Each late summer / early autumn brings the four major film festivals where 80% of the future Oscar contenders for the year début.

First up, there’s the Telluride Film Festival, high atop the mountains of Colorado, that gets underway at the end of August, where 40+ prestige films will make their début, from Friday, August 30th through Sunday, September 2nd. Organizers keep the titles of the films set to début under wraps until opening day.

Occurring almost simultaneously: the 81st annual Venice International Film Festival, to be held on the Lido di Venezia over an eleven day period, commencing on August 28th, and drawing to a conclusion on September 7th.

Venice is the star-studded film festival.

The lineup for the 81st edition of the festival includes new films starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jude Law, all of whom will be present for the world début of their new films.

The 81st edition kicks off August 28th with the world première of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. All of the main cast, including Michael Keaton, are expected to grace the red carpet.

Filmmaker Todd Phillips is returning to Venice with a sequel. Joker: Folie à Deux, the highly anticipated follow-up to the 2019 blockbuster comic book film that won the Golden Lion (Best Film) in Venice,  a multiple Oscar award winner, starring Oscar-winning Best Actor Joaquin Phoenix as the mentally ill Arthur Fleck, and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn.

The erotic thriller Babygirl, starring Kidman and Harris Dickinson, from filmmaker Halina Reijn

Among the films playing alongside Joker 2 in competition are Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas film Maria, starring Jolie; Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here; the erotic thriller Babygirl, starring Kidman and Harris Dickinson, from filmmaker Halina Reijn; Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burrough’s adaptation Queer, with Craig and Jason Schwartzman; and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, The Room Next Door, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

Seven episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s psychological thriller series Disclaimer will also première at the festival, which will also screen at the Toronto Film Festival once the Venice Film Festival concludes. The AppleTV+ series is based on a novel about a documentary journalist and a secret she’s been keeping. It stars Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline and will début on the streamer on October 11th.

Venice is a significant launching ground for awards hopefuls and the first major stop of a busy fall film festival season, alongside the Toronto, Telluride and the New York Film Festivals.

In respect of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF will run from September 5th through 15th

New films from such internationally renowned auteurs as America’s Steven Soderbergh, South Korea’s Hong Sangsoo, Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof and a number of acclaimed Canadian directors will screen at the 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Highlights include Soderbergh’s new thriller Presence, starring Lucy Liu and Julia Fox, which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year; the drama The Friend, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed novel, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts; By the Stream, the latest microbudget film from minimalist master Sangsoo; the hotly anticipated psychological thriller Cloud, from Kurosawa, best-known for his landmark 1997 horror film Cure.

Also on tap at TIFF: the documentary Will & Harper, featuring Will Ferrell; the papal thriller Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci; the concert doc Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band; the Lego-animated biopic Piece by Piece, tracing the life and career of Pharrell Williams; the post-apocalyptic musical The End, starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon; and Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which won over audiences at Cannes this past spring days after its director escaped impending imprisonment by the Iranian regime.

Meanwhile, the prestigious and heavily juried 62nd annual New York Film Festival kicks off on Friday, September 27th and runs through Monday, October 14th.

British director Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste

This year’s festival lineup includes new works from returning NYFF directors, such as David Cronenberg with The Shrouds, Alain Guiraudie with Misericordia, Mike Leigh with Hard Truths and Paul Schrader with Oh, Canada. Several directors will make their festival début, including Brady Corbet with The Brutalist, RaMell Ross with Nickel Boys and Kapadia with All We Imagine as Light.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, New York Film Festival’s artistic director. “The most notable thing about the films in the main slate is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

Many of the films listed in today’s VanRamblings column will also screen at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival — which I will begin writing about on August 30th, amidst my coverage of the upcoming provincial election — set to get underway Thursday, September 26 and run through Sunday, October 6th.