Fall 2024: It’s On

Looking ahead to Venice’s eighty-first edition with lists of their most-anticipated films are Owen Gleiberman (Variety), David Katz (Cineuropa), Glenn Kenny (RogerEbert.com), David Rooney (Hollywood Reporter), and contributors to the Film Stage and the Playlist. There’s less overlap in these lists than you might think, but one film that appears on every single one of them is Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. As an American expat in 1940s Mexico City, Daniel Craig delivers “what’s already being talked up as a startling performance,” notes Rooney. “Given the director’s talent for the drama of desire, who better to tackle William S. Burroughs’s iconoclastic work of transgressive gay literature?”

As part of a Venice preview package in the New York Times, Nicolas Rapold talks with directors racing to put the final touches on their films, including Guadagnino and Dea Kulumbegashvili (April). He also checks in with Robert Greene, who’s producing and editing Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, and Andrew Oran, an executive at FotoKem, the lab handling the creation of a 70 mm print of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

Adrien Brody stars in The Brutalist as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the U.S. and lands a life-changing contract with a wealthy client. The film runs just over three and a half hours, and talking to Variety’s Brent Lang, Corbet promises that there will be a fifteen-minute intermission. “I like the idea of them,” he says. “The movie doesn’t stop exactly. There will be images and sound and there is a timer to let the audience know how much time is left.” As for projecting The Brutalist on 70 mm, it “feels grander” and offers “better definition and color separation between the foreground and the background—it almost creates the impression of an image that is leaping out of the frame.”

Vanity Fair’s David Canfield talks with the directors of two other contenders for the Golden Lion. Pablo Larraín’s Maria stars Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Halina Reijn directs Nicole Kidman as a swanky CEO, Antonio Banderas as her husband, and Harris Dickinson as her lover in Babygirl. Canfield calls Babygirl “a masterclass in kink, blasting through a collective shame around sexual fantasies by presenting one woman’s journey without judgment and in rich, complex layers. It ranges from silly to scary to messy to profoundly sad. Well, and sexy. Always sexy.”

Canfield also assures us that Jolie, who will receive a TIFF Tribute Award in Toronto, delivers “a defining, crowning, at times staggering performance” as one of the world’s most renowned opera singers: “Jolie’s approach to her character is simultaneously heartbreaking, erratic, and imposing, displaying a cellular kind of understanding of Callas’s desperation to reclaim herself before it’s too late.”

Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes will be the first film from Singapore to premiere in the main competition, “just as the filmmaker’s A Land Imagined became the first from the country to win Locarno’s Golden Leopard in 2018,” notes Sylvia Wong, who talks with the director for Screen. The story centers on a father of a missing girl who’s contacted by a voyeur who’s been secretly filming him; the father decides to turn the tables and start stalking the voyeur. We have “never lived a moment more intensely interconnected through technologies and more watched by the state, big corporations, and each other,” says Yeo. “I don’t think we know enough about what living like this is shaping us into as a human race.”

Back in the NYT, Farah Nayeri gets a few moments with jury president Isabelle Huppert, who tells her that festivals are “crucial ecosystems for the visibility of movies,” and as a setting, Venice “adds to the overall magic of the event.” A. J. Goldmann tracks Venice’s emergence as “an Oscar launchpad,” and David Belcher looks back on the life of Marina Cicogna, a distributor of films by such directors as Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel, and Pier Paolo Pasolini who became “for decades the face of the Venice Film Festival.”

Cicogna’s grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi, a leading figure of Italy’s National Fascist Party, founded the festival in 1932. Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is the “first woman to govern Italy, and the most far-right politician to do so since fascist dictator Benito Mussolini,” as the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough points out in his piece on the Meloni’s government’s plans to pull the country’s “cultural sector” rightward. “Italian filmmakers are worried,” notes Roxborough, but fears that the appointment of right-wing intellectual Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as head of the Venice Biennale would signal “the start of a new far-right agenda at the Venice Film Festival have so far not been realized.”