2024 Venice Movie Reviews:

The 2024 Venice Film Festival kicked off August 28 with the long-awaited Tim Burton-Michael Keaton sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opening the 81th edition, which runs through September 7 on the Lido. Deadline is on the ground to watch all the key films. 

The lineup for the world’s oldest fest also includes world premieres of Todd Phillips’ Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga pic Joker: Folie à Deux, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Pablo Larrain’s Maria Callas biopic Maria starring Angelina Jolie and new works from the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Salles, Harmony Korine, Thomas Vinterberg, Brady Corbet, Takeshi Kitano, Claude Lelouch, Errol Morris and others.

Below is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year awarded its Golden Lion for best film to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, who went on the win the Best Actress Oscar. Isabelle Huppert heads the competition jury this year. Click on the movie’s title to read our full take.

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And Their Children After Them

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriters: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma
Cast: Paul Kircher, Angélina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
Deadline’s takeaway: And Their Children After Them takes the Boukherma brothers into the verdant territory of literary romance, which weighs heavily on the long, repetitive result; however much of the original novel has been excised, the end result feels overstuffed, as if everything had to be included.  

Babygirl

Section: Competition
Director: Halina Reijn
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor
Deadline’s takeaway: Nicole Kidman really goes the distance, imbuing Romy with a psychological vulnerability that is missing from the film it most obvious sounds like (50 Shades of Grey) and presenting a unique reversal of the film it most obviously looks like (Secretary). Halina Reijn leaves so much up in the air that Babygirl lasts longer in the mind than you think it might.

Battleground

Section: Competition
Director: Gianni Amelio
Cast: Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini, Giovanni Scotti, Vince Vivenzio, Alberto Cracco, Luca Lazzareschi, Maria Grazia Plos, Rita Bosello
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s a fascinating slice of history, but despite terrific performances from the leads, and especially Borghi, Battleground simply fizzles out, leaving us with the tantalizing thought of the more thorny, complex, relevant film it could have been.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Arthur Conti
Deadline’s takeaway: Michael Keaton is back as the compellingly horrible undead star, but it’s not so much a sequel — serving up more of the same — as a kooky, spooky school reunion where you find out what happened to the class weirdo. It’s also funny, all the time, and a blast to watch.

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The Brutalist

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

Cloud

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masataka Kubota
Deadline’s takeaway: A master of atmosphere in prize-winning films such as Wife of a Spy, Kiyoshi Kurosawa here grasps the thriller genre by the collar and gives it a good shake. Actually, Cloud manages to be many things — a social document about online communications and how radically they have reshaped the world, a snappy shoot-em-up, and a brooding moral tale.

Diva Futura

Section: Competition
Director: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan, Lidija Kordić, Davide Iachini, Marco Iermanò
Deadline’s takeaway: In Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s scattergun biopic of Riccardo Schicchi, the impresario of club, talent farm and porn production house Diva Futura, you can decide how much to believe.

Disclaimer

Section: Out of Competition (TV)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Hoyeon, Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Partidge, Leila George
Deadline’s takeaway: Disclaimer is a study in confession by a filmmaker for whom perspective is the ultimate deconstruction that is less a work of towering originality but more a compelling and disturbing story within a comfort zone of discomforting tropes.

Diva Futura

Title: Diva Futura
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Piperfilm
Director: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Screenwriters: Debora Attanasio, Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan, Lidija Kordić, Davide Iachini, Marco Iermanò
Running time: 2 hr 8 mins

Families Like Ours

Section: Out of Competition (TV)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Cast: 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
Deadline’s takeaway: The destruction of an entire country by climate change is a huge, urgent prospect. Maybe it is just too huge to conjure in the confines of a television drama about a few individuals whose lifelong good luck – being born Danish – has run out. 

Harvest

Section: Competition
Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane
Deadline’s takeaway: This is a story – a story told by Athina Rachel Tsingari, moreover —  which means it has its own rules. The idiosyncrasies of those rules won’t appeal to everyone, but for those of us drawn to remote places and the people who live in them, doing the work that Tsangari demands is a real pleasure.

I’m Still Here

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
Deadline’s takeaway: Salles has a purpose here. He is clearly not simply 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.

Joker: Folie à Deux

Section: Competition
Director: Todd Phillips
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Leigh Gill, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Bill Smitrovich
Deadline’s takeaway: A brilliant return to a world of madness and an odd love story in a world losing control. With song, dance, comedy, darkness, animation, drama, violence and more, this is a musical — if it even is a musical — like no other.

Kill the Jockey

Section: Competition
Director: Luis Ortega
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girolamo, Daniel Fanego, Osmar Núñez, Luis Ziembrowski
Deadline’s takeaway: A subdued yet strange piece of work, it starts out like a deadpan Wes Anderson spoof of a Stanley Kubrick gangster movie and slowly mutates. Although it has panache and style, Kill the Jockey needs a rather more substantial narrative to get it, and us, to the finish line.

Maria

Section: Competition
Director: Pablo Larraín
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino
Deadline’s takeaway: Somehow the portrait the film draws is curiously bloodless. Maria Callas the woman remains distant and unknowable; cunning to the end, she eludes us. Maria tells a fascinating story, but it lacks that rasping edge.

M. Son of the Century

Section: Out of Competition (TV)
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Luca Marinelli, Francesco Russo, Barbara Chichiarelli, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Benedetta Cimatti, Gaetano Bruno, Maurizio Lombardi, Vincenzo Nemolato, Paolo Pierobon
Deadline’s takeaway: The bio-series sticks to the facts of the great dictator Mussolini’s life, which are extraordinary enough, but stretches those facts into surreal shapes until we feel we’re in some parallel historical universe. Its club-mix massacres evoke both the horror and sheer excitement of fascism; it’s politics for sadists and thrill-seekers.

The Order

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

Queer

Section: Competition
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Andra Ursuta, Michael Borremans, David Lowery
Deadline’s takeaway: With this superb, incredibly insightful adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ early-’50s novel, Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig have succeeded where David Cronenberg failed, in humanizing a man whose preference for the company of cats was construed as misanthropy.

The Room Next Door

Section: Competition
Director: Pedro Almódovar
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Luengo, Alex Hogh Andersen, Esther McGregor, Alvise Rigo, Melina Matthews
Deadline’s takeaway: Often enough, death and life are sitting easily together. The Room Next Door is a thoughtful, vital, even radiant film. With any luck, it may even have helped Pedro Almodóvar feel better about things.

Separated

Section: Out of Competition (Non-Fiction)
Director: Errol Morris
Deadline’s takeaway: For those who have forgotten what that the Trump administration’s child-separation policy looked like, Morris arrives to remind us with an incisive account of how it was devised and implemented, and for what purpose.

September 5

Section: Horizon Extra
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Corey Johnson, Georgina Rich
Deadline’s takeaway: Taking a story that is now 52 years old and making it not just relevant but newly inspiring is no small feat. The acting across the board is superb, and September 5 succeeds on every level.

Sicilian Letters

Section: Competition
Directors: Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza
Cast: Toni Servillo, Elio Germano, Daniela Marra, Barbora Bobulova, Giuseppe Tantillo, Fausto Russo Alesi, Antonia Truppo, Tommaso Ragno, Betti Pedrazzi, Filippo Luna, Rosario Palazzolo, Roberto De Francesco, Vincenzo Ferrera, Maurizio Marchetti, Gianluca Zaccaria, Lucio Patanè
Deadline’s takeaway: So here it is: mob movie as a ripping yarn. There is a disconcertingly ambivalent tone to Sicilian Letters: It’s more of a romp than a revengers’ tragedy. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is Sicily as it’s supposed to be.

Stranger Eyes

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Yeo Siew Hua
Cast: Wu Chien-Ho, Lee Kang-Sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-Yew
Deadline’s takeaway: It is a meandering, strange film, in which the ostensible thriller framework ultimately feels like an obstruction and the characters remain indistinct. But that discordant strangeness is also its allure.

Trois Amies

Section: Competition
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Cast: Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne, Éric Caravaca
Deadline’s takeaway: The French enjoy films like Emmanuel Mouret’s relentlessly middlebrow romantic comedy, but you’ll likely have forgotten this soul-sapping soap — or want to — long before it finishes.

2073

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Asif Kapadia
Cast: Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer. As themselves: Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, Antony Lowenstein
Deadline’s takeaway: The filmmaker wisely avoids the seeming documentary imperative to provide a “hopeful ending” even to the direst stories of societal dysfunction. Had he attached a pat wrap-up, it would have absolved viewers of contending with his thesis. As the trailer puts it: “This is not fiction. This is not documentary. This is a warning.”

Vermiglio

Section: Competition
Director: Maura Delpero
Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Orietta Notari, Carlotta Gamba, Santiago Fondevila Sancet, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Patrick Gardner, Enrico Panizza, Luis Thaler, Simone Bendetti, Sara Serraiocco
Deadline’s takeaway: Although it is very much concerned with the limited choices facing the women of Vermiglio, Maura Delpero’s film is also about the presence — and absence — of the men in their world. A husband’s vanishing act is simply seen as a side effect of the conflict, and no one judges him for it. They simply wait and wait and wait.

Wolfs

Section: Out of Competition
Director-screenwriter: Jon Watts
Cast: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind
Deadline’s takeaway: Wolfs, featuring two of the biggest movie stars on the planet, is a genial action comedy that, to be frank, will appeal mostly to audiences over 40, raised on a diet of movies with jaded, wisecracking characters that were born too old for this s—.

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