The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival officially kicks off on Wednesday with the eyes of the film world focused on the Lido. 

Long-running festival director Alberto Barbera and his team have unveiled a star-studded lineup, including possible awards season contenders. But which premieres can’t be missed amid the busy program?

THR‘s chief movie critic David Rooney looked through the selection of the big Italian festival to pick some of the most intriguing prospects.

The Brutalist

When Brady Corbet was in Venice at age 16 with Mysterious Skin, instead of flying home with his director Gregg Araki and co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he stayed on a couple extra days to see the new Claire Denis film, The Intruder. That same cinephile curiosity is evident in the choice of filmmakers with whom he’s worked, among them Michael Haneke, Sean Durkin, Lars von Trier, Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve. Co-written with Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s buzzed-about third feature as director (following The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux) stars Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn in an immigrant drama about Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth, who survives the Holocaust and sets out in 1947 with his wife to pursue the American Dream, toiling in poverty until a lucrative contract changes the course of his future.

Cloud

One of the more distinctive voices to emerge from the new wave of J-horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa first turned heads internationally in 1997 with Cure, a hallucinatory detective story steeped in dread. Since then, he has experimented freely with different genres, moving from psychological crime thrillers to ghost tales, ruminative sci-fi, historical mysteries, ethereal afterlife reflections, romance and family drama, invariably with enigmatic elements. His latest centers on a young factory worker with a side hustle selling goods online; he quits his day job and rents a lake house outside the city, where a series of unsettling events builds into a life-threatening spiral.

I’m Still Here

Walter Salles’ first feature back in his native Brazil since 2008 is adapted from the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva and based on the author’s personal history. Set against the country’s military dictatorship in 1971, it follows a mother forced to reinvent herself as an activist when her family’s life is shattered by an act of random violence. In a pleasing full-circle arc, the lead role is played in her younger years by Fernanda Torres and later in life by her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, so unforgettable in Salles’ 1998 breakthrough film, Central Station.

Queer

After the actors’ strike and a shift in release date caused Challengers to be pulled from its Venice opening-night spot last year, Luca Guadagnino is back. Given the director’s talent for the drama of desire, who better to tackle William S. Burroughs’ iconoclastic work of transgressive gay literature? Guadagnino’s second collaboration with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes stars Daniel Craig, in what’s already being talked up as a startling performance, as Burroughs’ alter ego, adrift in Mexico City in the late 1940s, indulging his heroin habit and falling in with a group of gay American ex-pats. One in particular catches his eye, a preppy former military kid played by Drew Starkey, sparking an intoxicating romantic odyssey. The supporting cast includes Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, and the score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

The Room Next Door

After getting his feet wet with the shorts The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life, Spain’s master of ravishing melodrama and eye-popping aesthetics, Pedro Almodóvar, takes the long-awaited plunge into English-language features with this adaptation of the 2020 Sigrid Nunez novel, What Are You Going Through. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as writers who were close in their youth when they were co-workers at a magazine. Years after their lives took them in different directions, one becoming an auto-fiction novelist, the other a war reporter, they meet again. The cast also features John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola and Juan Diego Botto. 

This story first appeared in the August 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.