Venice Film Festival Best Movies in 2024: Joker 2, Queer, Maria

Joaquin Phoenix’s depressive, Travis-Bickle-as-incel Joker is back, now joined by Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. They become partners in crime and psychosis in what has been billed as a jukebox musical. As someone who thought Todd Phillips’ “Joker” was the best movie of 2019, I don’t need to know any more to consider “Joker 2” the must-see movie of the year. The first “Joker” premiered at Venice and proved cataclysmically divisive. One can only hope the same is true of this one.

Before Williams S. Burroughs became…William S. Burroughs, the outlaw nihilist legend who channeled America’s madness in “Naked Lunch,” he wrote two short, realistic, diary-like novels that proclaimed the hidden story of his life in their very titles. The first was “Junkie,” in 1953. The second was “Queer” (written in the same period, but not published until 1985). For decades, I have longed to see these confessional books turned into movies, and it would be hard to think of a more bracing piece of casting than Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character in Luca Guadagnino’s lavish and freewheeling adaptation, which follows the author’s adventures in Mexico, notably his pursuit of a beautiful young man (played by Drew Starkey).

Picasso had his Blue Period, and Pedro Almodóvar now seems in the middle of his blues period, fashioning dramas that have achieved, for him, an entrancing new level of melancholy realism. His first English-language feature is set in New England and stars Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent and highly imperfect mother, with Julianne Moore as her estranged novelist friend. The film has been described as a companion piece to “Parallel Mothers,” which premiered at Venice in 2021, and I’m avid to see if it approaches that film’s luscious interlacing of melodrama and historical inquiry.

The new Pablo Larraín biopic is the story of a diva: Maria Callas, the American-born Greek soprano who was one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 20th century. She also led a life of famously temperamental high drama, which means this is actually Larraín’s third movie about a diva, following “Jackie” and “Spencer.” I’m a super-fan of both, and with Angelina Jolie in the title role, there is every reason to hope that this one sings.

For me, the jury is still out on the actor-turned-director Brady Corbet. In his first two outings as a filmmaker, the fascist parable “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) and the pop-star parable “Vox Lux” (2018), he has shown flashes of brilliance amid waves of indulgence. But I’m primed with curiosity to see his latest movie, which feels like an event on every level: It’s a riff on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” it stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, and it’s three hours and 15 minutes long. Let’s hope the brilliance wins out.