Stephen Sondheim said it best (sort of): You wish to go to the festival? The festival?! The FILM FESTIVAL?! Two major film festivals are happening over the next two weeks in Venice and Toronto, setting the film world’s agenda for the rest of the year. Oscar contenders will emerge, big-name films may flop, and a few will turn out to be genuine groundswell surprises. Vulture will have boots on the ground for both festivals with Alison Willmore and Nate Jones in Venice, and Bilge Ebiri and Joe Reid in Toronto. They’ll be reporting back on the best (and worst) of the dozens of movies they see there with a special eye toward the ones in the list below. These are the movies we’re most curious and excited to see, grouped by festival.
Venice Film Festival
Babygirl
I was lukewarm on Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s initial outing with A24, the cool-kid party-gone-wrong comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, but her new film is arriving accompanied with all kinds of tantalizing keywords, like “erotic thriller,” “forbidden romance,” and “Harris Dickinson.” Nicole Kidman, who’s been coming into her own as one of cinema’s reigning cougars courtesy of her multiple on-screen romances with Zac Efron, plays a CEO who gets involved with a much-younger intern (the aforementioned Dickinson, who’s shown excellent taste in directors). Advance word has been that it’s very sexy! We shall see! — Alison Willmore
Familiar Touch
Kathleen Chalfant is one of those deities of the theater who’s never found a fitting showcase for her talents onscreen — possibly until now. The 79-year-old actor plays Ruth, a woman whose dementia has advanced to the point where she needs to move to an assisted-living facility. But Familiar Touch, the first feature from writer-director Sarah Friedland, isn’t a Still Alice spiral into misery but an open-hearted look at a new stage in life with all the pain and joy it entails. Friedland shot the film collaboratively with the residents and employees of an actual California retirement home, though pro actors like H. Jon Benjamin, Carolyn Michelle Smith, and Andy McQueen also star. — A.W.
The Room Next Door
Look, it’s Pedro Almodóvar first English-language feature. It stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, who have somehow never made a movie together before. And it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, the fall fest’s hottest author, whose previous book The Friend has also been adapted into a film (starring Naomi Watts and a Great Dane) that will premiere at TIFF. — A.W.
2073
While Asif Kapadia got his start making narrative films, he’s best known for Senna, Amy, and Diego Maradona, documentaries crafted entirely out of archival footage to form fascinating montages of famous figures as they were captured by cameras, both publicly and privately. His latest feature, 2073, is an intriguing hybrid. Billed as nonfiction, it’s a time-travel story set in a dystopian future and stars Samantha Morton and Naomi Ackie. Promising and mysterious! Though what’s really caught my eye is the fact that Kapadia has cited La Jetée as an inspiration. — A.W.
Joker: Folie à Deux
Five years ago, Todd Phillips’s Joker joined the hallowed ranks of Brokeback Mountain, The Battle of Algiers, and Rashomon by winning Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. That honor was soon followed by a moral panic around the film’s potential to incite violence and, ultimately, a successful Oscar campaign for star Joaquin Phoenix. It was a weird time! Now, Phillips and Phoenix are back with a sequel, and they’re joined by Lady Gaga, herself making a grand return to Venice after A Star Is Born. The pitch: You’ve seen Joker live, laugh, and murder — now watch him fall in love with Gaga’s Harley Quinn, who in this telling appears to be a troubled fellow inmate of the now-imprisoned Arthur Fleck. You might call it a bad romance, or maybe stupid love. Oh, and there are also musical numbers, inspired by films like One From the Heart and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. As another Joker might put it: He’s sart of like a singing porson. — Nate Jones
The Brutalist
While dancing about architecture remains a futile endeavor, perhaps moviemaking could be better suited? Thus comes the new film from arthouse wunderkind Brady Corbet: a 70-mm., three-and-a-half-hour epic about a fictional Hungarian Holocaust survivor (Adrien Brody) who attempts to preach the architectural glory of raw concrete with the help of a mysterious benefactor (Guy Pearce). Corbet’s previous features, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, operated on a similar wavelength as the Brutalist aesthetic — stark, chilly, imposing — which suggests this might be festival season’s most perfect match of style and content. — N.J.
Maria
With 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín established a mold-breaking approach to the biopic: free-associative dives into the messy psyches of female icons. He completes this unofficial trilogy with Maria, a look at the final years of opera legend Maria Callas. She’s played by Angelina Jolie, making a grand return to the screen for the first time since Eternals. (Though you could be forgiven for forgetting Eternals.) Oscars-wise, could Jolie follow in the footsteps of her Shark Tale co-star Renée Zellweger — a past Supporting Actress winner who won a long-awaited lead trophy for a musical biopic? For that to happen, two things have to occur: One, Academy voters would need to prove warmer to Larraín’s particular vibe than they have in the past. And two, the film would need U.S. distribution, which at the moment it apparently lacks. (Though there are rumors it’s already been acquired and is waiting to make a splashy festival announcement.) — N.J.
Queer
A year after Challengers pulled out of the opening-night spot at Venice owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Luca Guadagnino is here with Queer — get used to it! It’s an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novel, written in the ’50s but not published until 1985, about a strung-out author who becomes infatuated with a young sailor on a trip to Mexico City. Daniel Craig plays the Burroughs stand-in, in what will almost certainly be the sexiest depiction of William S. Burroughs ever put onscreen. (Outer Banks hunk Drew Starkey, no relation to Ringo, plays the sailor.) The film reunites Guadagnino with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, and if you were one of those people who thought the tennis drama needed more threesomes, fear not: The director claims the sex scenes here are “numerous and quite scandalous.” Is this Guadagnino making up for not having Armie Hammer eat the peach? — N.J.
Pavements
Befitting the most arch of ’90s alt-rock bands, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement movie is a Russian nesting doll of meta concepts. (Perry has compared it to a mash-up of Martin Scorsese’s highly fictionalized Dylan doc Rolling Thunder Revue and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There.) Level one of this “semiotic experiment”: a documentary about the band, featuring old concert footage. Level two: a filmed version of Slanted! Enchanted!, a jukebox musical written by Perry that features the group’s music. Level three: a satirical Pavement biopic that stars Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, and Fred Hechinger, among others. Stay tuned to see how Perry dramatizes the scene where the second drummer drowns. — N.J.
Toronto International Film Festival
Eden
Ron Howard, Academy Award–winning director of A Beautiful Mind (but also of good films like Apollo 13 and Backdraft) hasn’t had a big, broad, popular, well-reviewed hit in a very long time. Longer than you think! Unless you really feel like making a case for Solo: A Star Wars Story or Hillbilly Elegy (just don’t). And yet … Eden intrigues. Howard’s Galapagos-set film (it was originally titled Origin of Species) stars Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, Daniel Bruhl, and Ana de Armas as a group of “settlers” who soon learn that, as the TIFF description says, “hell is other people.” Thriller? Social satire? Triangle of Sadness meets A Perfect Getaway? Even if it’s not great, it could still be Howard’s return to having fun. — Joe Reid
Conclave
The pope is dead, and so the Vatican must begin the highly ceremonial and secretly schemey process of picking a new one. Ralph Fiennes as the head of the College of Cardinals, whose job is to oversee the selection, is enough to get my butt in a seat, but throw in Isabella Rossellini as a bossy nun and a novel as source material that includes an eye-popping (and potentially problematic) twist, and I’m more than willing to overlook the fact that I didn’t really like director Edward Berger’s last film, the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. That movie succeeded with brutal scenes of war violence, but can Berger handle a cast full of stars like Fiennes, Rossellini, John Lithgow, and Stanley Tucci? As a fan of big Catholic pageantry nonsense, I sure hope so. — J.R.
Nightbitch
Sound the Amy Adams Oscar Campaign klaxon — she’s back in the Best Actress conversation for the first time since (sigh) Hillbilly Elegy. The six-times-nominated actress has never made a run at Oscar with this pulpy a character, though. Adams plays a housewife and mother who moonlights (pun intended — deal with it) as a shape-shifting wild dog. A werewolf, if you will. The closest an actress has come to winning an Oscar for playing a creature out of the horror canon was either Kathy Bates for Misery or whatever Marion Cotillard was doing to Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Nightbitch’s director, Marielle Heller, is a big part of the reason to hope that this project may have the goods for Adams. Heller has already directed Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, and Tom Hanks to Oscar nominations. If Nightbitch turns out to be more than just cheap thrills, it’ll make for a fascinating case in the Oscar conversation. — J.R.
Saturday Night
The night of the very first Saturday Night Live show must have been an electric, heady, chaotic scene. That’s what we hear from the myriad recollections of the show’s lionized early run. Jason Reitman is sure hoping it’s the stuff of a good movie. The recent trailer debut for the Columbia Pictures film led to a lot of raised eyebrows for its on-the-nose dialogue and a sense of self-importance that had some particularly critical people citing the likes of Aaron Sorkin. In a way, concerns that Saturday Night might end up being too pompous for its own good only makes it more of a must-see. But the real draw is the remarkable cast of talented young actors gathered to play some of comedy’s most legendary personalities. The Fabelmans’s Gabriel LaBelle plays Lorne Michaels, while Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) plays NBC exec Dick Ebersol. Cory Michael Smith, so ostentatiously damaged in May December, plays Chevy Chase; Dylan O’Brien, the heartthrob from Teen Wolf and the Maze Runner movies, plays Dan Aykroyd, of course. Rachel Sennott (Bottoms) plays writer Rosie Shudter. There’s some static electricity to the idea of one ascendant generation of talent playing another one. If Reitman can keep from hanging too many lanterns on portentous dialogue, we might be in business. — J.R.
The Wild Robot
Decades ago, Chris Sanders created Lilo & Stitch for Disney, before setting off for Dreamworks to make the How to Train Your Dragon films. His latest is an adaptation of Peter Brown’s children’s story about a lost robot in the wilderness who winds up trying to raise a gosling whose whole family is gone. (Lupita Nyong’o voices the robot, and Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames provide supporting voices.) Sanders’s distinctive, rounded character designs have been blended here with a textured animation style that evokes painting brushstrokes. It’s still modern 3-D animation, but that hand-made quality should serve this gentle material well. — Bilge Ebiri
Hard Truths
It’s been years since Mike Leigh has made a film — 2018’s epic Peterloo was his previous effort — and he hasn’t exactly been silent over the years about the difficulties he’s had getting movies off the ground in our misbegotten era of franchise swill and streaming slop. So the arrival of a new feature from Britain’s great cinematic poet of the everyday is certainly one reason to celebrate. That it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Leigh’s Palme d’Or– and Oscar-winning 1996 hit Secrets and Lies, is another. — B.E.
M. Son of the Century
Joe Wright (The Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Atonement) has made a streaming series about the rise of Benito Mussolini, and it seems like a safe bet that it won’t be your typical musty, dusty period piece. Wright’s work has always been influenced by the rave culture of his youth and the glorious artificiality of his parents’ puppet theater; his best work demonstrates a kind of hand-made monumentalism. His last feature, 2023’s Cyrano, is one of the great modern musicals. The idea of him tackling the wild, melodramatic story of Mussolini’s rise — a subject that’s already fueled at least one masterpiece, Italian legend Marco Bellocchio’s 2009 epic Vincere — is too delicious to resist. — B.E.
No Other Land
This documentary from a collective of Israeli and Palestinian artists is not actually premiering at Venice or Toronto. It had its first screenings earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won two big prizes, and has been gathering acclaim (and controversy) all over the world since then. Now it will be showing up at most of the big fall festivals. That’s how major it is. The film, shot over four years, charts the friendship of a young Palestinian activist and journalist, Basel Adra, and an Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, who together try to document (and at times resist) the evacuation and destruction of Adra’s village by the Israeli Defense Forces working in tandem with Israeli settlers. Full of shocking footage, it’s a picture that’s certain to be talked about in the months and maybe years to come. — B.E.
Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story
By all accounts, Edna O’Brien wasn’t just a famous novelist but a woman who had quite an eventful life — a controversial bon vivant who challenged the mores of conservative Irish society as well as the British literary Establishment among whom she lived. Over the years, the likes of Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, and Richard Burton crossed paths with her, in ways both intellectual and romantic. Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary, shot before O’Brien’s death earlier this year, promises to get into all of it with O’Brien interviewed onscreen and her words read by the great Jessie Buckley in voice-over. — B.E.
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