loznitsa
COLLECTIVE – dir. Alexander Nanau
45 SECONDS OF LAUGHTER – dir. Tim Robbins
IL PIANETA IN MARE- dir. Andrea Segre
Out of competition – Special Events
GOODBYE, DRAGON INN – dir. Tsai Ming-liang
IREVERSIBLE – dir. Gaspar Noé
NO ONE LEFT BEHIND – dir. Guillermo Arriaga
ELECTRIC SWAN – dir. Konstantina Kotzamani
ZEROZEROZERO (episodes 1 and 2) – dir. Stefano Sollima
THE NEW POPE (episodes 2 and 7) – dir. Paolo Sorrentino
NEVER JUST A DREAM: Stanley Kubrick AND EYES WIDE SHUT – dir. Matt Wells
EYES WIDE SHUT – dir. Stanley Kubrick
Horizons
ZUMIRIKI – dir. Oskar Alegria
PELICAN BLOOD – Katrin Gebbe
BIK ENEICH – dir. Mehdi M. Barsaoui
BLANCO EN BLANCO – dir. Théo Court
MES JOURS DE GLOIRE – dir. Antoine de Bary
NEVIA – dir. Nunzia de Stefano
MOFFIE – dir. Oliver Hermanus
HAVA, MARYAM, AYESHA – dir. Sahraa Karimi
RIALTO – dir. Peter Mackie Burns
THE CRIMINAL MAN – dir. Dmitry Mamuliya
REVENIR – dir. Jessica Palud
GIANTS BEING LONELY – dir. Grear Patterson
VERDICT – dir. Raymund Ribay Gutierrez
BALLOON – dir. Pema Tseden
JUST 6.5 – dir. Saeed Roustaee
SHADOW OF WATER – dir. Sasidharan Sanal Kumar
Sole – dir. Carlo Sironi
ATLANTIS – dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych
MADRE – dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen
The “Seberg” movie… I think it’s titled “Against All Enemies”
They kept switching titles, but I think the final title is Seberg, according to Venice.
Wow Joker is really coming for those Oscars
Venice likes to give one of its acting awards to a high-profile Oscar contender so this could be the first award / successful step in the campaigns of Brad Pitt (Ad Astra), Joaquin Phoenix (Joker), Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story) or Meryl Streep (The Laundromat). My money is on Pitt.
Also very much looking forward to seeing where out of competition titles The King and Seberg will land. Michod showed promise with The Rover and I thought Una (Benedict Andrews’s film debut) was an underrated modern masterpiece. Chalamet and Stewart are also well-positioned career-wise for awards love so if the films around them are good / great, I could see their respective streamers (Netflix and Amazon) using their seemingly bottomless pockets to deliver fancy Oscar campaigns for both.
Michod made a masterpiece first out of the gate and then continually disappointed. War Machine was outright terrible.
You are not wrong however I do think The Rover had its moments. No Animal Kingdom, but still, flashes of greatness.
I just finished watching an excellent TV series based on the classic novel Catch-22, adapted by David Michod. He is good at adapting classic works, although I know that Joseph Heller is very different to Shakespeare.
So…only two films in competition by women, plus the newest Polanski and the Incel Joker film? I’m going to do myself a favor and stay offline till this whole thing blows over…
The most glamorous part of this festival won’t be Brad Pitt or the Joker. It’ll be seeing Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson reunited, seemingly a thousand years after Twilight. I predict we’ll see shots of them cuddling in a gondola.
Joking aside, it is a testament to both that what for MANY would have been a franchise so bad that it could have easily ended their careers, almost a decade later they are still going strong : both are still in demand for high-profile franchise fare (Batman / Charlie’s Angels) and also for arthouse festival fare (The Lighthouse, Waiting for the Barbarians, The King / Seberg). They both rose above and yeah, that franchise WAS bad enough to end careers of lesser actors … I mean just look at the rest of the main cast who are still young and supposedly in their prime yet nowhere to be found career-wise.
Yes, there have been many articles written about why Taylor Lautner’s career stalled. However, Anna Kendrick found success afterwards, in the Pitch Perfect franchise. I agree that Pattinson and Stewart both handled their career choices superbly. It’s not easy to be respected by both arthouse and mainstream audiences.
Yeah I don’t even consider Anna Kendrick a Twilight alumna for her bit role that was probably just a paycheck gig for her. Although she is definitely the biggest success story out of that cast to date.
I think the rest of young actors were quite simply lucky enough to be cast in a low-budget vampire movie that turned into a huge franchise that made them rich and for a brief moment in time, famous. Having said that, on the acting front they clearly weren’t all that skilled or talented otherwise they would have much better careers at the moment than they actually do. I mean if Stewart could persevere after one of the most maligned and ridiculed film characters / performances in recent memory, anyone else could have. IF they had the goods to make a case for themselves.
You have a different memory to me, possibly because we are different genders? I can easily think of someone much more maligned and ridiculed than Kristen Stewart: her co-star, Robert Pattinson. Persons of my gender hated him with a passion unmatched either before or since.
They have both proved their worth with their subsequent careers, especially by doing all these indie movies.
Same gender.
Ok, sorry for the crossed wires.
Edit: I get so many people’s gender on the internet wrong. I even thought Marshall Flores was a woman, because of his pic of Rebecca Ferguson.
Oh, don’t worry about it, no harm done. None.
Call me a traditionalist, call me a snob, but I don’t think that Joker should be in competition at a festival like Venice. I don’t care if it’s great, I don’t care if Warner threatened to give Toronto the world premiere if Barbera didn’t put the film in competition (which is likely), this is an atrocity.
Film festivals are a special thing, they are the only places where genuine arthouse cinema is (inside a bubble at least) treated like blockbusters, where new films by the world’s greatest auteurs can get people lining up for tickets for hours, where someone who no one has really heard of can become a sensation just because their film is a masterpiece. And at their finest, film festivals can work as a fascinating discussion about the state of the kind of cinema you don’t have playing in four multiplexes within 20 miles of where you live. When you introduce a Joker into that mix, when you take something that is so aggressively mainstream in terms of its box office prospects, part of a mega-blockbuster franchise (the Batman movies, not DCEU), and isn’t even directed by the kind of director most people would describe as notable, you say: “Who cares about this different kind of cinema, let’s just show you a movie you’re looking forward to a little earlier”, suck all the attention out from the other films, and thus state yourself as just a showcase for films on a slightly less populist “most anticipated” list than the ones you can find hundreds of on IMDB. Barbera might want to consider if this is what he wants.
So in other words, you can program Joker or you can express the legacy of the Venice Film Festival but I don’t think you can do both.
(I’m quite excited about Ema, Martin Eden, No. 7 Cherry Lane, About Endlessness, Ad Astra and Marriage Story, though, and hope that The Shadow Play was just simply an individual failure for Lou Ye)
While I was just as surprised as you about Joker landing in competition, in its defense it doesn’t look like the usual run-of-the-mill comic book movie and at a production budget of 55M it is definitely not going to be just another flashy action pic with (often pointless) flashy action scenes. I think the general idea behind this one was to deliver a film that is more Taxi Driver than “insert any comic book movie ever”. Would most certainly explain how they could get Joaquin Phoenix to sign on.
Joaquin does not sign up for comic book films. Remember Marvel aggressively chased him for Doctor Strange.
I do remember that’s why I’m convinced the inclusion of THIS Joker film at a prestigious film festival usually reserved exclusively for arthouse fare, may just be warranted in the end. It does look more of an arthouse fare than anything to me, if you look at the trailer and forget that it is a DC / Joker movie, it could just come off like a compelling film about the birth of a random, fictionalised serial killer.
If everything that we’ve heard about the Joker is true mainstream is not the word I would use. Its clearly not a comic book film unless comic book films are now violent depressing character studies with no action scenes.
This must have been a case of me expressing my point poorly: this has nothing to do with the actual content and quality of Joker. I get that it’s probably a character drama that uses the commercial power of its basic idea and property name to get people to see a movie that they wouldn’t see otherwise and get made a film that wouldn’t be otherwise made.
But, there is a difference between making a film with that basic idea and it getting good reviews and this kind of a film playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival. I would have felt a little bit akward about it even if it was out of competition but a competition slot is way too much, no matter how good it is.
This is because even if it’s not what audiences would usually see, it is the kind of film that on its worst day is going to make 20 times as much money as most of the competition films would on their best days. No matter how daring it is in the form of Hollywood franchise filmmaking, it still is a Hollywood franchise film. This means that mostly any talk about the other films will be pushed aside especially by the American press for “Is Joker a masterpiece” or “How dark and daring Joker is?” pieces. This means that films that would get attention otherwise at the second most prestigious film festival in the world are going to be pushed aside and instead we’re going to focus on and hear about a movie that would have gotten made anyway, that’s going to be seen anyway, from a filmmaker who is most likely going to get his next film made at a big studio level anyway. So what is the value of this movie recieving a competition spot? That the festival might get a little more attention from the American press? The action of presenting it as part of the competition lineup is populist pandering, no matter whether it’s a genuinely populist film or not.
I’m so stoked about The King. Simultaneously, I feel sick about this. Hope Waiting for the Barbarians is as good as it looks on paper.
Kore-eda, Soderbergh, Polanski and baby boy Ad Astra is what I’m going to Venice for this year.
(I wish).
Why are you worried about The King? It looked bad that it was missing in the TIFF announcements, but it’s great that it has made it to Venice. I know Shakespeare films generally don’t do well, but this one could be an exception.
Just looking at anglophone films (sorry, I know that’s bad, especially the year after Roma), Marriage Story seems to be the only film that has made it to Venice, Telluride and Toronto.
Venice/Toronto = The Laundromat + Joker
Telluride/Toronto = Ford vs. Ferrari + Judy + Uncut Gems + Motherless Brooklyn + The Two Popes
Venice/Telluride = (any of) Ad Astra or Waiting for the Barbarians or Babyteeth or Seberg or the King.
Edit: These calculations were made by looking at whether TIFF lists their films as Canadian premieres, North American premieres or world premieres.