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    ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ to Compete at Venice Film Festival

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    Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and new movies from Luca Guadagnino and Pablo Larraín will also debut at this year’s event.“Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’s comic-book sequel starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, will compete for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.The movie’s participation, which festival organizers announced during a news conference on Tuesday to reveal the lineup, comes five years after Phillips’s “Joker” — which told the Batman villain’s origin story — won the same prize at Venice’s 76th edition, paving the way for its two Oscar wins.Phillips’s movie will face starry competition for the Golden Lion, including from Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” a biopic of the opera singer Maria Callas with Angelina Jolie in the lead.Also in competition will be Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of a short novel by William S. Burroughs that follows a drug addict (Daniel Craig) as he undergoes withdrawal in Mexico City and becomes infatuated with an American drifter (Drew Starkey); Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl” starring Nicole Kidman as a manager who starts an affair; and Justin Kurzel’s “The Order,” with Jude Law as an F.B.I. agent investigating a white supremacist terrorist organization.Altogether, 21 movies will compete for the top prize at Venice’s 81st edition, which is scheduled to run Aug. 28 through Sep. 7. A nine-person jury led by Isabelle Huppert, the French actor, will choose the Golden Lion winner, which is announced on the festival’s final day.This year’s competition will include, from top left, “The Room Next Door,” “Maria,” “The Order,” and “Queer.”Iglesias Más; Michelle Faye; Yannis DrakoulidisThis year’s star-studded lineup suggests the impact of last year’s Hollywood strikes on the movie industry’s schedules is waning. Those strikes wrought havoc at last year’s festival, with the MGM studio pulling Guadagnino’s tennis drama “Challengers” from the lineup, and many actors and directors staying away to avoid breaking strike terms.At Tuesday’s news conference, Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, said that “Joker: Folie à Deux” showed Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s characters stuck in an asylum awaiting trial.“Nobody can imagine what Todd and his screenwriters have imagined,” Barbera said, adding that Phoenix’s performance was “incredible.”Venice’s organizers had announced some of this year’s lineup before Tuesday’s news conference, including this year’s opening movie, which won’t compete for the Golden Lion: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 comedy horror. The new movie has Michael Keaton return to play the title role, and also stars Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.Another high-profile movie appearing out of competition is Jon Watts’s comedic thriller “Wolfs,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as professional fixers who are hired to cover up the same crime. There are also movies by directors less familiar to Western audiences, including the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, with “Cloud,” and the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who is showing “April.”In recent years, the Venice Film Festival has gained a reputation for debuting Oscar contenders. Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone, won the Golden Lion for best film and Stone went on to win best actress at this year’s Academy Awards. More

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      ‘Nitram’ Review: Slouching Toward Infamy

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      In this unnerving drama based on a true crime, a lonely outsider reaches his breaking point.The most chilling scene in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” — a movie that’s rarely less than freezing — occurs near the end and shows the title character, a disturbed young man, buying multiple firearms and rounds of ammunition. His demeanor is, for the first time, confident and purposeful; his handling of the weapons as natural as if he were born to them. The scene unnerves even if we don’t know where he’s going, because we know where he has been.Tough and unflinching, “Nitram” is about the evolution of a killer. A lightly fictionalized portrait of events leading up to Australia’s 1996 Port Arthur murders, the film is terrifyingly controlled, tipping neither toward empathy nor judgment. The tone is instead coolly observational, the filmmakers betting everything on Caleb Landry Jones’s adamant yet impenetrable performance as the man known as Nitram — a derisive backward spelling of his real name (never spoken in the film) and a loathed childhood nickname.Organized to highlight the dark flags heralding the coming storm, Shaun Grant’s simmering screenplay opens in 1979 with archival footage from a hospital burn unit, showing the killer as a young boy cheerfully assuring an interviewer that he will continue to play with fireworks. This fascination endures into adulthood and is supplemented by other disruptive and dangerous behaviors. Neither his worn-out parents (a memorable Judy Davis and a very affecting Anthony LaPaglia) nor his medication seem able to prevent this straggle-haired man-child from acting on instincts only he understands.A brief period of happiness arrives when he’s befriended — and all but adopted — by Helen (Essie Davis), a reclusive heiress who’s strangely unperturbed by his evident slowness. Yet we worry for her, and we are right to do so, though we have not yet seen him be especially violent. His playfulness seems dangerous enough.With “Nitram,” Kurzel (whose 2012 feature debut, “The Snowtown Murders,” was also based on a particularly gruesome true crime) has created a bleak and passionless tale wrapped in a caul of inevitability. Rather than analyze his subject, the director steers us to the external factors — an inattentive physician, a shocking lack of effective gun laws — that eased his path to destruction. The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.NitramNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More