Joker 2, Angelina Jolie Start Awards Season

Alberto Barbera, it must be said, has done it again.

The long-running director of the Venice Film Festival, who successfully repositioned the august Italian cinema event as an awards-season launchpad, on Tuesday unveiled another top-shelf lineup for the 81st Biennale (Aug. 28-Sept. 7). And, as Kendall Roy would say, it’s “all bangers, all the time.”

Alongside tentpole studio sequels — Warner Bros. will kick off the festival with the out-of-competition screening of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Todd Phillips returns to the Lido competition with Joker: Folie à Deux, the follow-up to his 2019 Golden Lion-winner Joker — Barbera has selected a tasty mix of established auteurs and up-and-coming talent that looks to appeal both to critics and international buyers.

Pedro Almodóvar is back in Venice with The Room Next Door, the hotly-anticipated English-language feature debut from the Oscar-winning Spanish director. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star in the drama, which has the backing of two studios, with Sony Classics releasing domestically and Warners handling much of the rest of the world. Expect a major awards push for the movie, both for the two leads and Almodovar as a director after its Lido launch.

Awards eyes will also be on Angelina Jolie, who plays legendary opera diva Maria Callas in Maria, the new feature from Chilean director Pablo Larrain. Larrain’s three previous biopics — Jackie, Spencer and El Conde — all rode their Venice premieres to Oscar nominations.

By picking Jon Watts’ action thriller Wolfs, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, in an out-of-competition slot, Barbera also ensures the tabloids will have plenty to do in Venice this year. Expect a flood of “Brangelina” headlines surrounding the Wolfs world premiere, which could help Sony ahead of its September release.

Venice favorite Luca Guadagnino is in the awards spotlight with his latest, the William S. Burroughs’ adaptation Queer. Re-teaming with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, the Call Me By Your Name director cast Daniel Craig in his most un-007 role to date as an American expat in 1940s Mexico City who becomes infatuated with a younger man (played by Drew Starkey). Guadagnino always gets a warm reception on the Lido but that doesn’t always translate into international or awards success. There was little festival bounce from his last two Venice-bound features: Bones and All (2022) and Suspira (2018), though the director is riding high at the moment, thanks to the crossover success of Challengers, which was initially set as last year’s Venice opener.

Focus Features may also wait for the critical response to Brady Corbet’s Venice competition title The Brutalist before positioning the film for awards season. The epic drama, following 30 years in the life of Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody), from surviving the Holocaust through emigration and visionary success in the United States, arrives with a phenomenal amount of hype and an all-star cast that includes Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde and Guy Pearce. But Corbet’s last feature, Vox Lux, which also premiered in Venice, divided audiences and was unable to convert its festival bow into awards success.

On the documentary side, several nonfiction features heading to Venice could be in the awards conversation, including Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ music doc One to One: John & Yoko, which focuses on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s historic 1972 concerts at Madison Square Garden; 2073 from Amy and Senna filmmaker Asif Kapadia; Separated from The Fog of War director Errol Morris; and Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a look at notorious German documentarian Leni Riefenstahl.

It’s so far unclear whether A24 will be looking to awards love for its Venice headliner, Babygirl. But the erotic thriller, starring Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas, and Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson, from Dutch director Halina Reijn (Instinct), looks like another strong play from the New York mini-major as the company transitions towards more broad appeal genre fare.

Similarly, Justin Kurzel’s new feature, The Order, a thriller about a group of bank-robbing white supremacists in the Pacific Northwest, might not be an obvious awards season contender, but the Venice competition bow for the feature, starring Nicholas Hoult, Jude Law and Tye Sheridan, sets up the release nicely for Vertical, which will also screen The Order at the Toronto Film Festival before its U.S. rollout.

Berlin has dropped its popular television sidebar Berlinale Series, and Cannes has never fully warmed to the small screen (and after last year’s Cannes premiere of HBO’s ill-fated The Idol one can see their point). But Venice remains a booster of high-end, curated TV. Highlights on the Lido this year include Alfonso Cuarón’s psychological thriller Disclaimer, an AppleTV+ limited series starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen, which will bow worldwide on Oct. 11; and M – Son Of The Century from Darkest Hour director Joe Wright, an eight-part look at the rise of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, played by Italian star Luca Marinelli.

Unlike Cannes and Berlin (and, starting this year, Toronto), Venice does not have an official film market but Barbara has lined up a number of still-available titles that could draw bidding action this year. FilmNation will be looking for buyers for Maria; Fremantle/CAA Media Finance and Fremantle subsidiary The Apartment will be shopping Queer to international distributors; and The Match Factory will be pushing Harvest, the competition title from Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg), featuring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling in a drama described as a “tragicomic take on a Western.”

Match Factory is also selling Edge of Night, the feature debut from German-Turkish director Türker Süer, which premieres in Horizons Extra, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, an animated film by the Quay Brothers, playing in Venice Days.

M-Appeal could draw specialist attention for Love, the latest in the Sex Dreams Love trilogy from Norwegian auteur Dag Johan Haugerud. Sex, the first feature in the trilogy, premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, where it won multiple honors, including the Europa Cinemas Label prize as best European film. M-Appeal closed several international deals for Sex out of Berlin and will be looking to do the same for Love, which be the first Norwegian film to screen in competition in Venice for 38 years.