Venice 2024 Lineup

“Venice looks smashing,” tweets Jessica Kiang, “even if every single film is 418 minutes long.” She kids, but when Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera announced the lineup on Tuesday morning, he did advise attendees to check running times when drawing up their schedules. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, for example, runs just over three and a half hours.

Cinematographer Lol Crawley (Vox Lux, White Noise) shot The Brutalist in VistaVision, a widescreen, high-resolution 35 mm format, and the festival will project a 70 mm print. Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the U.S. with his wife (Felicity Jones), struggles for a while, but then lands a life-changing contract with a mysterious and wealthy client (Guy Pearce).

Wang Bing launched a trilogy of nonfiction group portraits of young Chinese workers last year with Youth (Spring), and he’ll complete it this year with Youth (Hard Times), slated to premiere in Locarno, and Youth (Homecoming), the only documentary selected for the competition in Venice. With a running time of two and a half hours, Homecoming is the shortest of the three films.

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on the 1985 novel by William S. Burroughs, is just as short. Set in the 1940s, Queer stars Daniel Craig as Lee, a heroin addict who flees to Mexico City after a drug bust and falls for a discharged Navy serviceman (Drew Starkey). The cast includes Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman as well as filmmakers Lisandro Alonso, David Lowery, and Ariel Schulman.

We noted yesterday that Toronto will screen Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, based on Jim Crace’s 2013 novel, as a Special Presentation—after it premieres in Venice. “Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears,” writes Variety’s Leo Barraclough. Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling star as farmer Walter Thirsk and lord of the manor Charles Kent, “childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.”

Dea Kulumbegashvili, who won the FIPRESCI Prize in Toronto and the Best Director award in San Sebastián for her first feature, Beginning (2020), is now back with her second, April, the story of an obstetrician in rural Georgia who helps women seeking to circumvent the law and get an abortion. Angelina Jolie portrays La Divina, the great Callas, in Pablo Larraín’s Maria, and Jude Law plays an FBI agent investigating radical white supremacists in Justin Kurzel’s The Order.

Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) directs Nicole Kidman as a high-flying CEO who falls for a much younger intern (Harris Dickinson) in Babygirl. And in Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux, Joaquin Phoenix reprises his Oscar-winning turn as the laughing nihilist, only this time around, he’s teaming up with his new lover, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga).

A truly varied catchall program this year, Out of Competition features the opening and closing films of Venice’s eight-first edition (August 28 through September 7), Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Pupi Avati’s L’orto americano; Separated, Errol Morris’s new documentary on families torn apart on the border between the U.S. and Mexico; and the first seven chapters of Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s anticipated miniseries about a journalist (Cate Blanchett) who discovers that she’s a character in a novel that reveals one of her most carefully guarded secrets.

The program also includes short films by Marco Bellocchio, Alice Rohrwacher and JR, and Nicolas Winding Refn. Takeshi Kitano’s mysterious Broken Rage, starring himself and Tadanobu Asano, runs just over an hour, but Lav Diaz’s Phantosmia, with Ronnie Lazaro as an ex–military man revisiting his past, clocks in at four hours. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Chime premiered in Berlin in February, just saw The Serpent’s Path, a remake of his own 1998 thriller, open in Japan last month. Kurosawa will bring his third film of the year, Cloud, to the Lido. Masaki Suda stars as an online entrepreneur who wades into trouble.

Both Amos Gitai and Asif Kapadia blend documentary and dramatization in their latest features. Gitai’s Why War takes as its starting point a 1931 exchange between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, while Kapadia’s dystopian 2073 is inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963). More strictly nonfictional titles include Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’s One to One: John & Yoko, and Göran Hugo Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989.

A bit like Un Certain Regard in Cannes, the competitive Orizzonti and Orizzonti Extra sections focus on “films that represent the latest aesthetic and expressive trends, with special attention to debut films.” Alex Ross Perry, of course, is no newcomer, having directed Jason Schwartzman in Listen Up Philip (2014), Chloë Sevigny in Golden Exits (2017), and Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell (2018). Pavements, though, “a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid,” is a good fit for the program.

As promised earlier this month, Venice Classics has added a selection of cinema-related documentaries to its lineup of world premieres of new restorations. Among the portraits we can look forward to this year are Leo Favier’s Miyazaki, L’esprit de la nature; Zara Jian’s “I Will Revenge This World With Love” S. Parajanov; and Cyril Leuthy’s Le cinéma de Jean-Pierre Léaud.