Why Venice is this year's most important film festival

Stand back, Cannes, because Venice will be taking your crown this year.

The 81st Venice Film Festival, which runs from August 28 to September 7, can lay claim to being the biggest, most important and just plain coolest film festival of 2024. 

Here's why Venice will be the can't-miss movie event of the year. 

Movie stars are back, baby

Last year's actors strike left red carpet gawkers starved of celebrity spottings, but Venice 2024 will be a VIP feast.

The long list of A-list stars includes Brad Pitt and George Clooney, in town for Jon Watts' action comedy "Wolfs" in which they play competitive crime scene cleaners forced to work together.

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore return to the canals for "The Room Next Door" from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, and Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix are set to tap and shimmy their way across Venice as DC villains Harley Quinn and Joker in "Joker: Folie a Deux." 

It's the sequel to Todd Phillips' "Joker" from 2019, which also premiered in Venice, winning the Golden Lion for best film.

Add in a very un-James Bond turn from Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino's "Queer"; Angelina Jolie in Pablo Larrain's "Maria;" Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas in "Babygirl" from Dutch director Halina Reijn; and the cast of Tim Burton's opening night film "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" — which includes the stars of the original 1988 film Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara together with newcomers Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe and Italian legend Monica Bellucci. That will be enough stars to crash Instagram.

"It looks like it will be the most crowded red carpet we've had in a decade," said festival director Alberto Barbera.

Oscar bait galore

Venice has long usurped Cannes as the launchpad for Oscar winners, with Barbera knowing how to pick films the Academy will go wild for.

Best Picture winners "Birdman," "Spotlight," "The Shape of Water" and "Nomadland," all got their start in Venice, as did award-season champs "The Favourite," "Dune," "The Whale" and "Poor Things," among many others.

This year, Oscar handicappers will find out if Angelina Jolie hits the high notes playing opera legend Maria Callas in "Maria"; if the magic of Almodovar's Oscar-winning Spanish films ("Volver," "Talk to Her") gets lost in translation with "The Room Next Door," his English-language feature debut; and if Joaquin Phoenix, who won the 2020 Best Actor Oscar for "Joker," can again dazzle the Academy as the clown prince of crime.

Venice's political agenda 

But it won't be all razzle-dazzle on the Lido. The Venice lineup includes some of the most politically relevant movies and documentaries of the year, films certain to contribute to the public debate.

They include "September 5," a docudrama from German filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum that recreates the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics — which claimed the lives of 11 Israeli athletes. The film tells the story from the perspective of the US TV sports journalists who were there to cover the games.

Andres Veiel, one of Germany's most acclaimed documentarians, takes on one of Germany's most infamous historical figures in "Riefenstahl," an examination of Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda films "Triumph of the Film" and "Olympia."

Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at age 101, always denied she knew anything about Hitler's concentration camps and the Holocaust.

But Veiel, who had new access to her archives for his documentary, finds evidence that suggests Riefenstahl was a devoted Nazi.

Beyond the history lesson, Veiel sees "Riefenstahl" as an example of the "seduction of fascism," which, with the rise of the far right across Europe, shows a frightening topicality. 

And Joe Wright, director of "Atonement" and "The Darkest Hour," examines the origins of fascism in "Son of the Century," a TV series that premieres in Venice and traces the rise of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Given the current Italian government is the most far-right since Mussolini, the show will be the talk of the town.  

Steaming up the big screen 

Debates around #MeToo and intimacy coordinators haven't stopped the world's oldest film festival from "getting pretty steamy this year," according to actor Drew Starkey, who stars as Daniel Craig's lover in "Queer" — an adaptation of the pretty explicit William S. Burroughs novel about American GIs in Mexico in the 1950s.

Nicole Kidman and "Triangle of Sadness" actor Harris Dickinson get it on in "Babygirl," which director Halina Reijn said was inspired by '90s erotic thrillers like "Basic Instinct," "Fatal Attraction" and "9 1/2 Weeks."

Kidman plays a high-powered CEO who puts her career and family on the line to begin a torrid affair with her much younger intern.

And "Love," a film by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, looks at singles trying to find spontaneous intimacy through Tinder hookups on a ferry to Oslo. Venice could be an ideal date night for film fans tired of a tepid diet of family-friendly Disney films. 

Scandal, sweet scandal 

What would a film festival be without the scandals? Social media lives for these viral moments of gossip, and Venice 2024 will offer plenty of opportunity.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, once engaged in a bitter, yearslong divorce, will walk the Venice red carpet.

Travis Scott, recently arrested in Paris during the Olympics, is expected to swing by to check out Harmony Korine's "Baby Invasion," an experimental film that features the hip-hop star.

And Joaquin Phoenix will have a hard time dodging questions at the "Joker: Folie a Deux" press conference about his sudden decision to drop out of Todd Haynes's untitled gay romance project just days before shooting began in Mexico — a decision that reportedly cost millions and could lead to a lawsuit.

Even mostly scandal-free George Clooney could be in the Venice hot seat, thanks to a mini-feud with Quentin Tarantino. The "Pulp Fiction" director supposedly claimed Clooney was "not a movie star," Clooney fired back: "Dude, f*** off!"