What were the Tops & Flops of the 81st Venice Film Festival?

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The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival took its final bow this weekend, awarding the coveted Golden Lion to Pedro Almodóvar’sThe Room Next Door.  

It was a line-up filled with starry vehicles, future awards contenders, glorious and emotionally revealing experimental fare, and several surprises. Many delivered the goods. Some didn’t.

These are the films you need to add to your watchlist… And the ones you’d do best to avoid.

TOPS: The Venice-premiering titles to look out for

The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s epic historical drama achieved critical consensus this year on the Lido, and was tipped to win the Golden Lion. That sadly didn’t materialise, with Corbet taking home Best Director instead. Not a bad shout, but you can expect The Brutalist to be dominating conversations when it comes to the upcoming awards season. It’s a six years in the making / 215 minutes in the watching American saga starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-born Bauhaus-educated Jewish architect called Laszló Toth. He flees war-ravaged Europe in 1947 to taste the fabled American Dream, only to discover the reality of the immigrant experience, powered by envy, xenophobia and the preservation of a status quo that ensures privilege remains insular. Those savagely maintaining hierarchies based on wealth are embodied by two stand-out supporting turns from Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn, the cultural gatekeepers who fuel Laszló’s struggles. With a scope worthy of the best Paul Thomas Anderson films, The Brutalist is a meticulously composed epic that is weighty without feeling ponderous, and which understands the many facets of American myth-making. It draws you into a balanced yet asymmetrical maze you don’t want to escape from. Read our full review.  

Release date: TBC – expect the end of this year.

April

In 2020, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili delivered her stunning debut feature Beginning, which won San Sebastian’s Golden Shell for Best Film – as well as being chosen by Georgia as its submission for the 2021 Best International Feature Oscar. April (previously titled Those Who Find Me) focuses on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician working in rural Georgia who performs clandestine abortions, despite the laws of the country which state that pregnancy terminations are only legal within the first 12 weeks. When a newborn dies in her care, an investigation begins and ramps up rumours about her morality and professionalism. What seems like a relatively straightforward story is given a tantalizingly challenging and ambiguous treatment, making the film seem like a hallucinatory trip – one that stuns due to its imagery and ingenious shot compositions. It’s a tough film to recommend as Kulumbegashvili’s unparalleled vision swallows the viewer whole, with surrealism and a borderline neo-realist take on horror, delving into the impossibility of escape for women like Nina who take it upon themselves to sacrifice everything for the survival of the many. The fact that this is only Kulumbegashvili’s second film is remarkable; she may have left the festival with the third-place prize, but this could have been one of the most daring Golden Lion wins in recent memory. Read our full review.  

Release date: Next year – April 2025 maybe?

Queer

When it comes to best male lead performances this year on the Lido, Daniel Craig was the one to beat. He bafflingly missed out on the top acting prize, which was awarded to Vincent Lindon in the strong but more pedestrian The Quiet Son. However, don’t be surprised if Oscar nominations are around the corner for the former James Bond actor. He stars in Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s second film out this year after Challengers. It’s an adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel in which Craig plays a needy, restless and awkwardly grandiloquent Burroughs avatar, William Lee. He’s an American expat who pines for an elusive younger man (Drew Starkey) in 1940s Mexico. When the aging gay man asks the object of his affections to travel to South America for a quest to discover a psychedelic drug called ‘yage’ (ayahuasca), the film turns away from their sweaty push-and-pull relationship with some parallels to Death In Venice (but maybe because we saw it on the Lido) and morphs into a fascinating Orphean retelling about the search for oneself, the yearning for self-acceptance, and the impossibility of going back to past glory days. Featuring all the sensuality Guadagnino has become renowned for, as well as some mesmerising visuals and meaningfully anachronistic needle drops, Queer is daring and nothing short of fascinating to watch unfold. Read our full review.  

Release date: TBC but expect it to drop later this year or at the start of 2025.

2073

Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy) delivers a genre-bending documentary hybrid set in a dystopian future which tackles the biggest challenges endangering our present. Broadly inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée – which also inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys – it features contemporary news footage interspersed with interviews and a depressingly familiar rogues gallery (Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk) to illustrate not only the disruption of democracy but that it’s not about facts any more. It’s about emotions and the distortion of a shared reality. Essentially a time capsule sent from the fututre mapping out what led to ‘The Event’ – which « wasn’t just one thing” but “a slow creep” – 2073 serves as a warning and a way for us to recognize our already triggered downfall before it’s too late. Kapadia covers an impressive amount of ground in 85 minutes (Brexit; Charlottesville; the weaponization of social media; the planetary-scale trashing of ecosystems) and while this compilation of our shittiest hits may strike some viewers as choir-preaching and lacking in subtlety, that is the whole point. When these images are edited together and framed within a cause-and-effect structure, as opposed to isolated incidents, understatement is not required. An urgent and scary cautionary tale not worth ignoring. Read our full review.  

Release date: Hopefully later this year. It screens at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival mid-October.

The Room Next Door

Celebrated Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar took home the Golden Lion for his first full-length English movie, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. While not an unmerited win, this one fails to sit alongside All About My Mother, The Skin I Live In or Talk To Her as one of Almodóvar’s best. However, it remains a touching tale of female friendship and death. Based on Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through”, it follows two friends who rekindle their friendship. It turns out that Martha (Swinton) has been diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer, and asks Ingrid (Moore) for a favour: to be in the titular room when she takes a euthanasia pill and ends her life with dignity. While the overly literal script and melodramatic flashbacks delute some of the emotional authenticity at the start (perhaps something was lost in translation), the second half of the film becomes a fascinating exploration into the western world’s shortcomings when it comes to confronting death, and how humans tend to find « lots of ways to live life inside a tragedy ». Bolstered as always by a vibrant style, production and symbolic visual elements, The Room Next Door stands strong as a humanist film about life and reconciliation rather than a political one – even if it is, by the director’s own admission, pro-euthanasia. And considering Venice has a proven track record for premiering future Oscar contenders, you can expect Almodóvar’s latest to be an early frontrunner for next year’s Oscars – alongside The Brutalist and Queer. Read our full review.  

Release date: 18 October in Spain. The rest of Europe should soon follow.

Babygirl

Dutch actress / director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) shows Hollywood how it’s done when it comes to telling complex stories about sexuality – especially when it comes to the perspective of older women. Her directorial debut Instinct, centred on a psychosexual relationship between a sex offender and his therapist, showed she was able to deal with knotty and slanted power dynamics. With Babygirl, she touches upon similar themes of gender and power through the story of an influential CEO (Nicole Kidman) whose personal and professional life threatens to come undone by desires she has been suppressing. They come to the fore when she meets her new, younger intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson)… Riffing on 80s erotic thrillers, Babygirl is a modern update on the genre which saw female leads punished for their transgressions. It is less a subversive BDSM adventure and more a sex-positive character study focusing on how honest and open communication regarding desire is vital. Kidman rightfully took home the Best Actress prize this year for her role as Romy, playing the character with an understated vulnerability, managing to convey her inner conflicts despite attempting to keep up appearances. Most impressive though is how Reijn explores, without any judgement, the contradictions of desire and how “shameful” yearnings need their space. Their suppression can be just as potentially dangerous as a torrid affair. Read our full review.

Release date: 20 December in the UK – 25 December in the US – an interesting pick for the Christmas holidays, but surely a sign that an awards campaign is already planned. 

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Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here)

Returning to the director’s chair 12 years since his Jack Kerouac adaptation On The Road, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Saller (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) also returned to his roots with Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here). Set in Brazil in 1971, during the military dictatorship, a family is torn apart by the arbitrary arrest of both the ex-congressman father (Selton Mello) and the mother (Fernada Torres), who play real-life figures Rubens and Eunice Paiva. Released, she relentlessly pursues the truth behind her husband’s disappearance while trying to keep her family of five together. Based on the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Rubens and Eunice, it’s a no-frills drama that is subtly gripping and sees Torres excel without toppling into melodrama. The fact-based story of desaparecidos during military-ruled Brazil told from the perspective of those left behind is incredibly moving, but it is her layered performance that makes I’m Still Here a truly engrossing watch. 

Release date: So far, November in Brazil – and you can expect it to be the country’s submission to the Best International Feature Film category for the Oscars.

Honorable mentions:Kjærlighet (Love), the excellent second part of Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex Love Dreams trilogy, which should have left the festival with Best Screenplay; Broken Rage, which sees Takeshi Kitano parody his hard man hitman image à la Le Magnifique, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo – it provoked the most laughter this year on the Lido; El Jockey (Kill The Jockey), a freewheeling tale of a self-destructive jockey who starts to discover who he is truly meant to be.

FLOPS: The ones to approach with caution

Joker: Folie À Deux

The sequel to 2019’s Joker was the buzziest title of the festival this year, with director Todd Phillips teaming up with Joaquin Phoenix once more. Lady Gaga joined the ranks for not a straightforward psychological thriller like the first, but an audacious sounding jukebox musical. What a shame that the unconventional follow-up plays out like a gimmicky slog. Props must go to the fact that Joker: Folie À Deux does the opposite of what you’d expect from a Joker sequel; not only does it contain musical numbers, but it’s also a (middling) prison play and a (tedious) courtroom drama that wrongfoots fans of the first film. However, the musical sequences become repetitive and lifeless, while the narrative is half-baked at best. You wish that Phillips had either made Folie À Deux either a full-blown musical or inverted the focus by having the story unfold entirely from the perspective of Lady Gaga’s (criminally sidelined) character. All in all, an underwhelming and strangely monotonous folly not worth entertaining. Read our full review.

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Release date: 2 October.

Disclaimer

We sat through all seven episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s TV series Disclaimer, in which Cate Blanchett plays a famed journalist who discovers she is a prominent character in the self-published novel by an unknown author. The book threatens to reveal a secret she has tried to keep hidden at all costs. Sounds promising, right? How wrong we were. Adapted from the best-selling book by Renée Knight, it features an omnipresent and mind-numbingly literal voiceover narration that spells out everything to a lunatic degree. This could have been by design and a comment on unreliable narrators; the final episode ruins that potential series-saving reveal. Add some very questionable acting from the likes of Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen, and Disclaimer is punishing in the extreme. But with a script this poor, you can’t fully blame the actors. You have to sit through at least five episodes before things get interesting; even when it does, the big reveal trivializes not only sexual assault by making it into a punchline, but also features questionable decisions that undermine themes regarding truth, narrative and form. It’s a melodramatic dud brimming with characters you want to shout at for not acting like human beings, one that can’t be saved by some admittedly very steamy sex scenes or Blanchett’s deligent efforts. Don’t waste your time.

Release date: Streaming on Apple TV+ on 11 October.

Wolfs

While not a bad way to spend an evening, Wolfs is a lightweight comedy-thriller about two corpse-disposal operatives (George Clooney, Brad Pitt) who are forced to work together for… reasons. It has its moments (mostly delivered by Austin Abrams’ hapless would-be corpse), but you ultimately wish that it had more vision, or at the very least a Shane Black-esque script to get a Kiss Kiss Bang Bang blast. The anti-bromantic back and forth between Clooney and Pitt works up to a point, but by the time you reach the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finale, this derivative buddy movie ends up more like Kiss Kiss Bland Bland.

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Release date: Streaming on Apple TV+ on 27 September. 

Maria

While not a bad film by any metric, Pablo Larraín’s biopic starring Angelina Jolie ends up as the weakest in his tragic women trilogy, featuring Jackie and Spencer. Jolie gives a committed performance as Maria Callas, the most renowned and influential opera singer of the 20th century, but you wish that Larraín had taken a bolder approach to her final days. Unlike Andrew Dominik’s polarizing Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, which was a purposefully fragmented and chaotic chronicle of an equally fragmented psyche, Maria feels like a tame and clunkier affair. The script by Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight works well and it is beautifully shot by cinematographer Edward Lachman, with the DP crafting palpably gorgeous autumnal tableaus using a mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm. Beyond the stylings though, the film is not the divine take on “La Divina” one might have hoped for. Read our full review.

Release date: Heading to the BFI London Film Festival this October, before dropping on Netflix in February 2025.

Trois Amies (Three Friends)

Emmanuel Mouret’s cute-at-best Gallic dramedy follows three BFFs from Lyon. Mousy Joan (India Hair) is no longer in love with Victor (Vincent Macaigne), but she can’t bring herself to break things off. Alice (Camille Cottin) reassures her that passion is overrated in long-term couples and that she tolerates her dependable partner Eric (Grégoire Ludig). But she has no idea that he is having an affair with the lively Rebecca (Sara Forestier), the third in the trio. It’s very French, very cheesy, very Eric Rohmer, and while it’s hard to get annoyed about, its musings about “synchronised” love end up feeling rather tedious. Why it ended up in the Competition section is a mystery.

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Release date: Later this year.

The 81st Venice Film Festival took place from 28 August – 7 September. Click here for our full daily coverage of this year’s 81st edition.