The line-up for the 81st Venice Film Festival has just dropped and it’s looking like it’ll be a strong season for new releases. Taking place from August 28th to September 7th, the festival is one of the biggest in Europe and is generally a good indicator of what films we’ll be seeing taking over the Oscars next year.

The festival will open with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s long-awaited sequel to his classic 1988 film which sees Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara reprising their roles from the original film, along with a new cast that includes Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe and Monica Belluci.

The in-competition strand of the festival has plenty of heavy hitters. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, adapted from the novel by William S. Burroughs, is receiving its world premiere at the festival. Following on from the huge success of Challengers, Guadagnino has reenlisted Jonathan Anderson to design the costumes for this queer drama starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey.

Pedro Almodóvar will be debuting his first ever feature film in English. Titled The Room Next Door, it stars Tilda Swinton as a war reporter and Julianne Moore as her friend, a novelist. Elsewhere, Todd Phillips’s sequel to Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, will also be making its premiere. After winning the Golden Lion with Joker back in 2019, the sequel is likely to be one of the festival’s biggest hits.

Some other exciting new projects that’ll be screened in competition include Babygirl from Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson; the Maria Callas biopic Maria starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Pablo Larraín; The Brutalist from Vox Lux director Brady Corbet (which has just been revealed to be a staggering 215 minutes long) and Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) from Walter Salles, his first film since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Being screened at the festival but outside of the competition will be new documentaries such as One to One: John & Yoko from High & Low – John Galliano director Kevin Macdonald; a new work by the master of the form, Errol Morris, called Separated; and an intriguing new film from Asif Kapadia, of Amy and Senna fame, called 2073 and described as a drama-documentary set in a dystopian future – inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 French new wave film La Jetée and starring Samantha Morton.

The out-of-competition feature films include the return of Harmony Korine attempting to one-up last year’s bizarre Aggro Dr1ft with Baby Invasion, a first-person shooter film in which everyone has the head of a baby. The legendary Takeshi Kitano makes a surprise return with Broken Rage after announcing his retirement after his last film, Kubi, in 2023. And Jon Watts’ Wolfs sees Brad Pitt and George Clooney reunited for an action comedy about two lone wolf “fixers” who are reluctantly forced to work a job together.