Festival time as the official announcements of the Venice and Toronto line-ups confirm rumours that had been sloshing around the internet for weeks. Venice leaked via Variety on Tuesday (officially confirmed just this afternoon). Toronto's big catches drip ... dripped out via an organiser's Twitter account later the same day. Tiny, tenacious Telluride's still watertight, but it definitely won't have the world premieres of George Clooney's The Ides of March, Roman Polanski's Carnage or Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (all playing at Venice), and better not have the first showings of The Descendants (Alexander Payne), The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) or Moneyball (Bennett Miller), if it doesn't want several angry Canadian festival programmers hiking up to its gates.
Clooney directred the film and stars in it with Ryan Gosling. Some 22 films will be presented in competition, including Roman Polanski's Carnage , starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly; William Friedkin's Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch; David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method , starring Viggo Mortensen (as Sigmund Freud) and Michael Fassbender (as Carl Jung); and Todd Solodz's Dark Horse , starring Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow. Films from Madonna, Al Pacino and Steven Soderbergh are among those set to be screened out of competition.
