Venice is on the move. The festival’s artistic director Marco Mueller has revealed that the dates of next year’s Venice Film Festival will shift to coincide with those of the Toronto Film Festival – a declaration of war. There used to be an understanding that the two festivals could share key titles. It looks as if that age of collaboration is over and the battlelines are being drawn to vie for the big films.

This could leave Venice in a vulnerable position: it’s a film festival noted for its glamour and certainly has more public recognition than Toronto – but no business is done there; it doesn’t have a “market” (as Toronto does) where films are bought and sold. Quite besides the red carpet fun and games, the “market” is the nuts and bolts of a film festival, including Cannes.

Oddly, celebrity sparkle – Venice’s USP – has has been lacking this year. The press conference for Burn After Reading was notable for the indecorous hysteria of some female journalists rather than anything said by Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giametti, turned up on the red carpet for the documentary Valentino: the Last Emperor (an unexpected highlight of the festival programme), looking like a pair of well-worn matching leather suitcases. Natalie Portman presented her directorial debut, a solid, unremarkable 20-minute short. But on the whole the festival has so far noticeably lacked the big Hollywood movies that traditionally kick-start their Oscar campaigns on the Lido.

The official line from Mueller is that this year’s programme was a victim of the writers’ strike, which has delayed several high-profile films (notably Frank Miller’s The Spirit and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) that would probably have played in Venice otherwise. It seems likely that this is only part of the story. With the dollar cripplingly weak against the euro and the expense of Venice, the danger is that the festival could be increasingly considered nonessential, hence perhaps Mueller’s decision to go head-to-head with Toronto.

This year, with Venice quieter than usual, the audience has been forced to look beyond cast names when making their viewing choices. Highlights have come in small, intimate packages bursting with hitherto undiscovered talent. For example there is Voy A Explotar (I’m Going To Explode), produced by Diego Luna and Gael GarcÍa Bernal, an achingly cool little Mexican film in which two teenagers go spectacularly off the rails. The film features a wonderfully unaffected young actress called Maria Deschamps, who gives such an honest, inquiring performance that I could watch her for days.

The performances are also one of the many strengths of 35 Rhums, Claire Denis’s nuanced study of a father and daughter’s relationship. This humane, emotionally intelligent film was shown out of competition – a shame as it could have had a real shot at a prize. The competition strand itself has been lacklustre, ranging from the laughably cack-handed Inju, La Bête dans l’Ombre by Barbet Schroeder to the incomprehensibility of Plastic City to the absolute nadir: the deranged pretension of Werner Schroeter’s Nuit de Chien.

Two strong contenders for prizes to date are Christian Petzold’s intense, effective love triangle Jerichow and the intriguing Birdwatchers, by Marco Bechis, an admirably restrained story set in a community of indigenous tribal people in Brazil. Also in with an outside chance is Alexey German’s Paper Soldiers, a Russian drama set in 1961 against the countdown to the first manned space flight. It’s a masterfully directed picture – German’s strikingly composed shots are teeming with activity and are rarely limited in their scope by the frame itself; however, his interest in the ordinary man means that the film is packed with relentless, incessantly banal dialogue that rather detracts from the majesty of the image.

Jonathan Demme’s acidic comedy drama Rachel Getting Married, which was shown last night, bucked the downbeat trend. The Altmanesque ensemble piece provided both star power in the shape of Anne Hathaway (who should expect an Oscar nomination for her turn as a recovering addict, Kym) and a savagely perceptive screenplay.

Hathaway was matched in the film by Rosemarie DeWitt (best known for her role in the television series Mad Men) as Rachel, the sister who resents the fact that Kym’s demons look set to upstage her wedding. Witty, insightful and poignant, this is everything that Nicole Kidnam’s Margot at the Wedding attempted to be but wasn’t.

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