The Venice Film Festival: What Keeps Audiences Coming Back Year After Year?

Even as the first press screening concludes, the Venice Film Festival hasn’t really started. Perhaps it’s in a continual process of starting, as anticipated world premieres screen, and films under wraps or finished for months are unveiled for their first audiences, after which they begin a public journey which can last for months, and end in untold glory, whether that means awards, box office revenue or critical plaudits.

Yet others in various sections may never be exhibited again on a screen of this size. For one, Apple TV seems to have replaced Netflix as the selectors’ favoured platform, producing “content” (that horrible word) intended to keep pace with cinema. Disclaimer from Alfonso Cuarón - a 6 hour series with Cate Blanchett - and Wolfs from Marvel director Jon Watts are the California tech giant’s two representatives here, although Cuarón - as sole writer-director - claims his work is more like an unusually long film, and not conventional TV.

On paper, the line-up seems less studded by great directors and the year’s most exciting films than the previous two editions, but there’s evidence the programming team has been discerning, and wanting to grant competition berths to fresher talent. Joker: Folie à Deux, not enwrapped in the first one’s controversy, The Brutalist and Queer feel like they have the potential to be special, whilst the likes of Athina Rachel Tsangari for the literary adaptation Harvest, and Dag Johan Haugerud for Love have a coveted slot to vie for prizes, whilst the previously tipped Mike Leigh, Joshua Oppenheimer and Edward Berger must settle for Toronto and San Sebastián.

So, keep your eyes glued to Film News UK for our ongoing round-ups of the festival. I spent my twenties reading dispatches like these from home, only attending my first Venice at the pandemic-era 2020 edition. The best writing really communicated that it was the most important place for global film culture after Cannes - where you had to be, if you truly cared about the art form - and soaking up the atmosphere this morning on the Lido, I still don’t doubt it.

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But I do doubt the raiding of Hollywood studios’ IP chests. In the past few years, we’ve gone from beloved franchises reclaiming their ground and satisfyingly concluding their arcs (Mad Max: Fury Road, Twin Peaks: The Return) to to studio conservatism having executives scour top-10 box office charts from thirty years ago, looking for something vaguely popular and remembered to dust off.

It’s more common in the genre and family-appealing space, with Star Wars and Blade Runner two classics to receive legacy sequels. Yet now we have unnecessary continuations of Top Gun and Twister, and Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice, when the fantasy maestro was firmly on an upward career trajectory, was pretty entertaining, I dimly recall…

I feared worse, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a belated sequel helmed by Burton that’s opening the festival, also comfortably reaches the bar of “pretty entertaining.” Rather than trumpeting its lore and mythos as something important, it knows that the requirements are purely to amuse and capture the original’s macabre fun, and for large part, it does.

The primary Deetz brood, made up of the iconic Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara as the now-grown up daughter Lydia and and mother Delia, have spent the following 30 years of their lives defined by what they experienced as yuppie interlopers, whose former, deceased owners of their new property (played with spark by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) attempted to scare them out, in a postmodern comic spin on classic haunted house tales.

Lydia is now a TV paranormal investigator: not a fraud, but someone actually once visited by ghosts sharing that awareness with a believing public. Her bright teenage daughter Astrid is looking for her deceased father: one of a few men, living and dead, who Lydia has history with.

The most charismatic and unpleasant one is Betelgeuse, the “haunting consultant” entrusted by the recently passed to settle their affairs and legacy on earth. I sighed a bit when first seeing Michael Keaton revisiting an old creation for these mercenary reasons, but his still-undimmed charisma grows on you, even if he’s a more jaded, sluggish sleazebag than the cartoon-zany (and maybe “upper”-addicted, not that I got that as a kid) version of the late Reagan era. Both Betelgeuse and Lydia are caught in two love triangles, which are conveyed with some sweetness, and the outsider-sympathy that’s always made Burton’s work feel as personal as Hollywood fantasy gets, but the special effects wrest control of the final act. Still, some characterful production design and Looney Tunes-level performances make this an inoffensive trip back to the postmodernism of a much earlier era.