Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Amazon MGM Studios, Cheryl Dunn/A24, Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features, Peter Mountain/Netflix
The Venice Film Festival wasn’t always the unofficial start of awards season. For many years, the festival was regarded as a high-minded and only moderately star-studded showcase for the latest and greatest in art cinema. But a little over a decade ago, Venice decided to embrace its fortunate timing — just ahead of Toronto and largely concurrent with Telluride on the calendar — to become a bigger, more Oscar-friendly event. Today, Venice is a kind of hybrid: a lineup filled with premieres of big (often American) titles, alongside independent, artier films. Those of us attending try to strike a balance between seeing the important movies and the adventurous ones, the behemoths and the sleepers. Here are some of the most exciting and promising films screening at this year’s festival.
Photo: Focus Features
Yorgos Lanthimos returns with another Emma Stone–Jesse Plemons collaboration, this time in the form of a remake of the strange classic Korean kidnapping thriller Save the Green Planet! Plemons plays a desperate and downtrodden man convinced that humanity is being experimented on by a race of aliens. Stone is the high-powered pharma exec being held hostage by this lunatic. Perhaps what’s most promising (and disturbing) about this premise is that even though it’s based on a movie that’s more than two decades old, and made by a director whose work tends towards the surreal, it feels like it could be ripped from today’s headlines.
Photo: Ken Woroner/Netflix
We know the story. But there’s still something delectable about Guillermo del Toro, a director who is both a visionary and a genre classicist, returning to the original horror novel, the tale of monsters and madmen that gave birth to all subsequent tales of monsters and madmen. Oscar Isaac plays the doctor, Jacob Elordi is his creation, and Mia Goth is his fiancée. Previous versions of this story understandably tend to dwell on the doctor’s delirium. It’ll be interesting to see how Isaac, an actor so good at conveying thought onscreen, handles this balance between the intellectual and the madman.
Photo: Peter Mountain/Netflix
George Clooney is a famous actor, Adam Sandler is his agent, and they’re traveling through Europe. That’s … well, that’s the premise, and it’s not a particularly dramatic one, but this one comes from Noah Baumbach, who can build comic-dramatic cathedrals out of the minutiae of ordinary life. His last film, the ambitious Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise, put him in a kind of movie jail — it was a good film, and it had an opening-night slot at the Venice Film Festival, but it also cost roughly the GDP of a small Central European country to produce and showed little in return. Still, Baumbach might also be one of the most underrated writer-directors of our time, as evidenced by previous efforts like Marriage Story and The Meyerowitz Stories (and, long before that, The Squid and the Whale).
Photo: Ken Hirama/A24
The Safdie Brothers reached indie-god status with 2019’s Uncut Gems, whereupon they dissolved their creative partnership and went their separate ways. This December, Josh will release the Timothee Chalamet–starring Marty Supreme. Benny, fresh off his scene-stealing turn in Oppenheimer, is at Venice with a wrestling biopic starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as troubled MMA fighter Mark Kerr. The most exciting thing about this project is the return of Johnson to the world of real movies after years of franchise churn and overpriced streaming slop: As evidenced in films like Snitch and Pain & Gain, the Rock can be a great actor when he wants to be — and the topsy-turvy story of Kerr’s life presents him with a rare opportunity to show us he’s still got it.
Photo: Giant Squid
A unique voice in American independent cinema, Ross McElwee was known for his documentaries about historical, political, or philosophical subjects that somehow intersected with his own personal life; the director famously carried a camera everywhere he went. His last film was 2011’s Photographic Memory, much of which dealt with his son Adrian’s struggles with addiction. Adrian died in 2016, at the age of 27, and since then McElwee has not made a movie. Now, he returns with this documentary about Adrian, being a father, and questions of ownership and creation and grief and renewal.
Photo: MUBI
The opening-night film of Venice, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest reunites him with his longtime star Toni Servillo. It also returns him to the world of politics with this tale set during the last days in office of a fictional Italian president. It remains to be seen whether this film will focus on court intrigue and quasi-historical reflections, a la Il Divo and Loro, or continue down the more personal paths trod by recent Sorrentino efforts like the Oscar-nominated Hand of God and last year’s Parthenope.
Photo: Eros Hoagland//Netflix
It’s been some years since we’ve had a new Kathryn Bigelow picture (her most recent film was 2017’s messy historical drama Detroit), so there’s cause for celebration regardless. But the concept of this film also plays to her strengths: It’s a political thriller about a group of White House officials trying to deal with an imminent missile attack on the U.S. The director’s facility with narrative immediacy and her fascination with extreme personalities in extreme situations (here they’ll be played by Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson) should serve her well.
Photo: PiperFilm
Pietro Marcello will debut this biopic about the legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), whose life coincided with dramatic changes in Europe, and who represented a style of performance that ran counter to prevailing trends at the time. Marcello’s Martin Eden, the best film of 2020, won its star Luca Marinelli the Volpi Cup at this festival; the idea of this director teaming up with the great Tedeschi for such a grand subject is truly exciting.
Photo: MUBI
Is Jim Jarmusch in his golden period or his wilderness years? His last feature was 2019’s The Dead Don’t Die, an apocalyptic zombie comedy that was more Salo than his Night of the Living Dead — a vicious and awkward lament against a dying world, rather than the genre adventure some were hoping for. But before that he made one masterpiece, 2016’s Paterson, and another equally enduring drama, 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive. So what can we expect from his latest, which stars Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, and (of course) Tom Waits? It’s an anthology movie, so maybe we should expect anything and everything.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
Julia Roberts doesn’t act nearly as often as she used to, and it’s been a while since she worked with a director who knows how to elicit truly great performances from their cast. Now, she’s finally teamed up with Luca Guadagnino for a drama set at a prestigious college that’s being rocked by allegations of sexual misconduct. Surely everyone will be totally normal about this one.
Photo: I Wonder Pictures
The Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (whose Four Daughters and The Man Who Sold His Skin were both Oscar nominated) has made a film about the 2024 killing of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a vehicle with her cousin after Israeli forces killed the rest of her family as they attempted to flee the destruction in Gaza. The film will screen at a festival that’s already set to see protests around the ongoing destruction and starvation of Gaza. Ben Hania is a tremendously versatile director — she has excelled at both narrative dramas and documentaries — so we will see how she tackles a true-life incident of startling immediacy.
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