VENETIAN CLASS

Venice festivalgoers were treated to a first look at the actors and films in contention for Oscars, writes Geoffrey Macnab

- Geoffrey Macnab

The Venice Film Festival is justly seen as the bellwether for the Oscars. Birdman, Spotlight and Nomadland are just some of the Best Picture winners to have surfaced here first. That is why industry watchers pay so much attention to what plays well on the Lido. Venice's 2024 edition, which ended at the weekend, was as notable for the blazing intensity of the acting as for the films themselves. On the evidence here, next year’s Academy Awards will be ferociously competitive in the Best Actor and Best Actress category.

The festival programme presented a tantalising array of very bigname stars in unusual and unexpected movies. Daniel Craig was facing his biggest challenge since his Bond days as a gay, junkie expat American writer, adrift in 1950s Mexico, in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. George Clooney was moving in the opposite direction, trying to reinvent himself as a plausible action star in Jon Watts’ thriller Wolfs. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton were in Spanish maestro Pedro Almodovar’s first US movie. Angelina Jolie was playing an opera legend. Joaquin Phoenix was back as the demented clown with the rictus smile in Joker: Folie à Deux. Some delivered, some didn’t.

Craig was one actor who emerged with his reputation significantly enhanced. He has already demonstrated in the Knives Out films that he can play offbeat and even camp characters very different from 007. Guadagnino, though, was making heavy demands on him in his role as author William Lee (based on Beat novelist William Burroughs). In his white linen suit, and with a gun, Lee may look like Bond on foreign assignment in the early scenes, but here he is in pursuit of gay male lovers, not Smersh agents.