What’s the Buzz About Lido Movies?

The Venice Film Festival — which gets underway today — has in recent decades fired the starting gun on awards season.

This year’s festival is stacked with A-list talent. It’s perhaps starrier than ever. The roll-call includes Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, George Clooney, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, Daniel Craig, Angelina Jolie, Kevin Costner, Sigourney Weaver, Nicole Kidman, Isabelle Huppert, and many more.

In terms of awards hopefuls, Joker Folie A Deux , Pedro Almodovar’s English-language debut The Room Next Door , Maria , and Queer , are among those jostling for lift-off at the event which is firmly established as a key Academy launch-pad.

This isn’t the year’s first glimpse at awards hopefuls, however. In reality, Cannes has now become the first major stop in the awards season. The Academy’s embrace of foreign-language films across its categories has meant that the Croisette’s arthouse favorites have more chance of breaking out than in the past. Movies that popped in May such as Anora [English-language but firmly arthouse], Emilia Perez , and The Seed Of The Sacred Fig will be hoping to become this year’s Anatomy Of A Fall and/or Zone Of Interest .

While the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride triangle is still the place to be for many of the major studio awards hopefuls, we may be experiencing a subtle shift in their status as surefire awards bell-weathers. After launching eight of the nine Best Picture winners between 2013-2021, none of the past three Best Picture winners launched at a fall festival. Time will tell if this is a trend or a blip. The lack of Netflix contenders on the Lido hasn’t helped this year’s depth of “awards-type” movies.

That said, when we spoke to Venice chief Alberto Barbera ahead of the festival he was bullish, tipping Joker , Queer , Maria , and the Almodóvar” as likely to stand out for the Academy, adding “maybe The Brutalist too”, about Brady Corbert’s epic starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.

Joker 2 is seemingly the most solid Best Picture candidate among the Venice crop. Joker scored 11 Oscar nominations back in 2019 and Barbera described the sequel to us as “one of the most daring, brave and creative films in recent American cinema.”

Todd Phillips’ “dystopian musical” charts how failed comedian Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), while in Arkham State Hospital. Upon release, the pair embark on a doomed romantic misadventure. Barbera described Phoenix, who already won an Oscar for Joker , as “outstanding”, and also praised Phillips’ direction.

According to the bookmakers and awards watchers, the current leading contenders for Best Picture also include Dune: Part Two , Blitz , Conclave , Gladiator 2 , Nickel Boys , Here , and A Complete Unknown , in addition to Anora and Emilia Perez . Only three of those are fall festival films, by the way, and only one from TIFF-Telluride-Venice.

A fall season launch is still the norm for Best Actor winners. Nine out of the last ten Best Actress winners come from films that had fall launches, while that ratio is six out of ten for the leading men.

Barbera described Daniel Craig’s performance in Queer as a career best. Anticipation is high. That said, we hear the film itself is polarizing, and it still hasn’t managed to attract a U.S. distributor. Maria is another high-profile Venice film without a U.S. buyer to date. Both are expected to get deals out of the festival.

One of the projects that has attracted simmering buzz since Cannes where it sold to Sony Classics is Walter Salles’ anticipated first narrative feature in more than a decade: I’m Still Here .

In I’m Still Here , the acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker, known for critical hits such as Oscar nominee Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries , has tackled the emotional and powerful true story of a woman who is forced into activism after her husband is captured by the military regime in Brazil in the 1960s.

The film reunites Salles with his Oscar-nominated Central Station star Fernanda Montenegro, one of Brazil’s most acclaimed actors, and her daughter Fernanda Torres, with whom the filmmaker has worked multiple times.

Among other Venice films we’re hearing good things about are September 5 by Tim Fehlbaum, Harvest , doc Russians At War (Venice has a typically impressive docs lineup), and Lawrence Valin’s Little Jaffna .

Check back in throughout the week to hear what’s popping and what’s not.

Source: Variety