Venice film festival to showcase big hitters George Clooney, Emma Stone, Julia Roberts – and the Rock | Movies

A high-calibre solid of Hollywood A-listers are resulting from descend on Venice’s waterways for this yr’s movie competition, with George Clooney, Emma Stone, Oscar Isaacs and Julia Roberts starring in movies that may premiere on the Lido between 27 August and 9 September.Extremely anticipated titles in a hefty lineup embrace Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Isaacs because the titular protagonist scientist and Saltburn star Jacob Elordi because the monster, in addition to Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, that includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson because the heavyweight wrestling champ Mark Kerr and Emily Blunt as his spouse Daybreak Staples.Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos groups up with actor Emma Stone for his or her fourth collaboration in a row, after The Favorite, Poor Issues and Sorts of Kindness. Bugonia, which additionally stars Jesse Plemons, is a remake of 2003 Korean sci-fi movie Save the Inexperienced Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan.Additional star-packed movies introduced by Venice’s inventive director Alberto Barbera on Tuesday morning are Noah Baumbach’s comedy drama Jay Kelly, with a solid that features Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig, and artist-film-maker Julian Schnabel’s meta drama in regards to the artistic genesis of The Divine Comedy, Within the Hand of Dante, which has roles for Al Pacino, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, and Martin Scorsese as an aged sage who advises Oscar Isaac’s Dante Alighieri.Indie movie legend Jim Jarmusch, a shock absence from the Cannes lineup this Could, is for the primary time competing for a Golden Lion with anthology movie Father Mom Sister Brother, starring Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and long-time Jarmusch collaborator Tom Waits. “Cannes had all the time prevailed,” stated Barbera at Tuesday’s press convention. “We now have him this yr.”In recent times Cannes has gone some method to reclaim its standing because the world’s premier springboard for critical movies with a watch on the field workplace, launching accoladed and commercially profitable titles together with Sean Baker’s Anora, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Curiosity. But with few apparent arthouse-to-mainstream crossover contenders rising from the Croisette this yr, Venice might really feel it has earned a comeback.Veteran US director Gus Van Sant will come to Venice with historic kidnapping drama Lifeless Man’s Wire, whereas Harm Locker director Kathryn Bigelow sweeps into city with geopolitical thriller The Home of Dynamite starring Idris Elba.There are additionally new works from famous European administrators. Oscar-winning Hungarian auteur László Nemes involves Italy with Orphan, a drama set after the 1956 revolt towards Soviet rule that Barbera described because the director’s “most private movie thus far, as a result of it’s primarily based on his father’s reminiscences”. There will probably be a contest premiere for French director François Ozon’s black-and-white L’Etranger, the third cinematic adaptation of Albert Camus’ novel, following Luchino Visconti’s 1967 model and Zeki Demirkubuz’s 2001 Turkish telling.Jude Legislation is starring within the unlikely function of Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, a movie that examines the Russian president’s rise as seen by his spin physician, performed by Paul Dano. Italy will probably be represented by Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt – a London-shot faculty drama starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Chloë Sevigny – and the ever-productive Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, beforehand introduced because the competition’s opening movie.Venice, which has a repute because the least overtly political of the “large three” European movie festivals, just isn’t shying away from current geopolitical occasions this yr. In the principle competitors, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab tells the real-life story of a five-year-old Palestinian lady who was killed when a automobile carrying her household was shelled by Israeli forces in January 2024.German film-maker Werner Herzog, Russian director Alexander Sokurov and US investigative journalist Laura Poitras lead a notably sturdy non-fiction line-up. Herzog, who will obtain a lifetime achievement at Venice, may even be displaying his new movie Ghost Elephants, a few legendary herd of the animals roaming the jungles of Angola.Poitras, a number one chronicler of post-9/11 digital surveillance practises, will premiere Cowl-Up, a portrait of Seymour Hersh, the American journalist who gained acclaim in 1969 for exposing the My Lai bloodbath however whose use of nameless sources in current stories have been seen extra critically.Russian Ark director Sokurov will showcase experimental Director’s Diary, a five-hour work that Barbera stated “isn’t simple to comply with”, whereas Sofia Coppola goes to current a doc on designer Marc Jacobs, Marc by Sofia.This yr’s Venice jury will probably be presided over by US director Alexander Payne, and consists of exiled Iranian film-maker Mohammad Rasoulof, Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu amongst others. The Venice worldwide movie competition runs from 27 August to six September