Venice Main Competition Round-Up (plus London and NYFF Openers)
Tuesday, July 23, 2024 at 6:00PM
Nick Taylor in 2024, Angelina Jolie, Babygirl, Halina Reijn, Isabelle Huppert, Joker: Folie a Deux, Justin Kurzel, Pedro Almodóvar, Venice, film festivals

by Nick Taylor

BLITZ (2024) Steve McQueen

So many film festivals the past few days have come to make an announcement! Steve McQueen’s Blitz, about Londoners trying to survive a bombing during WWII starring Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson, has been named the opening film for the London Film Festival. Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival will open with Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel helmed by Hale County This Morning, This Evening director RaMell Ross.

A lot of films have been announced for TIFF, and will presumably keep being announced until the festival starts in September. We’ve also received word of the full lineup for the 81st Venice Film Festival, and since they’ve got much fewer releases than TIFF, I’ll be doing a quick run-down of which titles are most exciting to me personally. While I won’t be able to attend Venice, you can still see me watching them take off from the sidelines, like a 20th century mother waving to her children as they set sail on a voyage to a new country, hoping for the absolute best but steeling myself to be strong, just in case of disaster...

First and foremost, I can’t wait to see how Joker: Folie à Deux performs here, after the first film swiped the Golden Lion with Lucrecia Martel’s jury in 2019. Are we expecting Isabelle Huppert to have the same predilections? Perhaps not, but the allure of vulgar American art has gotta be radioactive at a film festival that decided the best use of its opening night was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Maybe this is all about getting Todd Phillips to remake Greta.

Halina Reijn’s Babygirl looks like an exciting time, especially as a dark inverse to Kidman’s A Family Affair earlier this year. Maybe it’ll have the additional inverse of being good, well-lit cinema. Still, do we think Isabelle will be vengeful towards Nicole after Paul Verhoeven nearly considered her as the lead for Elle? If there’s one thing her presidential stint at Cannes taught us, diva likes to play favorites! And people obviously have no room for growth or change, so we have to expect the exact same performance from her that she gave 15 years ago. 

BABYGIRL (2024) Halina Reijn

As far as pet favorite filmmakers go in the competition lineup, I for one am wishing the best for Justin Kurzel’s The Order. The story of an FBI agent infiltrating a white supremacist group in 1983 is not an alluring premise on its face, but Kurzel’s developed an impressive portfolio of formal ingenuity, rigorous performances, and teasing out symptoms of individual and national failings without moralizing or getting off on his character’s lurid behaviors. If the allure of name-brand stars saves it from languishing for a year like Nitram did at the turn of the decade, The Order could be the feel-bad event of this year!

We’ve got April, the much-anticipated follow-up from Beginnings director Dea Kulumbegashvili. Arguably the most anticipated ticket of all - at least for the platonic ideal of TFE’s writers and commenters - is Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, his much-anticipated English language debut starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and Alessandro Nivola. Beautifully severe people with cheekbones for everyone! Nivola’s pulling double-duty since he's also in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody as a Holocaust survivor trying to live out the American dream. I can’t say Challengers has whetted my appetite for another Luca Guadagnino/Justin Kuritzkes team-up, but Daniel Craig is making me all kinds of interested for Queer. Similarly, Angelina Jolie returning to the silver screen where she belongs (plus all those interviews and red carpets) is a far more fascinating draw for Maria than Pablo Larraín.

MARIA (2024) Pablo Larraín

I won’t talk much about the goings-on outside the competition, since those filmmakers are generally less familiar to me. I can at least be hyped for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Clouds, and for Takeshi Kitano’s Broken Rage, a 60-minute film with no announced information about it anywhere on the internet. But a girl must ask, why did the Venice programmers keep Phantosmia, the new film by Lav Diaz, out of competition after the man already won the Golden Lion? Where is Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, after so many well-received showings at this festival. At least, it'll be at Toronto. But now I turn to you , dear readers. Which competition placements are most surprising to you? Are there any missing films you were expecting to show here? How about festival goss - who do we think is throwing wine at who? A full list of competition films have been posted below this paragraph, and the rest of Venice’s lineups can be found on their website here. 

APRIL (2024) Dea Kulumbegashvili

THE MAIN COMPETITION

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024) Pedro Almodóvar

Any early Golden Lion predictions? And what about wishes?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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