This summer has been jam-packed with stellar red carpet events, so we don’t blame you if you’ve lost track. There were feather boas and thigh-high boots at the MTV Video Music Awards, ethereal dresses during Margot Robbie’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood press circuit, and hundreds of crystals at The Lion King‘s L.A. premiere. But now, it’s time to turn our attention to Italy for the 76th annual Venice Film Festival, which begins on August 28 and runs to September 7. 

Eleven glorious days of a festival packed with A-listers can only mean one thing: We’re about to witness a whole lot of stellar red carpet looks. This year’s Cannes Film Festival certainly set the bar high, but we have no doubt that the Venice iteration will deliver as well. Last year’s event in Venice saw the likes of Lady Gaga, Dakota Johnson, and Ryan Gosling walk the red carpet, so we have high expectations for 2019. Scroll down to see the very best Venice Film Festival red carpet looks, from Iman to Sofia Richie. 

Next, the striking VMAs after-party looks you didn’t see.

A one-off edition of the BMW X6 is the first vehicle to get decked out in the “world’s blackest black.” 

The sinister finish’s technical name is Vantablack VBx2. Because it can absorb up to 99.9 percent of light and virtually eliminates the reflection of rays, the super-black paint was first developed for space equipment to further enable the observation of distant stars and galaxies that stray light makes difficult to detect. 

On the third-gen X6, which BMW dubs a “sports activity coupé”, Vantablack enhances its kidney grille, angular headlights and sleek taillights. What’s quite possibly the most menacing paint job ever also contributes to the new luxury ride’s muscular demeanor.

A BMW press release has more details on how Vantablack technology works:  

It contains an acronym of the technology enabling this superior black in its first two syllables, which stand for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, a matrix made out of carbon.

Each of these carbon nanotubes has a length of 14 to 50 micrometers, with a diameter of 20 nanometers, making it around 5,000 times thinner than a human hair.

As a result, around a billion of these vertically aligned carbon nanotubes fit into one square centimeter. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.

According to BMW, this X6 is the first car to be covered in any Vantablack variant. Hussein Al-Attar, who designed the X6, says Vantablack opens up new doors for carmakers.

“We often prefer to talk about silhouettes and proportions rather than surfaces and lines,” he said in a statement.

“The Vantablack VBx2 coating foregrounds these fundamental aspects of automotive design, without any distraction from light and reflections.”

It’s hard to tell in photos, but BMW claims that Vantablack also tricks the human eye into seeing objects as two-dimensional. 

Anyone in attendance can judge for themselves at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September, where the Vantablack-coated BMW X6 will be on display. 

The intense final trailer for director Todd Phillips’ Joker is here, and it shows Joaquin Phoenix in his full greasepainted glory as Arthur Fleck, a clown-for-hire by day who aspires to be a stand-up comic at night. 

In case you didn’t already notice from the first trailer released back in April, Joker aims to be a “gritty character study” of DC’s most famous criminal clown, according to the film’s official synopsis: 

Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study. 

Three-time Oscar nominee Phoenix is joined in the trailer by co-stars Robert De Niro and Marc Maron in the gripping final trailer above. 

It’ll have to tide you over until Joker hits theaters nationwide on October 4, 2019.