Venice Film Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup

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

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 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 Larrain (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.

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 anticipated, Brady Corbet’s hotly-anticipated The Brutalist, 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.

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, and Henrique Zaga from 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 will make her Venice competition debut with Babygirl, a mystery thriller 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.

Documentary 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 is also Göran 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 the notorious, groundbreaking German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Venice has selected four TV series for its small-screen selection: 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 años 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 October 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 Familar Touch, from the experimental U.S. director Sarah Friedland, Deepak Rauniyar’s Indian-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 from U.S. director John Swab, 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 documentaries 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 Mendonça Filho, Abderrahmane Sissako, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Julia von Heinz; and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.

Venice kicks off on 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 Italian director Pupi Avanti will close this year’s festival, also out of competition.