Venice 2015: Read our Venice 72 preview

The 72nd Venice Film Festival will run from the 2-12 September and promises one of the hottest line ups for years. The already announced opening film, Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, continues the start big philosophy of Gravity and Birdman of the previous two years. Johnny Depp’s return to ‘proper’ acting, Black Mass, has also already been announced as showing out of competition, seeing Depp don another physical transformation, but this time in the service of a more grown-up tale of real life gangster Whitey Bulger. In the main competition, the English language big hitters include Kirsten Stewart in science fiction thriller Equals, a post-True Detective project for Cary Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation starring Idris Elba – and Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl starring an unrecognisable Eddie Redmayne.

Previous Golden Lion winner Aleksandr Sokurov returns with Francofonia, a film set entirely in the Louvre “during German occupation”. Beside veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s Blood of My Blood comes Laurie Anderson’s first feature film, Heart of a Dog. A special documentary section features new work from the legendary Frederick Wiseman, as well as a documentary on Brian De Palma by Noah Baumbach. As if to emphasise some of the little gems that Venice is particularly good at polishing there is even a short film by Martin Scorsese tucked into the programme. The Horizons sections promises a particularly strong selection as well with Brady Corbet’s The Childhood of a Leader, starring Robert Pattinson and Tobias Lindholm’s follow up to A Hijacking, succinctly titled A War. We will be covering the full festival here at CineVue.