In a summer when oppressive heat has turned the Venice Lido into a sauna, the stars at the city’s annual film festival were as numerous as the droplets of sweat. Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie, George and Brad, the list goes on… Interestingly, many A-listers were working in English-language productions by auteurs from Spain (Pedro Almodóvar), Italy (Luca Guadagnino), Chile (Pablo Larraín), Greece (Athina Rachel Tsangari), Mexico (Alfonso Cuarón)… It shows how much cinema’s mainstream is fuelled today by global voices, although it raises the question of where this leaves the world’s national cinemas once their biggest names move abroad.

One director who has returned to his national roots is Brazilian film-maker Walter Salles. Following Jack Kerouac adaptation On the Road, he evokes his country’s military dictatorship in I’m Still Here, about one family’s experience of government brutality in the early 70s. Masterfully executed, this no-frills real-life drama balances political and domestic registers to gripping, moving effect, and its lead, Fernanda Torres, is surely a cert for an acting award here.

Another acting tour de force was provided by Daniel Craig in Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of William Burroughs’s autobiographical novel. Craig plays amorously restless Burroughs avatar William Lee, yearning for an elusive younger man. As the focus shifts from desire to Lee’s quest for mind-liberating jungle drugs, the film – mounted in lavish trompe l’oeil style – becomes ever more boldly wayward. Craig, putting 007’s shadow definitively to rest, is terrific – languid, peppery and grandiloquent, faintly channelling the famous Burroughs drawl, but with his baggy-jowled physiognomy suggesting that he should next have a crack at WH Auden.

As if it weren’t steamy enough here, festival head Alberto Barbera teasingly suggested that this year’s lineup would be audaciously heavy on sex; but not all the films were as persuasively carnal as Queer. Nicole Kidman was characteristically impressive in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, as a tech CEO in a forbidden relationship with an intern (an unnerving Harris Dickinson), but the film feels too sleekly deliberate an invitation to debate sexual power relations, like 50 Shades with an HR angle.

It was, however, way better than the three episodes I saw of Alfonso Cuarón’s TV seven-parter Disclaimer, in which Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen contend with secrets from the past. This murky melodrama contains some uncharacteristically creaky acting from a prestige cast, and a ludicrous seduction scene revolving around fantasies about Kylie Minogue (no, she doesn’t appear, and she’ll be glad she didn’t). Then there was Italian film Diva Futura, a homegrown Boogie Nights about the porn label that launched national sex icon La Cicciolina. A boisterous, disjointed ensemble piece, it hinges on a facile opposition between pornographers nice and nasty, but Giulia Steigerwalt directs con brio.

Appropriately for a year with Isabelle Huppert as jury president, the competition was rich in impressive female leads. Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas in the stately, airless Maria, Pablo Larraín’s film about the last days of the opera deity. Stiffly scripted by Steven Knight, this comes across like a trophy mounted in its own over-polished vitrine: a quietly lofty Jolie is laudably restrained, yet this feels too self-consciously a fine performance, as if Larraín had instructed her: “Just be iconic, darling.”

On another level entirely were Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, generating an almost telepathic level of fine-tuned complicity in The Room Next Door, the English-language feature from Pedro Almodóvar. About two friends reconnecting over one woman’s terminal illness, the film wears its erudition and cultural seriousness a touch heavily, but displays Almodóvar’s typical grace, insight and visual elegance.

Then there was the ever-surprising Lady Gaga, in Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’s sequel to the Batman spin-off that unexpectedly won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2019. Joaquin Phoenix returns as tormented Arthur Fleck, falling for Gaga’s version of the beloved Harley Quinn character, here a deranged superfan. Their relationship is provocatively enacted as a musical, drawing on the great American songbook (but no, not Gaga’s Bad Romance). The film is as brutally discomforting as the first, Gaga offsetting Phoenix’s full-throttle angst with a performance all the more troubling for being tenderly low-key. At the very least, the film merits admiration for its nerve – and for being the bleakest comics-derived movie to date.

Among other genre titles were three strong entries, including two true-crime thrillers. In Justin Kurzel’s The Order, FBI man Jude Law pursues Nicholas Hoult’s neo-Nazi to taut effect, while Fabrice Du Welz’s Maldoror – roughly, a Belgian Zodiac – recounts a young policeman’s investigation of a paedophile ring. And lightweight but sterling fun was provided by George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Wolfs, a super-sleek comedy thriller about two hyper-professional corpse-disposal operatives forced to work together: come for the bromantic backchat, stay for the bracing action sequences.

This was a strong year for documentaries, notably those getting to grips with today’s political nightmare. Asif Kapadia’s 2073 is a dystopian hybrid, framed by a future fiction with Samantha Morton, as the last woman standing, inviting us to look back at what went wrong. Racing through 9/11, Trump, Brexit, Elon Musk and surveillance tech, 2073 issues a warning so intensely baleful that it rather fills you with disempowering panic. More focused is Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, a fascinating investigation into Brazil’s evangelical preachers who contributed to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro. Exploring similar territory, Michael Premo’s revealing Homegrown follows various Trump supporters and Proud Boys – literally following one of them into the storming of the Capitol.

There was also One to One: John & Yoko by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. It shows Lennon and Ono in early 70s New York, hanging out with radicals and counterculture types such as Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg. Comprising footage, interviews and recorded phone conversations, it doesn’t offer revelations but shows the duo enjoying a state of euphoric idealism before their decade turned darker. The concert footage, from their benefit for disabled children, is terrific too.

The competition lineup had its share of experiment. In The Brutalist, by Europhile US director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux), a Jewish Hungarian architect (Adrien Brody) tries to start afresh in the US after the second world war; there’s no denying the project’s ambition, but it is hamstrung by its monumentalist determination to be visionary. Considerably livelier was the UK-made Harvest, by Greek “weird wave” pioneer Athina Rachel Tsangari. Based on Jim Crace’s novel, and set in an anachronistic no-place, it recounts the collapse of a rural community. It’s ramshackle but daring, as much ensemble performance art as narrative, with a defiantly hand-woven feel.

Then there was April by Dea Kulumbegashvili. Every bit as daring and perplexing as the Georgian director’s Beginning, this is the story of an obstetrician (Ia Sukhitashvili) who also performs abortions in the countryside. The film is at once an unsparing depiction of her work and a hallucinatory trip, including images of a strange golem figure, and with every unconventionally composed shot changing the stakes. Kulumbegashvili is in a different league of imaginative daring: this could be a well-deserved Golden Lion.

Also way out in a territory of their own are UK-based stop-motion animators the Quay Brothers, here with their long-awaited Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Inspired by 20th-century Polish writer Bruno Schulz, it mixes humans and puppets and ostensibly tells of a man’s search for his father. But while actors squint into keyholes and peepshow contraptions, the real story – only insofar as this hazily remembered delirium is a story – is enacted by figures combining characteristics of humans, Victorian dolls and stuffed birds, amid a choreography of feathers, dust motes, light beams and top hats. The Quays’ films are closer to music than narrative: this one is a hypnotically achieved dark-modernist chamber symphony.

Jonathan Romney’s best of Venice

Best films
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili); Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Quay Brothers); I’m Still Here (Walter Salles); Queer (Luca Guadagnino).

Best performances (solo)
Daniel Craig in Queer; Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here.

Best performances (duo)
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in The Room Next Door; Laure Calamy and newcomer Charles Peccia Galletto as a woman and her disabled son in French comedy drama My Everything.

Best supporting performances
Guy Pearce in The Brutalist; Lesley Manville as a deranged jungle botanist in Queer.

Best show-stealing moment
Rising star Austin Abrams (The Walking Dead, Euphoria) outriffing George Clooney and Brad Pitt with a manic tour de force as a hapless babbler in Wolfs.

Best documentaries
Apocalypse in the Tropics (Petra Costa); Homegrown (Michael Premo); One to One: John & Yoko (Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards).

Best music
Caetano Veloso and other Brazilian greats in I’m Still Here; Daniel Blumberg’s propulsive score for The Brutalist; Timothy Nelson (with passages of Alfred Schnittke) in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass; Yoko Ono’s hyper-intense live performance of Don’t Worry Kyoko in One to One: John & Yoko; the preposterous jukebox musical renditions of songs by 90s indie rockers Pavement in Alex Ross Perry’s lively mock-doc Pavements.

Best thrillers
Justin Kurzel’s The Order, with Jude Law hunting down an American far-right militia; Clooney-Pitt comedy thriller Wolfs; and Maldoror, a grim, gritty true-crime drama about a missing-children investigation in 1990s Belgium. French rising star Anthony Bajon is terrific as the obsessed young cop fighting systemic corruption. From genre specialist Fabrice Du Welz, this is the Belgian answer to David Fincher’s Zodiac, and every bit as compelling.

Best short-and-sweet pleasure
Laura Citarella, director of the recent madcap epic Trenque Lauquen, follows it up with a short for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, entitled The Miu Miu Affair. A model disappears after a fashion shoot in the Argentinian pampas. Local female cops impound the Miu Miu wardrobe as evidence – and dress fabulously through the investigation. An effortlessly mischievous left-field gem.