The 75th Venice film festival honors the past, present and future with a star-studded affair 

VENICE, Italy -- Cannes has the glamour, Toronto the scale. But it's hard to beat Venice for an overall film festival experience, from hospitality and layout to the quality and prestige of what arrives onscreen. The oldest film festival in the world, founded in 1932, Venice honors the old and the new (and now, with its expansive virtual reality section, the future).

And it doesn't hurt that it's in Venice.

I've been fortunate to make four trips to the festival, including the 2018 edition, which ran Aug. 29 to Sept. 8. I go to Venice in an official capacity, as a panelist discussing the films of the Biennale College (a festival program that finances and exhibits micro-budget films). My fellow panelists make up an all-star team of film thinkers, including David Bordwell, Stephanie Zacharek, Glenn Kenny, Mick LaSalle, Michael Phillips, and our leader, the European don of film historians, Peter Cowie (whose new book commemorating the festival's 75^th anniversary was recently published).

It's important to note that nobody's festival experience is the same. There are those who dress to the nines for gala world premieres at the lustrous Sala Grande, where the red carpet resides. I've done this before, but I don't exactly have an extensive red carpet wardrobe. So you'll usually find me lining up for the press and industry screenings, where, it must be said, the behavior is far worse than at the public gatherings. (Put your phone down. For five minutes. You'll feel better).

I missed some of the big-ticket items at Venice, including Suspiria (deeply divisive), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (the Coen Brothers go West) and The Favourite (which I really wanted to see). But I caught several others, including First Man, a melancholic though stirring take on Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and the moon landing; A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper's nimble rendition of Hollywood's most enduring musical, featuring a revelatory Lady Gaga performance; and Roma, Alfonso Cuarón's stunning black-and-white drama about a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s.

These will all be coming soon, as they say, to a theater near you. But most of my favorite Venice films were smaller affairs. These include two of the Biennale College productions: Zen in the Ice Rift, a polished Italian film about a young female hockey player (Eleonora Conti) wrestling with her sexual identity and abuse from  her male teammates; and Yuva, an enigmatic character study of a man living in the wilds of a Turkish forest as a military coup rumbles through the outside world. These are highly personal cinematic visions, resourceful and very promising.

Two other under-the-radar offerings that caught my eye coincidentally share flammable titles. Tel Aviv on Fire is a whip-smart comedy about a young Palestinian man (Kais Nashif) who stumbles into a job writing for a popular Israeli soap opera. Diplomacy is rarely this entertaining. In a much different vein, What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? is a bracingly intimate and utterly gorgeous documentary portrait of black Southerners getting by and soldiering on during the long, hot summer of 2017.

Seventy-five years is a lot of Adriatic Sea water under the bridge, and a lot of film history in the books. To the festival's credit, it still finds a way to feel very much of the moment.