Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Emma Stone, Laura Dern, Ayo Edebiri, Jude Law, Jacob Elordi, Greta Lee, Amanda Seyfried, Emily Blunt, Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs—the Venice Film Festival is always a glitzy affair, but this year’s star-filled roster is really something to behold. Ahead of the 82nd edition, due to run from August 27 to September 6, these are the 11 films—from atmospheric thrillers and madcap musicals to the long-awaited return of lauded directors (Kathryn Bigelow, Guillermo del Toro, Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach, Park Chan-wook)—to keep an eye on at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
After the Hunt
The festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, noted that Luca Guadagnino’s latest thriller packed with Hollywood heavyweights—hot on the heels of the Daniel Craig-led Queer, which was on the Lido just last year—would be premiering out of competition, at the request of its financiers, Amazon. Is that a bad sign? Well, not necessarily. It has a knockout cast—Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, and Julia Roberts, with the latter, shockingly, marking her first time on the Venice red carpet—and the trailer promises a spine-chilling, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-scored deep dive into the corridors of power at a dark wood-panelled Ivy League institution, a cloistered community that implodes after a promising student accuses a well-respected professor of assault. Expect a substantial Oscar campaign to follow.
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s long-gestating Mary Shelley adaptation—which casts Oscar Isaac as the wildly ambitious scientist and Jacob Elordi as his terrifying creation, alongside period-drama regulars Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, David Bradley, Charles Dance, and Ralph Ineson—is the director’s first big-screen, live-action offering since 2021’s Nightmare Alley. Grand in scope and lavishly designed and rendered, it’s a no-expense-spared spectacle sure to get Venice talking.
The Testament of Ann Lee
Brady Corbet scooped Venice’s best-director prize and came within a hair’s breadth of taking the Golden Lion last year for his half-astounding, half-exhausting The Brutalist. Now, he and his partner, (and that film’s co-writer and executive producer) Mona Fastvold, are back with another 70mm epic—though, thankfully, this one is almost an hour and a half shorter than its predecessor. Penned by the pair and directed, this time, by Fastvold, it’s—wait for it—a musical about the titular founding leader of the 18th-century religious sect the Shakers, as embodied by a ringleted Amanda Seyfried. Add Thomasin McKenzie, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson, and Stacy Martin; another rousing Daniel Blumberg score; and a surreal tone, and you have what is quite possibly the strangest and most intriguing film on this line-up.
Father Mother Sister Brother
Indie legend Jim Jarmusch’s first film in six years is this tragicomic familial triptych tracking a set of ambivalent parents and their adult children, as played by everyone from Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver to Vicky Krieps, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, and Tom Waits. Unfolding against three distinct backdrops—Paris, Dublin, and the American northeast—it’s billed as a meditative character study, and is guaranteed to be infused with the filmmaker’s trademark wit and whimsy.
Jay Kelly
George Clooney slips into the shoes of a suave movie star in the midst of an identity crisis—opposite a roll call of industry fixtures including Adam Sandler (as our hero, Jay’s devoted manager, Ron), Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Billy Crudup, Jim Broadbent, Lenny Henry, Alba Rohrwacher, Patrick Wilson, Eve Hewson, and Greta Gerwig—in Noah Baumbach’s next ensemble piece. Co-written with Emily Mortimer, who also appears, it sees Jay and Ron embark on a whirlwind adventure through Europe as they consider their life choices, relationships, and the legacies they’ll leave behind.
Bugonia
The 2003 South Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! is reimagined in characteristically batshit fashion by the idiosyncratic Yorgos Lanthimos in this chilling and absurdist farce. It marks the director’s fifth collaboration with double Oscar winner Emma Stone, after The Favourite, Bleat, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, and reunites him with the latter’s lead, Jesse Plemons, too, in a story about two conspiracy theorists who kidnap a high-powered CEO, convinced that she’s an alien hellbent on destroying the earth.
The Smashing Machine
The Safdie brothers are, for the moment, going their own way: After making Good Time and Uncut Gems as a duo, Josh Safdie is now focused on the Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow ping pong movie Marty Supreme, while Benny Safdie is turning his attention to this rip-roaring portrait of MMA fighter Mark Kerr (a prosthetics-swathed Dwayne Johnson). Beside him, through the triumphant victories, crushing losses, and struggles with substance abuse, is his devoted wife, played by Emily Blunt—a Jungle Cruise reunion I never saw coming.
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning auteur behind The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit, returns with a prescient examination of our contemporary geopolitical hellscape: When a missile is launched at the US, the race is on to determine who is responsible and how the White House should respond. In charge? The likes of Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jonah Hauer-King, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Kaitlyn Dever, as they confront a potential nuclear catastrophe and the precarious world we’ve created with our dependence on atomic weapons.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
Another politically charged polemic, Olivier Assayas’s account of Putin’s rise to power, adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s recent novel of the same name, sees none other than Jude Law transform into the deathly pale, dark-suited KGB officer-turned-president. Paul Dano is his (partly fictional) spin doctor, pulling the strings at the heart of the Russian government, while Alicia Vikander, Zach Galifianakis, Tom Sturridge, and Jeffrey Wright complete the impressive ensemble. As the boundaries blur between truth and lies, news and propaganda, nationalism and imperialism, we’re given an unnerving insight into Russia’s turbulent recent past, as well as its incredibly troubled present.
No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook’s last film, 2022’s Decision to Leave, may have received a more muted audience response than his earlier output, but a new release from the South Korean master behind Oldboy and The Handmaiden is always a major event. This one, a pacy, pitch-black comedy based on Donald E. Westlake’s satirical horror The Ax, stars Squid Game’s devious Front Man, Lee Byung-hun, alongside Son Ye-jin and Park Hee-soon, and follows a middle manager who is left reeling after losing the position he’s held for decades. The only solution, following a long and fruitless job hunt? To eliminate his competition by any means necessary, of course. Let the bloodbath commence.
Marc by Sofia
Surely essential viewing for all fashion fans, the first-ever documentary from Sofia Coppola will focus on her longtime friend, fellow tastemaker Marc Jacobs. Given the close nature of their almost-three-decade-long relationship, think fewer formal talking heads and archival footage providing a historical overview, and more deeply personal revelations and much reminiscing about their freewheeling youth, spent organizing guerrilla fashion shows and running riot in New York. As ’90s nostalgia goes, it sounds pretty irresistible.
This article was first published on Vogue.com.
