‘Joker 2,’ ‘Maria,’ ‘Wolfs’ in Venice Lineup

The Venice Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled its official, star-packed lineup for its 81st edition, which runs from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7.

Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 Golden Lion-winning Joker, will also bow in Venice. Joaquin Phoenix, who won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, in the original, returns in the musical sequel, with Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, his love interest and partner in crime. Zazie Beetz, Brendan Gleeson and Catherine Keener co-star.

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Venice favorites Brad Pitt and George Clooney will return to the Lido with Wolfs, an action drama from Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) about two lone-wolf fixers assigned to the same job. The film, an Apple Original Films production that Columbia/Sony will release theatrically worldwide, will screen out of competition, as will Broken Rage, the latest feature from legendary Japanese director Takeshi Kitano.

Angelina Jolie will also descend on Venice for Maria, the new biopic from Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Spencer), in which she stars as famed opera diva Maria Callas. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight penned the screenplay for Maria, whose cast includes Kodi Smit-McPhee, Haluk Bilginer, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher and Valeria Golino. The movie will screen in competition. FilmNation is handling worldwide sales.

The Room Next Door, the English-language feature debut from Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), secured a Venice competition slot. Tilda Swinton plays a war reporter with a strained relationship to her daughter who seeks help from her novelist friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Mathews and Victoria Luengo co-star. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing the film domestically and Warner Bros. has snatched up much of the rest of the world, including Spain, Italy, Germany and the U.K., as well as Latin America and Japan.

As expected, Brady Corbet’s hotly anticipated The Brutalist, a Focus Features title featuring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde and Guy Pearce, will have its world premiere in Venice in competition. Corbet is no stranger to Venice, having screened Vox Lux here in 2018. Justin Kurzel’s new feature, The Order, which follows a group of bank-robbing white supremacists and stars Nicholas Hoult, Jude Law and Tye Sheridan, also secured a Venice competition slot. Vertical has U.S. rights to the film, with Amazon Prime handling it across most of the rest of the world.

Also returning to Venice is Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who will premiere Queer, his adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel, in competition. Daniel Craig stars, alongside Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Drew Starkey and Henrique Zaga, with a script by Guadagnino’s Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. (Challengers was set to open Venice last year before the U.S. actors strike pushed MGM to hold the film for a 2024 release). Queer is financed by Fremantle with CAA Media Finance handling sales, alongside Fremantle and its subsidiary The Apartment.

Dutch director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) will make her Venice competition debut with Babygirl, an erotic thriller for A24 starring Nicole Kidman as a high-powered CEO who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson co-stars, alongside Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde and Jean Reno.

Out of competition, indie provocateur Harmony Korine, whose last feature, Aggro Dr1ft, was a must-attend screening in Venice in 2023, will be back with his latest, Baby Invasion, premiering on the Lido. Aggro Dr1ft used the themes and aesthetics of video game first-person shooters (FPS); it featured Travis Scott as a co-star and was set to a trippy beat by AraabMuzik. Baby Invasion appears to be a further extension of what Korine calls “gamecore.” The project is described as an “ultra-realistic, multiplayer FPS game” about a “group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity” tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful and stripping them bare. This time, U.K. electronic musician Burial provides the soundtrack.

Nonfiction highlights in Venice include Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ music doc One to One: John & Yoko; Asif Kapadia’s 2073; and Separated, the latest from the great Errol Morris (The Fog of War). Certain to attract attention also is G?ran Hugo Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, which documents how Swedish public broadcasters have covered the crisis in the Middle East over three decades; and Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a look at notorious, groundbreaking German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Venice has selected four TV series for its small-screen presentation: Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, Joe Wright’s M. Son of the Century, the Danish dystopian series Families Like Ours from director Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), and the Latin American limited series Los a?os nuevos.

Israeli director Dani Rosenberg (Vanishing Soldier) will screen his new feature, Of Dogs and Men, in Venice’s Horizons sidebar. The drama, shot shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, follows a 16-year-old woman who returns to her kibbutz seeking her lost dog amid a terror spree, navigating horrors while encountering the unfolding disaster beyond the fence in Gaza.

Alex Ross Perry, famed music video director and Her Smell filmmaker, is bringing Pavements, a documentary on seminal American indie band Pavement, to Horizons. Other Horizons highlights include Familiar Touch, from the experimental U.S. director Sarah Friedland; Deepak Rauniyar’s Nepal-set crime drama Pooja, Sir; and Wishing on a Star, the latest from Czech filmmaker Peter Kerekes (107 Mothers).

In the Horizons Extra section, the Egyptian media satire Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo, the debut feature from acclaimed short-film director Khaled Mansour, will have its world premiere, as will King Ivory, John Swab’s drama set in the underworld of fentanyl trafficking, starring Ben Foster.

From Darkness to Light, a documentary from directors Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler about Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust movie The Day the Clown Cried, featuring never-before-seen footage of the legendary lost film, will screen in Venice’s Classics section devoted to docs about cinema.

Long-running festival director Alberto Barbera, who recently extended his contract through 2026, presented the Biennale lineup together with Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who was appointed last year following the election of Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

French star Isabelle Huppert (Elle, The Piano Teacher) will head up this year’s Venice competition jury as president and pick the 2024 Golden Lion winner alongside fellow jury members including directors James Gray, Andrew Haigh, Agnieszka Holland, Kleber Mendon?a Filho, Abderrahmane Sissako, Giuseppe Tornatore and Julia von Heinz; and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.

Venice kicks off Aug. 28 with the world premiere of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s hotly anticipated sequel to his 1988 comedy-horror hit, screening out of competition. The film, which reunites the original Beetlejuice cast, including Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, goes out internationally via Warner Bros. beginning Sept. 4 and in North America on Sept. 6.

L’Orto Americano from veteran Italian director Pupi Avati will close this year’s festival, also out of competition.

Opening Film

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton

Closing Film

L’Orto Americano, dir. Pupi Avati.

In Competition

The Room Next Door, dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Campo di Battaglia (Battleground), dir. Gianni Amelio

Leurs enfants après eux (And Their Children After Them), dir. Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma

The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet

Jouer avec le feu (The Quiet Son), dir. Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin

Vermiglio, dir. Maura Delpero

Iddu (Sicilian Letters), dir. Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza

Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino

Kj?rlighet (Love), dir. Dag Johan Haugerud

April, dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili

The Order, dir. Justin Kurzel

Maria, dir. Pablo Larraín

Trois amies (Three Friends), dir. Emmanuel Mouret

Kill the Jockey, dir. Luis Ortega

Joker: Folie à Deux, dir. Todd Phillips

Babygirl, dir. Halina Reijn

Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here), dir. Walter Salles

Diva Futura, dir. Giulia Louise Steigerwalt

Harvest, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari

Qing chun gui (Youth — Homecoming), dir. Wang Bing

Stranger Eyes, dir. Yeo Siew Hua

Out of Competition (Fiction)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton

L’orto americano (The American Backyard), dir. Pupi Avati

Il tempo che ci vuole, dir. Francesca Comencini

Phantosmia, dir. Lav Diaz

Maldoror, dir. Fabrice du Welz

Broken Rage, dir. Takeshi Kitano

Baby Invasion, dir. Harmony Korine

Cloud, dir. Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Finalement (Finally), dir. Claude Lelouch

Wolfs, dir. Jon Watts

Se posso permettermi Capitolo II, dir. Marco Bellocchio

Allégorie citadine (An Urban Allegory), dir. Alice Rohrwacher, JR

Out of Competition (Non-Fiction)

Apocalipse nos trópicos (Apocalypse in the Tropics), dir. Petra Costa

Bestiari, erbari, lapidari (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries), dir. Massimo D’Anolfi, Martina Parenti

Why War, dir. Amos Gitai

2073, dir. Asif Kapadia

One to One: John & Yoko, dir. Kevin Macdonald, Sam Rice-Edwards

Separated, dir. Errol Morris

Israel Palestina pa svensk TV 1958-1989 (Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989), dir. G?ran Hugo Olsson

Russians at War, dir. Anastasia Trofimova

TWST / Things We Said Today, dir. Andrei Ujic?

Riefenstahl, dir. Andres Veiel

Pisni zemli, shcho povilno (Songs of Slow Burning Earth), dir. Olha Zhurba

Out of Competition (Series)

Disclaimer (Chapters 1 – 7), dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Los a?os nuevos (The New Years) (Ep. 1 – 10), dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen del Amo, Sandra Romero, David Martín de los Santos

Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) (Ep. 1 – 7), dir. Thomas Vinterberg

M – Il figlio del secolo (M – Son of the Century) (Ep. 1 – 8), dir. Joe Wright

Out of Competition (Special Screenings)

Leopardi. The Poet of the Infinity (Part 1 & 2), dir. Sergio Rubini

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, dir. Peter Weir

Beauty Is Not a Sin, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

Horizons Competition

Nonostante, dir. Valerio Mastandrea

Quiet Life, dir. Alexandros Avranas

Mon inséparable (My Everything), dir. Anne-Sophie Bailly

A?cha, dir. Mehdi Barsaoui

Yin’ād ‘alīku (Happy Holidays), dir. Scandar Copti

Familia, dir. Francesco Costabile

Hemme nin ?ldü?ü günlerden biri (One of Those Days When Hemme Dies), dir. Murat Firato?lu

Familiar Touch, dir. Sarah Friedland

Marco, dir. Jon Gara?o, Aitor Arregi

Carissa, dir. Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar

Wishing on a Star, dir. Péter Kerekes

Mistress Dispeller, dir. Elizabeth Lo

Anul nou care n-a fost (The New Year That Never Came), dir. Bogdan Mure?anu

Pooja, Sir, dir. Deepak Rauniyar

Al klavim veanashim (Of Dogs and Men), dir. Dani Rosenberg

Pavements, dir. Alex Ross Perry

Happyend, dir. Neo Sora

L’attachement (The Ties That Bind Us), dir. Carine Tardieu

Diciannove (Nineteen), dir. Giovanni Tortorici

Horizons Short Films In Competition

Neredeyse kesinlikle yanl?? (Almost Certainly False), dir. Cansu Baydar

Shadows, dir. Rand Beiruty

Il burattino e la balena, dir. Roberto Catani

Duyao mao (The Poison Cat), dir. Tian Guan

Nime baz, nime basteh (Ajar), dir. Atefeh Jalali

Three Keenings, dir. Oliver McGoldrick

Minha m?e é uma vaca (My Mother Is a Cow), dir. Moara Passoni

René va alla guerra (René Goes to War), dir. Mariachiara Pernisa, Luca Ferri, Morgan Menegazzo

James, dir. Andres Rodríguez

O, dir. Rúnar Rúnarsson

Who Loves the Sun, dir. Arshia Shakiba

Moon Lake, dir. Jeannie Sui Wonders

Marion, dir. Joe Weiland, Constantine Finn

Horizons Short Films Out of Competition

F II – Lo stupore del mondo, dir. Alessandro Rak

Horizons Extra

September 5, dir. Tim Fehlbaum

Vittoria, dir. Alessandro Cassigoli, Casey Kauffman

Le mohican (The Mohican), dir. Frédéric Farrucci

Al bahs an manfaz i khoroug al sayed Rambo (Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo), dir. Khaled Mansour

La storia del Frank e della Nina, dir. Paola Randi

Shahed (The Witness), dir. Nader Saeivar

After Party, dir. Vojtěch Strakaty

Edge of Night, dir. Türker Süer

King Ivory, dir. John Swab

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