Babygirl

Halina Reijn’s new film sounds like Disclosure in reverse, an erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman as a high-powered exec who starts an affair with an intern (Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson). It’s an ambitious swing from the Dutch director, teaming once more with A24 off the back of her satirical slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies. Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me) and Antonio Banderas round out a nifty cast.

Baby Invasion

Harmony Korine prefers TikTok to cinema these days, but he’s still finding new ways to fuck with the form in Baby Invasion, an “interactive thriller” about a group of mercenaries disguised as babies who ransack the homes of the rich and powerful. It’s the second feature-length project from Korine’s EDGLRD tech studio, after the first, infrared action thriller Aggro Dr1ft, made its bow at the festival last year.

Queer

Adapted from William S Burroughs’ novel of the same name, Luca Guadagnino’s latest is a long-brewing passion project starring Daniel Craig in one of his most adventurous roles to date. Surprisingly given the source material, the director says he leaned into his love of Powell and Pressburger – The Red Shoes especially – in making the movie, which he also claims boasts several “scandalous” sex scenes. For anyone who’s agnostic about the director’s recent turn to high-gloss genre fare (Suspiria, Bones and All, Challengers), it might just be the opus we’ve been waiting for.

Read our guide to the cinema of Luca Guadagnino here.

Pavements

If Alex Ross Perry’s film about slacker-rock icons Pavement were any more meta, it would have to be called Being Stephen Malkmus. With a tricksy approach to its subject recalling Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There – frontman Malkmus is played by several members of the cast, including Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and himself – the film draws from an absurdist musical Perry made about the band in 2022, and has been teased by the director as “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical”. Perry’s proved his ability to make films about music that don’t run on conventional Hollywood lines before – seek out Her Smell at your earliest convenience – so we bet this one will do justice to one of 90s indie rock’s defining bands.

The Room Next Door

With the first English-language feature he’s directed in his 40-plus years as a filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar arrives at the Lido in search of his first major festival prize. Adapted from the novel by Sigrid Nunez, who co-wrote the screenplay with Almodóvar, The Room Next Door concerns a complicated mother-daughter relationship and an author, Ingrid, caught in the middle. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star – really, you couldn’t ask for more than that.

Read our guide to Pedro Almodóvar’s most stylish films here.

The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s typically ambitious-sounding, three-and-a-half-hour third film tells the rags-to-riches story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a fictional architect and Holocaust survivor whose life is changed when a “mysterious and wealthy client” (Guy Pearce) enlists his services. Corbet’s first two films, Vox Lux and The Childhood of a Leader, had a capital-A auteuriness about them that split critics right down the middle; expect his new one to walk a similarly fine line between portentous and pretentious.

Harvest

Athina Rachel Tsangari was a name on the Greek weird-wave scene that brought Yorgos Lanthimos to wider renown; indeed, the Poor Things director had a brief role in her debut, the surreally charged comedy Attenberg. Harvest is Tsangari’s first film in nearly a decade, a hallucinatory drama set in medieval Britain adapted from the John Crace novel of the same name. Caleb Landry Jones, who stopped by the Lido last year sporting a Scottish accent as part of his prep for the role, takes the lead in this one.

2073

Asif Kapadia is known for his shrewd documentary portraits of tragic figures like Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna. For his next trick, he unveils a “terrifying” vision of a world coming apart at the seams, using Chris Marker’s seminal sci-fi La Jetée as its source text. With Samantha Morton and Naomi Ackie among the ‘contributors’, it’s an intriguing gear-shift from one of the UK’s preeminent documentarians.

Peaches Goes Bananas

Peaches is a true musical radical whose genderqueer performances put her whole light years ahead of the competition around the turn of the millennium. The brainchild of former teacher Merrill Nisker, who bought herself a synth in 2000 while recovering from thyroid cancer, her neon-streaked brand of sex-positive feminism is celebrated by French filmmaker Marie Losier in Peaches Goes Bananas, an “anti-biographical portrait” that doubles as a record of the decades-long friendship between the two women. 

April

Déa Kulumbegashvili’s first film was an austere religious drama that competed for a Palme d’Or and won her comparisons with Michael Haneke. Her second, April, sounds no less forbidding and tells the story of an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions in her home country of Georgia. It promises a tough watch from a big talent who brings a striking lens to her difficult subject matter.

Television

Not a separate strand per se, but Venice’s TV slate enjoys a banner 2024 with the unveiling of new series by Roma director Alfonso Cuarón, Joe Wright and Thomas Vinterberg. Cuarón’s show Disclaimer, produced for Apple TV, is reportedly an erotic thriller (one of them again!) starring Cate Blanchett as a journalist who discovers she’s the main character in a novel. It’s another coup for the festival, which has proved a fertile testing ground for auteur dramas in past editions, from Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy.

Venice Immersive

A literal stone’s throw from the Lido across the lagoon, Venice Immersive returns for an eighth edition heavy on documentary and non-narrative projects. Exploring what immersive media can do for the documentary form, the likes of Address Unknown: Fukushima Now and All I Know About Teacher Li bear powerful witness to global news stories, the latter an interactive VR work about the Chinese art student in Italy who sparked one of the largest democratic protests in China with his wildly popular newsfeed on Twitter. There’s a strong focus on the corporeal in projects like Mammary Mountain, a haptic experience exploring “dis-ease within the body and its broader context of the land”, and Ceci Est Mon Coeur, a “sensory odyssey” tackling distorted perceptions of the body in contemporary society. And fans of Tilda Swinton seeking their next fix after The Room Next Door can head over to Impulse: Playing With Reality, a poetic and insightful exploration of the inner lives of people living with ADHD, created in tandem with a team of psychologists and neuroscientists.