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  • Venice Film Festival Recap: Films We’ll Be Talking About For The Rest of the Year

    Venice Film Festival Recap: Films We’ll Be Talking About For The Rest of the Year

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    For those of us who love the glamor and the glitz of the entertainment industry, September passes by in a train of tulle and sartorial spectacle. Fashion weeks across New York, Paris, London, and Milan take the cake.

    Packed front rows and celebrity-studded catwalks keep the internet entranced. From my couch – clad in my hole-ridden sweatpants – I judge couture and ready-to-wear fashion shows from the mega-brands and the sparkling stars who actually attend these exclusive events.

    But to me, fashion week is just the punctuation to the summer film festival season. There’s the Tribeca Film Festival and Cannes, Toronto Film Festival, and Venice International Film Festival to name the heaviest hitters. Some films premiere across all these festivals; others are more selective. But each one has its headlines: the drawn-out standing ovations, the celebrity attendees, the future award winners.

    Indeed, September marked the Venice Film Festival, one of the most anticipated film events of the year, and spawned some of the most talked about films of the year. The 2024 Venice Film Festival’s pomp and circumstance – arguably the film festival circuit’s glittering crown jewel – transforms the floating city into a playground for the cinematic elite.

    Venice has long been the preferred launchpad for Oscar hopefuls and auteur passion projects alike. In recent years, Timothee Chalamet used it to flex his fashion prowess, the cast of The Idol used it to gaslight us into thinking it was going to be a good show (as we extensively reviewed: it wasn’t), and the Don’t Worry Darling cast played out their workplace drama for the world to see. This year was no exception. Lido was alight with couture gowns and paparazzi flashes, albeit a lot less drama and gossip to satiate us. So, rather than hashing out the latest cast feuds, let’s talk about the films.

    What to watch at the Venice Film Festival 2024?

    The 81st Venice International Film Festival is organized by La Biennale di Venezia and ran on the Lido di Venezia from 28 August to 7 September 2024. A parade of A-listers descended upon the city, ferried to Lido in glamorous water taxis to promote some of the films we’ll be seeing at award shows this year, and….some films that flopped.

    Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore – those chameleons of the silver screen – graced the red carpet for Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut, The Room Next Door, which ultimately snagged the coveted Golden Lion (Venice’s top prize). The ever-ethereal Nicole Kidman turned heads alongside her fresh-faced co-star Harris Dickinson after her turn in The Perfect Couple. Meanwhile, Daniel Craig proved he’s still got it, swapping his Bond tuxedo Loewe alongside new It Boy Drew Starkey in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.”

    This year’s theatrics were at their peak – enough to manufacture and stoke social media chatter. And it worked. Brad Pitt and George Clooney played up their pairing’s nostalgia factor by chasing each other around the red carpet, reliving their youth but also relying on the reputations of their glory days. Luca Guadanino took a selfie with his absolutely stacked cast. Jenna Ortega looking fabulous in one of her gothic Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice outfits proved that thematic press tour dressing is far from dead.

    But this year’s films were just as conversation-worthy. Let’s dive into the films that have everyone talking:

    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

    Tim Burton returns to the 1988 classic that launched his career, reuniting with Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder while adding Gen Z darling – Jenna Ortega – to the mix. After her turn in Wednesday, Scream, and even the video for Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste,” it’s clear that Ortega can handle horror – she’s a scream queen with the acting chops to back it up. The result is a nostalgic trip that manages to feel fresh, thanks in large part to Ortega’s deadpan charm (honed to perfection in Wednesday) as set in counterpoint to Keaton’s manic energy. It’s a welcome return to form for Burton. His triumphant release is a rare example of commercially and critically successful and was an energetic opening to the Festival.

    Babygirl

    The latest in the buzzy pantheon of female-driven age-gap dramas, Babygirl carves out a fresh niche for our darling Ms. Kidman. After her comic turn in A Family Affair, A24’s latest offering sees her playing an all-business CEO who becomes entangled with her much younger intern (Harris Dickinson). Fans of Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper, or The Iron Claw will recognize Dickinson and admire his remarkable range. It takes an impressive young actor to shine alongside Kidman but Dickinson is up for the task. Director Halina Reijn – fresh off her Gen Z slasher hit Bodies Bodies Bodies – brings a distinctly female gaze to the May-December romance trope. The result is a steamy, thought-provoking exploration of power dynamics that will have HR departments squirming in their seats.

    The Room Next Door

    Pedro Almodóvar ventures into English-language territory with this Golden Lion winner, proving that his particular brand of melodrama translates beautifully in any tongue. Based on Sigrid Nunez’s book What Are You Going Through, the film pairs Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, two of cinema’s most captivating chameleons. It follows a writer who reconnects with an old friend after years of distance in a tale of friendship, grief, and deep discussions about what it means to be a writer. It’s intimate and intellectual but feels accessible and human thanks to Almodóvar’s direction and the nuanced performances of these two powerhouse thespians.

    Maria

    This year’s Venice International Film Festival was a big one for shimmering stars of the silver screen. Angelina Jolie triumphed as opera legend Maria Callas, securing instant iconic status and positioning herself for Oscar recognition. The gravitas she lends to Pablo Larraín’s portrait of Callas reveals that Jolie’s side projects (like her fashion brand, Atelier Jolie) have not dampened her acting skills. Following in the footsteps of Natalie Portman’s Jackie and Kristen Stewart’s Spencer, Jolie disappears into the role of the troubled diva. Larraín’s dreamlike direction and Jolie’s raw performance make for a haunting exploration of fame, art, and the price of genius. When picking Jolie for the titular role, Larrain said he wanted an actress who would “naturally and organically be that diva,” and Jolie delivered with aching nuance. Oscar buzz is already building, and rightly so.

    Queer

    Speaking of actors challenging themselves, no one is in their comfort zone in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. For this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, Guadagnino reunites with his A Bigger Splash star Ralph Fiennes and ropes in Daniel Craig. Craig shed his 007 persona entirely in order to play Lee – a Burroughs stand-in – as he navigates the seedy underbelly of mid-century Mexico City. It’s a mix between last year’s Venice darling Strange Way of Life by Pedro Almodóvar and Guadagnino’s famous Call Me By Your Name.Drew Starkey – of Outer Banks fame – is the object of his desire, with Guadagnino’s camera lingering on his lithe frame in a manner that would make even Timothée Chalamet blush. It also stars singer Omar Apollo in his first major acting role. Between unflinching sex scenes and luscious landscapes, it’s a heady blend of desire and ennui that solidifies Guadagnino’s place as cinema’s Yearner In Chief.

    Disclaimer

    Venice isn’t all movies. Some limited dramas also make their way to Lido. Two years ago, The Idol got the full Venice treatment, but we know how that went. Luckily, Alfonso Cuarón’s return to the festival circuit fared better. This twisty psychological thriller stars Cate Blanchett – last at Venice with Tar. This time, she plays a documentary filmmaker whose life unravels when a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table. As always, Blanchett is a force of nature, her icy exterior cracking as she realizes that she’s the subject of a book that will reveal her long-buried secrets. Cuarón proves he’s as adept at space epics as he is with intimate character studies, crafting a nail-biting exploration of truth, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves.

    The Order

    Starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, and Jurnee Smollett, The Order is a historical crime drama that plunges us into the action-packed world of counterfeiting operations, bank robberies, and armored car heists in the Pacific Northwest. Told through the eyes of the lead detective, these crimes are deemed acts of domestic terrorism, revealing the deep-seated hatred and violence in the United States. Inspired by the January 6 insurrection – when nooses were hung in front of the Capitol Building – this film references a fictional white nationalist insurrection that’s at the center of William Luther Pierce’s 1978 novel The Turner Diaries. Taking this hatred back to its roots, The Order explores how these same psychologies have been buried in the US consciousness for decades.

    The Brutalist

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s8SdygxUhs

    Joe Alwyn, Taylor Swift’s ex-London Boy, sauntered through Venice alongside castmates Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. This sprawling epic follows a Hungarian immigrant architect (Brody) navigating love, loss, and artistic integrity. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract that changes the course of his life for the next 30 years. Clocking in at a hefty three-and-a-half hours, it’s not for the faint of heart. But those who stick with it will be richly rewarded with a deeply felt meditation on the American Dream and the cost of creation. Corbet’s ambition is a labor of love, as his official statement expresses how he spent “the better part of a decade revving the engine to bring this particular story to life.” His toiling is definitely worth it.

    Joker: Folie à Deux

    Closing Venice was the ambitious, melodramatic Jukebox musical Joker: Folie à Deux. It’s the polarizing sequel to the controversial original, and although everyone’s talking about it — no one can make up their minds about whether or not it’s good. Todd Phillips returns to Gotham, bringing Lady Gaga along for the ride as Harley Quinn to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. The addition of musical numbers is either a stroke of genius or a bridge too far, depending on who you talk with. Phoenix and Gaga commit fully to the madness, their chemistry undeniable even as the plot threatens to buckle under the weight of its own ambition.

    This is a swing for the fences that doesn’t always connect, but you have to admire the creative audacity. Gaga is electric, though you can’t help but wonder if her talents are wasted in this convoluted film that, just like the original, isn’t always sure what it’s trying to say.

    As the curtain falls on another Venice Film Festival, one thing is clear: cinema is alive and well, continuing to push boundaries and provoke thought even in the face of industry upheaval. Whether these films will stand the test of time remains to be seen, but for now, they’ve given us plenty to chew on as we sail away from the Lido and into the heart of awards season.

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    LKC

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  • What Is the New Standard for America Cinema?

    What Is the New Standard for America Cinema?

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    The movies in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival told a story of a porous U.S. film world, a washed up scene, or something in between.
    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros., Niko Tavernise/A24, Focus Features, Universal Pictures

    Exhausted from jetlag and with stomachs full of way too much pasta, Vulture’s correspondents have finally returned from the Venice Film Festival. Both of us were on the Lido for the very first time. Besides the thrill of seeing stars in their natural habitat, and the joy of devoting multiple hours a day to experiencing the cream of global cinema, what did we make of the experience?

    Nate Jones: This was the first Venice to take place since last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. On one hand: The stars were back! On the other: American film production was shut down for a significant chunk of 2023, which is when many movies in this year’s festival would have been trying to shoot. Did you notice any effect on the quality of the films in competition?

    Alison Willmore: Maybe I’m loopy from having spent an unplanned night in the Charles de Gaulle Holiday Inn Express on my way home, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s normal anymore. 2023 was the strike, but before that was the pandemic, which makes it years of business as not-usual, and at this point I feel like the real question is what the standard is going to look like going forward. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of starry U.S. productions, though I think it says less about the strike than the state of the industry in general that the big studio contributions were sequels — Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which I liked!) and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (which I did not).

    Meanwhile, the feature that actively sets out to be a Great American Movie of the old school, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is set in Pennsylvania and New York but shot in Hungary and Italy, and a lot of the other American movies also had an international tilt. Queer (directed by the Italian Luca Guadagnino) is about American expats in Mexico City and South America, while Maria (directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín) is about the Greek-American opera star Maria Callas living out her last days in Paris. Babygirl and The Room Next Door, both set in New York, are the work of Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn and Spanish legend Pedro Almodóvar. I don’t know what to make of this, so I’ll turn the question to you: Is this a sign of greater porousness in American filmmaking, or a sign of how washed our homegrown scene is at the moment that we need to look abroad for ambitious visions?

    Jones: I have a hard time condemning the lack of bold visions in American cinema at a festival that featured The Brutalist, which — whatever else you want to say about it — is undoubtedly ambitious: a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor trying to put his stamp on the New World. Despite the silent T in his last name, Brady Corbet is as American as golf courses and shopping malls (each of which are prevalent in his hometown of Scottsdale, AZ). That he had to go abroad to make this film is less a condemnation of American filmmaking, and more of American financing. The Brutalist was funded by eight separate production companies, and you’d probably have to be an accounting savant to untangle the European film-board benefits that made it possible. The oft-rapturous reviews that greeted its premiere were, I think, a reflection of the fact that its mere existence felt like a minor miracle.

    Still, Corbet was one of only two American directors in competition this year. (The other was Phillips LOL.) Stateside filmmakers were better represented in the wider festival. Besides Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the out-of-competition lineup saw Jon Watts’s Wolfs, Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, while Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements played in a sidebar. That feels like a fitting snapshot of where the industry’s at right now, for good and for ill: You’ve got a legacy-quel that’s going to make zillions of dollars; a big starry project that a streamer has insanely decided not to give a wide-release to; a self-funded auteur epic; and a winky metafictional music doc — plus whatever the hell Baby Invasion is.

    But your remark about the international bent of films like Queer and Babygirl reminded me of a late-night conversation I had with some fellow journalists who were complaining that our own directors were too online to make great films. Too self-conscious about pissing off their followers, their film’s politics often felt pre-digested. That, to me, was the fun of a film like Babygirl: Reijn was willing to follow her own strange muse wherever it took her, angry commenters be damned. What do you make of this?

    Willmore: I can definitely see that argument, though, funnily, I thought Reijn’s previous film, the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, suffered from not being online enough. But, related to that, one of the things that’s compelling about Babygirl and The Room Next Door, which is Almodóvar first feature in English, is that they both feel off-kilter — set in versions of the U.S. that are clearly being conjured up by someone outside of it. The warehouse automation company presented by Reijn in Babygirl feels more like a low-grade corporate fever dream than an attempt at a realistic place, and its ideas about American workplace culture and sexual mores are all openly drawn from the ‘90s erotic thrillers that Reijn set out to subvert. Meanwhile, The Room Next Door layers Almodóvar’s exquisitely dressed and decorated style over a New York setting in a way that reminded me of Sex and the City in that the writer characters live in fabulous places they shouldn’t be able to afford. But it’s also a film about grappling with mortality that takes an abrupt turn toward the legal issues surrounding assisted suicide toward the end — an odd final development that, again, felt born out of an outside viewpoint on puritanical American morality.

    I’d like to hope, in general, that we’re relinquishing the surface-level, Twitter-applause-line style of politics that has plagued American pop culture for years now. God knows, Korine’s Baby Invasion wasn’t beholden to anything except his own nihilistic vision (and a mystifying continuing attachment to feature length runtimes). His latest venture into post-cinema is a first-person shooter inspired expedition around a Florida that’s simultaneously the center and the ends of the earth — whether you love it or hate it, you could never say that it’s playing safe. And in its own way, I’d say the same for Familiar Touch, Sarah Friendland’s lovely little drama about a woman with dementia that’s proof there’s hope for American independent filmmaking even when it’s not about being a Great Artist (though, coincidentally, H. Jon Benjamin shows up in a supporting role playing, like Adrien Brody, an architect). What I loved about Familiar Touch is that it feels genuinely guided by its main character, who’s as prickly as she is personable, and it never condescends to her by trying to fit her journey into a neat message.

    But that’s enough high-falutin’ talk for now. Let’s get to the crass American conversation we’ve been waiting on, which is to say: Nate, which of these folks is ending up in the Oscar race?

    Jones: I thought you’d never ask! Unlike Cannes, which takes pleasure in holding Hollywood at arm’s length, Venice embraces its status as the kickoff to unofficial awards season. However all the fall festivals are at a weird moment, Oscar-wise. Not since Nomadland in 2020 has the eventual Best Picture winner bowed at Venice, Telluride, or Toronto. That season comes with a considerable asterisk, of course. If you write it off, Venice hasn’t premiered the Best Picture winner since 2017, when The Shape of Water took the Golden Lion ahead of its triumphant campaign of monster-fucking.

    I don’t know if we saw any future Best Picture winners at the Lido this year. The closest was probably The Brutalist. There’s a world where it gets nominated for Picture, Director, and Actor; there’s another where it doesn’t even come out in 2024. (Plus, the year after Oppenheimer, will voters really reward another three-hour mid-century epic, with a fraction of the commercial prospects?)

    If I had to plant a flag for a nomination that’s definitely going to happen, it’s Angelina Jolie for Maria. Both of Larrain’s previous off-kilter biopics, 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, earned Best Actress noms for their stars, and this one too has a thrilling interplay between the legend of La Callas and Jolie’s own imperious star image. You were not alone in finding Maria underwhelming, but all the reasons critics disliked it — the unbroken hauteur of Jolie’s performance, the film’s stately refusal to go Full Camp — only makes me think Oscar voters will fall hard for it. Plus, Maria just got bought by Netflix, who have never been shy about throwing money around in awards season. (They got Ana de Armas a nom for Blonde, for goodness’ sake.) Jolie feels like a lock, and might even be the early frontrunner.

    I’m a little less confident in predicting nods for Queer’s Daniel Craig and Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman, both of whom are repping sexually explicit dramas that fall further outside the Oscar sweet spot. (Both films will be released by A24.) But each turn in surprisingly vulnerable performances worthy of consideration: Craig for molding himself into a lonely, lovelorn loser, Kidman for her raw portrayal of female desire. Forget the film’s copious sex scenes; given her history of tabloid scrutiny, the scene where she’s seen getting Botox injections may be Babygirl’s most naked reveal.

    When it comes to awards that won’t happen, I’m skeptical Joker: Folie a Deux will be able to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, which earned double-digit noms and a Best Actor trophy for Joaquin Phoenix. Not only was the sequel savaged by critics, its star now comes into the season dogged by the mystery of why he abandoned the new Todd Haynes project shortly before production — a question Phoenix dodged at the film’s official press conference. Plus, Lady Gaga, who everyone agrees is the best part of the movie, is in it less than you’d expect. This time, the only music Joker will be dancing to is a sad trombone.


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    Nate Jones,Alison Willmore

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