While many critics and journalists (including our own correspondent, A.A. Dowd) have characterized this year’s Cannes Film Festival as underwhelming, the line-up for its fall cousin, the Venice Film Festival, is bursting with potential. As Variety reports, the main competition and sidebar selections includes Darren Aronofsky’s horror film Mother!, starring Jennifer Lawrence; Guillermo Del Toro’s 1960s-set merman movie The Shape Of Water; Lean On Pete, the latest from British writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years); Martin McDonaugh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Ex Libris: New York Public Library, a new film by documentary titan Frederick Wiseman; Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, the first new film by Tunisian-French writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche since his Cannes prize-winner Blue Is The Warmest Color; Zama, Lucrecia Martial’s long-awaited follow-up to The Headless Woman; the black comedy Suburbicon, directed by George Clooney and starring Matt Damon; and Caniba, by Leviathan directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravell. And that’s just barely scratching the surface.
The full slate—which also includes new films by Paul Schrader, William Friedkin, Errol Morris, Takeshi Kitano, James Toback, and Stephen Frears, as well as some kind of virtual reality project by Tsai Ming-Liang—was announced at a press conference this morning. You can find the whole exhaustive list over at Variety.
The festival will open August 30 with Downsizing, the latest movie from Alexander Payne. We look forward to catching up with some of these titles a few weeks later, during our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.