Clooney, Lawrence slated for Venice Film Festival
Event has proven to be a launch-pad for eventual Oscar-winning movies
The Venice Film Festival is kicking off the fall cinema season with searing drama, serious glamour and a crop of new movies vying for attention, awards and acclaim.
Thanks to its late-summer time slot — just ahead of rivals in Telluride, Colo., and Toronto — the world’s oldest cinema festival is a key showcase for films hoping to dominate Hollywood’s awards season. In recent years, Venice has been a launch-pad for Oscar winners including Gravity, Birdman, Spotlight and La La Land.
This year’s edition opens Wednesday with Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, a science fiction-tinged drama starring Matt Damon as a man who hopes to minimize his problems by shrinking himself.
Other films competing for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, include George Clooney directed heist movie Suburbicon; Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical The Shape of Water; Darren Aronofsky’s secrecy-shrouded thriller Mother!; and Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Unspooling in one of Italy’s most ravishing cities, the festival takes style and celebrity very seriously. Among the stars who will be whisked across the Venice lagoon by boat to walk the Palazzo del Cinema red carpet are Clooney, a festival favourite who has a house on nearby Lake Como.
He’ll likely be joined by pal Damon, who stars in both Suburbicon and Downsizing, which also features Kristen Wiig. Jennifer Lawrence is expected for the much-anticipated Mother!, which also stars Javier Bardem. The Spanish star should also be on hand alongside Penélope Cruz for the drug-lord biopic Loving Pablo.
An older generation of showbiz royalty will be well represented by stars including Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland and Michael Caine. Jane Fonda and Robert Redford star in the late-life romance Our Souls at Night. Several films in the lineup tackle the conflicts and divisions convulsing the world.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s documentary Human Flow travels to 23 countries as it tries to put a human face on the vast migrations unfolding around the world. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, directs First Reformed, featuring Ethan Hawke as a minister wrestling with his faith and the spectre of environmental catastrophe.
Israel’s Samuel Maoz, director of acclaimed war drama Lebanon, returns with Foxtrot, another story of conflict and loss. From China, Vivian Qu’s Angels Wear White centres on sexual assault in a small provincial town.