Once again, Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera presents a mouthwateringly calorific menu of awards-bait movies, and a pageant of Hollywood stars about to arrive at the Palazzo del Cinema, kicking off with Tim Burton’s sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The debate about festival gender parity among directors, never a huge priority in Venice, does seem to have receded still further in the memory – but there are brilliant women directors and it’s another festival of alpha-list auteurs and bankable names either side of the camera, both in competition and out – 86-year-old French icon Claude Lelouch is incidentally in the latter list, poignantly giving us his swan song Finalement … Ou La Folie Des Sentiments.
