As the oldest and one of the most glamorous cinema festivals in the world, the Venice Film Festival has become a springboard for art films to find mainstream release while providing a first glimpse of next year’s Oscar contenders.
The director Darren Aronofsky heads this year’s jury, following on from Quentin Tarantino’s controversial involvement last year, when allegations of favouritism overshadowed the awards.
The festival opens on Wednesday with The Ides of March, a drama directed by George Clooney and inspired by Howard Dean's US presidential campaign in 2004, and featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ryan Gosling.
This year, 22 films will compete for the prestigious Golden Lion award. Among the forerunners will be two stage adaptations, Roman Polanski's Carnage, starring Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster, and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, in which Keira Knightley plays the object of rivalry between psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Also in contention are two high-profile remakes: Andrea Arnold's take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heightsand Thomas Alfredson's reboot of John Le Carré's 1974 spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a cast that includes Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and John Hurt.
Much of the attention, however, is likely to focus on the premiere of Madonna's WE, a film about King Edward VIII's romance with American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Al Pacino's Wilde Salome– an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1891 play – also receives an out-of-competition screening, as will Steven Soderbergh's thriller, Contagion.
