The history of movie romance is the story of beautiful people with terrible problems. That also could be a description of The Fountain, one of the entries at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. In this ambitious epic from Darren Aronofsky, writer-director of the critical favorites Pi and Requiem for a Dream, medical scientist Hugh Jackman races

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) through time and space to discover the Tree of Life and save his beloved, Rachel Weisz, from death by cancer.

In real life, or what passes for it at a film festival, neither star could save The Fountain from a death sentence of boos at both the critics' and the public screenings. Weisz, who earlier this year received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and became a mother, seemed equally maternal in defense of her new movie. "I think it's wonderful that this film is so different," she told the press. "I would love to work with Darren again." (She'd better say that. Aronofsky is the father of her child.)

Beauty imperiled: that could also be the theme of this, the world's oldest film festival. Founded in 1932 by Benito Mussolini, and ensconced on the lovely Lido, a 15-minute vaporetto ride from St. Mark's Square, the Biennale di Venezia still looks terrific at its advanced age. Compared to Europe's other dowager festivals, it's svelter than Cannes, more stylish than Berlin. Marco Müller, in his third year as Venice's program director, assembled a commendable slate of 22 films, each a world premiere, to compete for the Golden Lion. This year's prize, to Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life, was handed out by jury president Catherine Deneuve, who'll be 63 next month. Could any festival have a more radiant exponent of sexagenarian chic?

Lately, though, Venice has had to battle also-ran status. It attracts hundreds of European critics, but not many North Americans, who can trumpet new films and their showcase festival to a huge audience of readers. Those critics now trek to Toronto, which in its 31st year has become the late-summer festival of choice and a launching pad for movies with eyes for Oscar.

Venice also faces competition closer to home. Next month will see the debut of a Rome film festival, which as an opening salvo impudently filched Fur, the new Nicole Kidman movie, from a spot on the Lido. The Roman challenge is sparked in part by feelings in the Italian cinema community that Venice has ignored its local product. (In the past 40 years, only two Italian films have won the Golden Lion.) To head off the insurgency, Venice is replaying its competition slate in Rome this week. But that other festival is one Venice would rather ignore. In an hour-long conference that Müller and Biennale president Davide Croff held with the international press, Rome was the four-letter word no one dared utter. Nor did anyone discuss the insistent rumor that Müller would be tapped to be the next programming boss at Cannes.

Political intrigue is, of course, as Venetian as those dark, narrow alleys off the Rialto. And Venice, that most chimerical of great cities, is used to whispers of doom: it's been sinking for centuries and, for nearly as long, trading on a gloried past. Why should the film festival be different? Well, for one thing, because it has a future. At the festival's midpoint, Prime Minister Romano Prodi visited the Lido to declare that the government would match local funds to help build a new movie palace, replacing the edifice erected by Il Duce in the '30s. Just as important, Venice has a present: a solid mix of world cinema in the competition selection.

In this context, The Fountain was an honorable choice, and a worthy film. The catcalls that greeted it reflected more the prevailing fashions of the arthouse intelligentsia: in favor of bleak austerity, dismissive of sweeping sentiment. But on its own terms, this is a daring and impressive achievement. Jackman lends a delicate power to the role of a man who will span millenniums — from 16th century Spain to today's New York City to the astral future — all to prove that love is stronger than death.

Or at least it is in storylines. Even before it reached Venice, The Fountain had a tag on its toe. Several studios nixed the project; Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett bowed out as the original stars (moving on to play strangely similar roles in Babel); Cannes refused to show the film in competition. The Fountain was seen as a $35 million extravagance.

But that's peanuts in today's Hollywood. Another Venice entry, Children of Men, had a budget estimated at around $150 million. Investors were banking on Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) to bring his sizzle to the science fiction genre. Based on a P.D. James novel, the movie imagines a dystopia 20 years hence, in which a plague has made all women infertile; the youngest person on earth is in her 20s. The British government is futilely battling a guerrilla army, with immigrants as the villains and the victims. Clive Owen, as a former activist, is dragooned into escorting to safety a young woman who may be the hope of the future, if there is any (hope, or future). His unlikely mentor in the quest: a long-haired, pot-puffing old hippie played with liberating brio by Michael Caine.

The movie is alive with briskly choreographed violence. Or, rather, dead; the body count must be in the high three figures. (You'd think that, in this stillborn future, people's lives would be more valuable, considering that the product line has been discontinued.) Eventually all that urban warfare becomes wearying, like the evening news, but with better visuals. If the characters in Children of Men are representative of our future selves, the world hardly seems worth saving.

It's said that comedy is tragedy plus time. So is nostalgia. Bobby is an exercise in American political nostalgia for a time when candidates could eloquently articulate noble goals. Emilio Estevez's chronicle of a day at Hollywood's Ambassador Hotel — the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated there — will remind viewers of Crash: a tangle of small agitations with a devastating climax. Bobby is the better film, giving more heft to its individual stories, subtler nuance to its star turns.

There are plenty in this Grand Hotel plot — Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Harry Belafonte, Lindsay Lohan, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Laurence Fishburne, Elijah Wood, many others — all well cast, even when their characters veer toward caricature. Estevez appears in front of the camera too, as the harried husband of nightclub diva Demi Moore.

If Bobby ventured back in time, and Children of Men forward, other Venice films showed directors on the move in today's world. Benoît Jacquot went to India for The Untouchable, about a young woman (solemn Isild Le Besco, whom the jury inexplicably named Best Young Actor) searching for the father she has never known. This minimalist mess should have been called The Unwatchable; if no one booed, it might be because the film sapped all its viewers' energy. Gianni Amelio, the last Italian to win the Golden Lion, in 1998, ventured to Wuhan, China, for The Missing Star, a gentle drama of cross-cultural frustrations involving an Italian factory worker (Sergio Castellitto) and his young translator (pretty Tai Ling). Deftly, tactfully, Amelio suggests that we are all strangers in a land whose ethical ground keeps cracking under our feet.

That can happen even in your home town. The Golden Lion recipient Still Life is set in the ancient Chinese village of Fengjie, which the government displaced — destroyed, actually — to make way for the building of the Three Gorges Dam. It's a piquant subject, and the jury obviously found Still Life moving, but to other eyes the film was opaque, cinematically adventurous, but drained of human drama.

Peter Brosens, a Belgian, and Jessica Woodworth, from Washington, journeyed to Mongolia to make Khadak, also known as The Color of Water. Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa) and his family, nomads living peacefully on the steppes, are relocated to a drab mining town where the lad meets Zolzaya, a gorgeous coal thief, and becomes an activist. This might have been a condescending exercise in ethnography, but Brosens and Woodworth have a directorial touch to match the ravishing landscapes and flinty people. It's part political thriller, part social document, and it well deserved its Lion of the Future award for best first feature.

At 84, French director Alain Resnais is content to travel just across the Channel — and that metaphorically. His film Coeurs, an adaptation of the Alan Ayckbourn play Private Fears in Public Places, transports the action from London to Paris and gives it a rueful grace lacking in the original. The radiant cast includes Laura Morante, Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi and Isabelle Carré — a pleasure to watch in this engaging fable of interlocking promises and compromises, dreams and defeats.

Paul Verhoeven experienced enough of all those in his 20 years in Hollywood, where he directed action hits (RoboCop, Total Recall) and lurid sexcapades (Basic Instinct, Showgirls). So he went home to Holland and made Black Book, a smart, sprawling World War II epic. Carice van Houten lends brains and body to a fact-based story of a Jewish singer in the Dutch Resistance, wondering who will betray her next. The answer: everyone.

The skirmishes of the Nazis and the Free Dutch were playground stuff compared to the infighting within Balmoral and 10 Downing Street in the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In The Queen, written by Peter Morgan (winner of the Best Screenplay prize) and directed by Stephen Frears, the royal family is cloistered in denial, believing the nation cherishes them more than Diana, and that the appropriate tribute is a discreet silence. Small-minded and drably dressed, caring more for their dogs and stags than for the late Princess, the Queen (Helen Mirren) and Prince Philip (James Cromwell) seem almost a Monty Python parody of middle-class domestic rancor. It takes firm, diplomatic effort by the new Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) to slap the royals awake to recognize the intensity of the nation's grief and Elizabeth's need to display some herself.

Frears and his company pirouette effortlessly between satire of the Windsors' blinkered complacency and sympathy for it. In a pageant of superb acting, led by Mirren, who to no one's surprise took the best actress award. Her performance showed that an aging monarch can both acknowledge her diminished status and act to correct it.

Rather like the queen of film festivals. Except that the Venice festival, that Lady of the Lido, has already shown it can carry itself with a demeanor that is both stately and spry.

• RICHARD CORLISS | Venice
• The world's longest-running film festival is growing old gracefully