Exhausted from jetlag and with stomachs full of way too much pasta, Vulture’s correspondents have finally returned from the Venice Film Festival. Both of us were on the Lido for the very first time. Besides the thrill of seeing stars in their natural habitat, and the joy of devoting multiple hours a day to experiencing the cream of global cinema, what did we make of the experience? Nate Jones: This was the first Venice to take place since last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes .
On one hand: The stars were back ! On the other: American film production was shut down for a significant chunk of 2023, which is when many movies in this year’s festival would have been trying to shoot. Did you notice any effect on the quality of the films in competition? Alison Willmore: Maybe I’m loopy from having spent an unplanned night in the Charles de Gaulle Holiday Inn Express on my way home, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s normal anymore. 2023 was the strike, but before that was the pandemic, which makes it years of business as not-usual, and at this point I feel like the real question is what the standard is going to look like going forward.
There certainly wasn’t a shortage of starry U.S. productions, though I think it says less about the strike than the state of the industry in general that the big studio contributions were sequels — Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which I liked! ) and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (which I did not ).
Meanwhile, the fea.