The 2024 Venice Film Festival kicked off on August 28 with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s highly anticipated sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opening of the 81st edition, which runs until September 7 on the Lido. Deadline is on the ground to see all the major films.

The lineup for the world’s oldest festival also includes world premieres of Todd Phillips’ Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga film Joker: Foil for TwoPedro Almodóvars The room next doorLuca Guadagnino’s Foreign, Pablo Larrain’s biopic about Maria Callas Maria starring Angelina Jolie and featuring 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 from the festival, which last year awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film to Yorgos Lanthimos Poor things, starring Emma Stone, who won the Oscar for Best Actress. Isabelle Huppert heads this year’s competition jury. Click on the film title to read our full review.

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And their children after them

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriters: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma
Form: Paul Kircher, Angélina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
What Deadline teaches you: And their children after them takes the Boukherma brothers into the green terrain of literary romanticism, which weighs heavily on the long, repetitive result. No matter how much has been left out of the original novel, the end result feels overcrowded, as if everything should have been in there.

Baby girl

Section: Competition
Director: Halina Reijn
Form: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor
What Deadline teaches you: Nicole Kidman really goes far, she gives Romy a psychological vulnerability that is missing in the film, as it sounds most clearly (50 shades of grey) and presents a unique reversal of the film, it most resembles (Secretary). Halina Reijn leaves so much in the air that Baby girl sticks in your mind longer than you think.

Battlefield

Section: Competition
Director: Gianni Amelio
Form: Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini, Giovanni Scotti, Vince Vivenzio, Alberto Cracco, Luca Lazzareschi, Maria Grazia Plos, Rita Bosello
What Deadline teaches you: It’s a fascinating piece of history, but despite the great performances by the leading actors, especially Borghi, Battlefield simply disappears, leaving us with the tantalizing thought of the more prickly, complex, relevant movie could have been.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Section: Out of competition
Director: Tim Burton
Form: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Arthur Conti
What Deadline teaches you: Michael Keaton is back as the compellingly terrifying undead star, but this isn’t so much a sequel – serving up more of the same – as a goofy, creepy high school reunion where you find out what happened to the classmate. It’s also funny, all the way through, and a joy to watch.

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The brutalist

Section: Competition
Director: Brady Corbet
Form: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
What Deadline teaches you: The brutalist is the story of a man who thinks big, of a director who also has a vision that doesn’t fit easily into the modest confines of American independent cinema. It falls slightly short of its lofty goal, but it casts a strange spell and often swells with imagination.

Cloud

Section: Out of competition
Director: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Form: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masataka Kubota
What Deadline teaches you: A master of atmosphere in award-winning films such as Wife of a spyKiyoshi Kurosawa grabs the thriller genre by the collar and shakes it up. In fact, Cloud is a social document about online communication and how radically it has changed the world, a flashy shootout and a somber moral tale.

Disclaimer

Section: Out of competition (TV)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Form: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Hoyeon, Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Partidge, Leila George
What Deadline teaches you: Disclaimer is a study in confession by a filmmaker for whom perspective is the ultimate deconstruction that is less a work of towering originality than a compelling and disturbing story set within a comfort zone of uncomfortable clichés.

Families like ours

Section: Out of competition (TV)
Director: Thomas Winterberg
Form: 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
What Deadline teaches you: The destruction of an entire country by climate change is a huge, urgent prospect. Perhaps it is simply too big to contemplate in the privacy of a television drama about a few individuals whose lifelong happiness – born Danish – has run out.

I’m still here

Section: Out of competition
Director: Walter Salles
Form: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
What Deadline teaches you: Salles has a purpose here. He is clearly not just recording what happened; this is a film of political advocacy, warning against forgetting what tyranny did to the country and the stains it left behind.

Kill the Jockey

Section: Competition
Director: Luis Ortega
Form: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girolamo, Daniel Fanego, Osmar Núñez, Luis Ziembrowski
What Deadline teaches you: An understated but strange piece of work, it starts out as a dryly comic Wes Anderson parody of a Stanley Kubrick gangster film and slowly mutates. While it has flair and style, Kill the Jockey needs a much stronger story to get it, and us, across the finish line.

Maria

Section: Competition
Director: Pablo Larrain
Form: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino
What Deadline teaches you: Somehow, the portrait the film paints is strangely bloodless. Maria Callas the woman remains distant and unknowable; sly to the end, she eludes us. Maria tells a fascinating story, but lacks the raw undertone.

The Order

Section: Competition
Director: Justin Kurzel
Form: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Marc Maron
What Deadline teaches you: Australian director Justin Kurzel brings the same bleak sense of outsider thinking to his Venice competition film title The Order that made Nitramhis portrait of the young outsider who carried out Australia’s worst mass shooting in 1996 is so chilling.

Separated

Section: Out of competition (non-fiction)
Director: Errol Morris
What Deadline teaches you: For those who have forgotten what the Trump administration’s child separation policy looked like, Morris provides a sharp account of how the policy was conceived and implemented, and to what end.

September 5

Section: Horizon Extra
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Form: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Corey Johnson, Georgina Rich
What Deadline teaches you: Making a story that is now 52 years old not only relevant but inspiring is no small feat. The acting is fantastic across the board and September 5 succeeds at every level.

Three Friends

Section: Competition
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Form: Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne, Éric Caravaca
What Deadline teaches you: The French enjoy films like Emmanuel Mouret’s relentlessly mediocre romantic comedy, but chances are you’ll have forgotten — or want to forget — this soulless soap opera long before it ends.

Wolves

Section: Out of competition
Director-screenwriter: Jon Watts
Form: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind
What Deadline teaches you: Wolvesstarring two of the biggest movie stars in the world, is a brilliant action comedy that, frankly, will appeal most to an over-40 audience raised on a diet of movies starring bored, wisecracking characters who born too old for this s—.

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