VENICE, Italy (AFP) — The Venice Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with a devilish debut of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice sequel and a surge of star power for the glitzy competition on the sun-splashed Lido.

Lady Gaga, George Clooney, Daniel Craig, Julianne Moore, and Brad Pitt are among the A-listers expected over the next 10 days in Italy’s watery city for the world’s longest-running movie festival, known as La Mostra.

The return of big-budget Hollywood pizzazz — after a low-key edition last year due to the Hollywood writers’ strike — was on full display Wednesday with the out-of-competition world premiere of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

The film again features Michael Keaton as a chaos-causing ghoul, alongside Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Monica Bellucci and young star Jenna Ortega, who sported a backless red gauze confection that matched the red carpet.

For Burton, the acclaimed aficionado of the strange and ghoulish, his latest fantastical romp into the afterlife was a project “from my heart”.

“In the past few years I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry,” Burton told journalists ahead of the opening.

“For me, this movie was reenergising, kind of getting back to the things that I love doing, the way I love doing it, the people I love doing it with,” he said.

Asked by a reporter whether another sequel about the prankish, irreverent ghoul could be on the cards, Burton joked: “Well, let’s do the math. It took 35 years [to do this sequel], I’ll be over 100 [for a third]. I guess it’s possible — medical science these days — but I don’t think so.”

Wednesday’s opening ceremony saw Sigourney Weaver presented with a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, with the Alien star calling the honour “jet fuel of encouragement”.

The festival shifts tone on Thursday, when eyes turn to Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in
Maria, Pablo Larrain’s biopic about the opera diva’s tormented life — one of 21 films in contention for the top Golden Lion prize to be awarded September 7.

The roster also includes US director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, featuring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian Jewish architect and a life-changing project.

Playing out of competition are two documentaries about the Ukraine war — Songs of Slow Burning Earth by Ukrainian director Olha Zhurba and Russians at War, in which Russian-Canadian film-maker Anastasia Trofimova was embedded with a Russian army battalion in eastern Ukraine.