Venice Film Festival 2014: the top five new films not to miss

Venice Film Festival is just over the halfway mark and critics are already hedging their bets on which films will sweep up in the forthcoming awards season. Now in its 71st year, Venice is seen as a springboard for Oscar contenders. Since this year's festival opened last week, several films have received five-star reviews. Here are five of the most popular with the critics:

Birdman Gravity won seven Oscars after it opened Venice Film Festival in 2013. This year the opening film was Birdman (pictured above), which looks set to follow Gravity's lead. Michael Keaton stars as a washed-up Hollywood actor trying to regain credibility by acting in a Broadway play. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the "superb" drama is "a hallucinogenic, witty takedown of thespian ambition", says Kate Muir in The Times. Birdman becomes "funnier and more poignant the longer it lasts", says The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab. Edward Norton also "excels" as Keaton's co-star, a "Brando-like method actor who strives after absolute reality on stage but whose shambolic private life is characterised by cheating and subterfuge".

The Look of SilenceAmerican director Joshua Oppenheimer has produced a follow-up to his 2012 documentary The Act Of Killing, a take on the Indonesian death squads of the 1960s. In his first documentary, Oppenheimer persuaded ageing members of the Indonesian civilian militia to re-enact their crimes, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. This time, the people involved seem at last to have grasped how horrendous they are appearing. "But this film is just as piercingly and authentically horrifying as before," says Bradshaw. "It is filmed with exactly the same superb visual sense, the same passionate love of the Indonesian landscape, and dialogue exchanges are captured with the same chilling crispness."

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99 HomesMichael Shannon and Andrew Garfield deliver "dynamic performances" in Ramin Bahrani's "furious study of corrupt One Percent privilege", says Guy Lodge in Variety. Garfield stars as a blue-collared Florida everyman who enters a Faustian pact with Shannon's white-blazered real-estate shark. "Like the devil that gets all the best tunes, it's Shannon – ideally cast in a role that fully capitalises on his dauntless stare and imposing, almost-handsome physicality – who gets the choice lines here, though his half-snarling, half-purring delivery lends a certain snap even to clunkier ones," says Lodge. In the Evening Standard, David Sexton says the moral drama is "brilliantly performed by its leads and vividly filmed".

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on ExistenceCritics seems to be at a loss when it comes to explaining A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – but several give it five stars nonetheless. Billed as the final part of Roy Andersson's trilogy of comic sketch films (following Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living), Pigeon is described as a "glorious metaphysical burlesque" by Xan Brooks in The Guardian. Brooks says it is a "lugubrious joy" that nobody other than Andersson could have made, but admits: "I can no more make sense of this movie than I can explain my own life." In the Daily Telegraph, Robbie Collin says it might well be "impossible" to make sense of the film in words. "You just have to watch it," he says, "then grab a net and try to coax your soul back down from the ceiling."

Olive KitteridgeOne of the most talked-about debuts at Venice Film Festival is not technically a film – it's a four-hour mini-series called Olive Kitteridge. It premiered to "acclaim and howls of laughter" this week, says Kate Muir, who describes it as the "best thing" at the festival so far. Frances McDormand, who stars as the title role, bought the rights to adapt the novel by Elizabeth Strout shortly after it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. The film follows maths teacher Olive Kitteridge over 25 years in a quiet New England town. "It's the kind of cast and writing that makes you think at the start of every scene: Oh good! Them again," says Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph. "Over four hours, that's a lot of oh goods."