The 2024 Venice Film Festival began on August 28 with the long-awaited sequel from Tim Burton and Michael Keaton Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Opening of the 81st edition, which runs until September 7th at the Lido. Registration deadline is on site to see all the important films.

The program for the oldest festival in the world also includes the world premieres of Todd Phillips’ Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga picture. Joker: Foil for TwoPedro Almodóvar’s The room next doorLuca Guadagnino’s Gay, Pablo Larrain’s biography of Maria Callas Mary with Angelina Jolie and new works by Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Salles, Harmony Korine, Thomas Vinterberg, Brady Corbet, Takeshi Kitano, Claude Lelouch, Errol Morris and others.

Below you will find a compilation of our reviews of the festival, which last year awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film to Yorgos Lanthimos’ The poor, with Emma Stone, who won the Oscar for best actress. Isabelle Huppert is leading the jury of the competition this year. Click on the title of the film to read our full review.

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And their children after them

Section: Competition
Directors and screenwriters: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma
Pour: Paul Kircher, Angélina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
Conclusion from Deadline: And their children after them takes the Boukherma brothers into the lush territory of literary romanticism, which weighs heavily on the long, repetitive result; however much was removed from the original novel, the end result feels cluttered, as if everything had to fit in.

Babygirl

Section: Competition
Director: Halina Reijn
Pour: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor
Conclusion from Deadline: Nicole Kidman really goes into detail and gives Romy a psychological vulnerability that the film lacks, as it sounds most clearly (50 Shades of Grey) and represents a unique inversion of the film it most closely resembles (secretaryHalina Reijn leaves so much in the air that Babygirl stays in your memory longer than you might think.

Battlefield

Section: Competition
Director: Gianni Amelio
Pour: Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini, Giovanni Scotti, Vince Vivenzio, Alberto Cracco, Luca Lazzareschi, Maria Grazia Plos, Rita Bosello
Conclusion from Deadline: It is a fascinating piece of history, but despite the great performances of the main actors, especially Borghi, Battlefield simply fizzles out and leaves us with the tormenting thought of the more delicate, complex, relevant It could have been a movie.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Section: Outside the competition
Director: Tim Burton
Pour: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Arthur Conti
Conclusion from Deadline: Michael Keaton is back as the irresistibly terrifying undead star, but it’s not so much a sequel – which offers more of the same – but more of a wacky, spooky class reunion where you find out what happened to the class geek. It’s also consistently funny and a blast to watch.

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The Brutalist

Section: Competition
Director: Brady Corbet
Pour: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
Conclusion from Deadline: The Brutalist is the story of a man who thinks big, from a director who also has a vision that doesn’t quite fit within the modest confines of American independent cinema. The film doesn’t quite reach its lofty goals, but it has a strange charm and is often bursting with imagination.

Cloud

Section: Outside the competition
Director: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Pour: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masataka Kubota
Conclusion from Deadline: A master of atmosphere in award-winning films such as Wife of a spyKiyoshi Kurosawa takes the thriller genre by the collar and gives it a good shake. Cloud manages to be many things – a social document about online communication and how radically it has changed the world, a fast-paced shooting game and a dark morality tale.

Disclaimer

Section: Out of competition (TV)
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Pour: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Hoyeon, Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Partidge, Leila George
Conclusion from Deadline: Disclaimer is a confessional study by a filmmaker who sees perspective as the ultimate deconstruction. It’s less a work of supreme originality than a compelling and disturbing story set within a comfort zone of uncomfortable tropes.

Families like ours

Section: Out of competition (TV)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Pour: Amaryllis August, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Magnus Millang, Esben Smed, David Dencik, Thomas Bo Larsen, Asta Kamma August
Conclusion from Deadline: The destruction of an entire country by climate change is a huge, pressing prospect. Perhaps it is simply too huge to be conjured up in a television drama about a few individuals whose lifelong happiness of being born Danish has come to an end.

I’m still here

Section: Outside the competition
Director: Walter Salles
Pour: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
Conclusion from Deadline: Salles has a goal here. He is clearly not simply documenting what happened; it is a film that shows political commitment and warns against forgetting what tyranny did to the country and the stains it left behind.

Kill the Jockey

Section: Competition
Director: Luis Ortega
Pour: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girolamo, Daniel Fanego, Osmar Núñez, Luis Ziembrowski
Conclusion from Deadline: A restrained yet strange work that begins like a deadpan parody of a Stanley Kubrick gangster film with Wes Anderson and slowly changes. Although it has momentum and style, Kill the Jockey requires a much more substantial narrative to get it and us across the finish line.

Mary

Section: Competition
Director: Pablo Larrain
Pour: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino
Conclusion from Deadline: The portrait that the film paints is strangely bloodless. The woman Maria Callas remains distant and inscrutable; she eludes us cunningly until the end. Mary tells a fascinating story, but it lacks the crisp edge.

The Order

Section: Competition
Director: Justin Kurzel
Pour: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Marc Maron
Conclusion from Deadline: Australian director Justin Kurzel brings the same dark sense of outsider thinking to his Venice competition title The Order that made Nitramehis portrait of the young outsider who committed Australia’s worst mass murder in 1996 is so harrowing.

Separated

Section: Out of competition (non-fiction)
Director: Errol Morris
Conclusion from Deadline: For those who have forgotten what the Trump administration’s child separation policy looked like, Morris now reminds them with an astute account of how it was designed and implemented, and for what purpose.

5 September

Section: Horizon Extra
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Pour: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Corey Johnson, Georgina Rich
Conclusion from Deadline: Making a story that is now 52 years old not only relevant but also inspiring is no small feat. The acting is excellent throughout, and 5 September is successful at every level.

Three friends

Section: Competition
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Pour: Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne, Éric Caravaca
Conclusion from Deadline: The French like films like Emmanuel Mouret’s relentlessly mediocre romantic comedy, but you’ll probably have forgotten this soul-sapping soap opera long before it ends – or at least you’ll want to.

Wolves

Section: Outside the competition
Director-Screenwriter: Jon Watts
Pour: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Buric, Richard Kind
Conclusion from Deadline: Wolvesstarring two of the biggest movie stars in the world, is a nice action comedy that, to be honest, will appeal mainly to viewers over 40 who grew up with films about jaded, funny characters who born too old for this shit.

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