Jurors at the Venice film festival on Wednesday had only three days left to make their pick for the coveted Golden Lion after many of the 21 movies in competition failed to live up to expectations.

"There are too many films that have disappointed, too few crammed with Hollywood stars, fewer people in the theatres, fewer parties," lamented Wednesday's Corriere della Sera.

After the festival opened on 27 August with the glam duo George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the out-of-competition comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen 'Burn After Reading', most of the films in this year's lineup "seemed like plain porridge without sugar", in the words of Guardian film critic Andrew Pulver.

"What a disaster this year!" fumed Lietta Tornabuoni of the Italian daily La Stampa. "Of the many films I've seen, I liked only the Coen brothers'."

Festival director Marco Mueller defended the selection before the jury headed by German director Wim Wenders, saying: "The films are the best that are out there."

Mueller noted that Toronto film festival, opening on Thursday, planned to screen 23 of the films being shown here, compared with 11 from the Cannes film festival in May.

The Italian daily La Repubblica fretted that the world's oldest film festival has become "so tired".

The Golden Lion and other prizes at Venice "no longer seem important to anyone", wrote La Repubblica's Natalia Aspesi. "In the past ... the jurors' every bat of an eye was scrutinised."

French director Barbet Schroeder's American-style thriller set in Japan, 'Inju, the Beast in the Shadow', and Hong Kong director's triad drama 'Plastic City' in particular fell short of expectations.

International Herald Tribune reviewer Roderick Conway Morris faulted Schroeder for being "so submerged in local colour... that he loses the plot", while the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett blasted 'Plastic City', set in Brazil, as a "silly fantasy".

Things began looking up this week with Argentine-Italian director Marco Bechis' 'BirdWatchers' exposing the plight of Brazil's Guarani Indians in the face of the biofuels boom and 'Teza' by Ethiopia's Haile Gerima in which he revisits his homeland under the dictator Mengistu.

And on Wednesday, US 'Silence of the Lambs' director Jonathan Demme unveiled 'Rachel Getting Married', an emotion-packed family drama starring Anne Hathaway as a recovering drug addict who shakes up her sister's wedding with an overdose of honesty about their dysfunctional family.

Two Japanese films have also stood out — Takeshi Kitano's whimsical 'Achilles and the Tortoise' and Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated children's fantasy 'Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea'.

Still to come among the 21 films vying for the prestigious Golden Lion on Saturday are Kathryn Bigelow's 'The Hurt Locker' and Darren Aronofsky's 'The Wrestler'.

Venice finds itself squeezed in the festival calendar between Toronto and Rome, whose third edition comes next month, but it is also hampered by the high costs of the lagoon city and the ageing infrastructure of the world's oldest film competition.

A new hall, whose first stone was laid last week, is planned for completion by 2011 at a cost of €75-million.

Ticket sales are down 12 percent, according to Biennale president Paolo Baratta, and the Italian paper L'Unita said hotels and restaurants on the Lido, the festival's island venue, were reporting a 20 percent dip in turnover compared with last year.