The 2026 Venice Film Festival will be splashy—but it could have been a whole lot splashier. There are a number of hotly-anticipated titles that were once expected to sail to the Lido this September, but now, it turns out, will not be in attendance: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise-led Digger; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg; David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood spin-off, The Adventures of Cliff Booth starring Brad Pitt; Tom Ford’s Cry to Heaven, featuring Adele’s acting debut; and Tony Gilroy’s Pedro Pascal-fronted awards hopeful Behemoth!, to name but a few.
Still, the lineup for the 83rd showcase—due to run from 2 to 12 September, with Maggie Gyllenhaal serving as the jury president, and George Clooney and 93-year-old screen legend Ellen Burstyn set to receive the festival’s lifetime achievement awards—is a star-studded one. There are pacy thrillers, head-spinning romps, and, as is always the case at Venice, several headline-grabbing documentaries. (The latter includes a Laura Poitras co-directed short about ICE, Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s four-hour study of Elon Musk, a seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci documentary from Luca Guadagnino, and an account of Oasis’s recent reunion tour, as told by both Gallagher brothers.) These are the 10 films you need to look out for.
Wild Horse Nine
The one (seemingly) ironclad awards behemoth on this roster is Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black comedy. His last two dramas, 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin and 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, both parlayed a Venice premiere into awards glory, collecting two Oscars and 16 nominations between them—and this one is equally starry and pertinent. Unfolding amongst the mysterious, monumental statues of Easter Island, in the run-up to the 1973 Chilean coup, it follows two freewheeling CIA agents (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell) with plans to overthrow the national government. When they become entangled with a pair of rebellious students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), all hell breaks loose. Parker Posey, Steve Buscemi, and Tom Waits fill out the supporting roles.
Bunker
The First Couple of Spanish cinema, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, are back with their latest collaboration, and it should be a corker. Oscar-winning filmmaker Florian Zeller (The Father, The Son) has placed them at the centre of his new family saga: a psychological thriller about an architect who is commissioned to construct an impenetrable, top-secret bunker by a billionaire tech mogul. It’s a project that consumes his life, strains his marriage, and prompts the slow unravelling of his family. Expect taut writing and characteristically explosive performances, including from supporting players Paul Dano, Stephen Graham, and Patrick Schwarzenegger.
Bucking Fastard
It’s been a long, hard road for Werner Herzog. His latest oddity—a hallucinatory head-scratcher about codependent twin sisters (Rooney and Kate Mara, marking the first time the real-life siblings will be on screen together)—was offered a spot on the Cannes line-up earlier this year, but the auteur turned it down, given said slot wouldn’t allow him to compete for the Palme d’Or. Now, he’s in contention for the Golden Lion instead. This is the bonkers tale of Jean and Joan Holbrooke, who speak in unison, have the same dreams, love the same man (Orlando Bloom—fair enough), and live on the fringes of society. After they’re assigned a government-issued social worker (Domhnall Gleeson) in a bid to help them adapt to modern life, they, for some reason, begin digging a tunnel through a mountain range to find an imaginary land where true love is possible. It doesn’t get more Herzog than that.
Ink
James Graham’s 2017 play of the same name, which chronicled the rise of Rupert Murdoch and The Sun in the late ’60s, is being brought to the big screen by Oscar winner Danny Boyle, in his first hefty, awards-angled drama since 2015’s Steve Jobs. Guy Pearce is his Murdoch, and Jack O’Connell is Larry Lamb, an editor at the Daily Mail whom the media mogul recruits as The Sun’s new editor-in-chief, after purchasing the then-failing publication from its parent paper, The Mirror. (There’s also Claire Foy as Jules Davies, Lamb’s fictional wife and the paper’s deputy editor.) Cue a no-holds-barred race to maximise profits, which sowed the seeds for the sensationalist tabloid culture of today.
Possible Love
If you were blown away by Lee Chang-dong’s beguiling, beautiful 2018 Korean-language chiller Burning, you’ll be happy to hear that the maestro is finally returning to the fore with another close examination of intimate relationships. This time around, his focus is on an intertwined quartet: a recently laid-off worker and his wife, and a documentary filmmaker and her husband, all of whom come together to make a movie that progressively unspools their most private desires. The cast is stellar—Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong, Hope’s Zo In-sung, Oasis’s Sul Kyung-gu, Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-yeon—and the mind games they play with one another are inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog. The last buzzy film festival entry to take cues from the latter was Asghar Farhadi’s widely-panned Parallel Tales from Cannes—here’s hoping this one fares much better.
Primetime
Robert Pattinson transforms into the stilted, inscrutable To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in this ripped-from-the-headlines yarn, the narrative feature directorial debut of Ren Faire’s Lance Oppenheim. 2006 was the year that gripping, stomach-turning, aughts-TV phenomenon—a series of sting operations arranged by the presenter and his crew, with the support of the police, in which baby-faced decoys were used to trap and arrest alleged paedophiles—reached its apex, attracting millions of viewers. But Hansen and his team’s relentless pursuit of bigger, juicier stories and more high-profile targets soon proved disastrous. With Ari Aster among the film’s producers and Phoebe Bridgers in the ensemble, in her formal acting debut, it feels like the kind of unconventional biopic only A24 would make.
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger
The most wholesome story of 2025 is coming to the big screen, courtesy of writer Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) and music documentary directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern. More than a decade on from their messy split, Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher reconciled, reunited, and then embarked on a global tour, a highly emotional affair for fans who’d lost all hope that day would ever come. This behind-the-scenes peek takes us inside the band’s rehearsals, trails them on the road and, notably, includes the brothers’ first joint interviews in more than 25 years. Best of all, Venice Film Festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, has confirmed that the Gallaghers will in fact be promoting the movie together on the Lido. Can you imagine that press conference? I can’t think of anything more surreal or potentially chaotic.
The Echo Chamber
Alicia Vikander, Susan Sarandon, and Luca Marinelli star in this poetic dissection of love, longing, and obsession from Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro (he helmed Hannah, for which Charlotte Rampling won Venice’s Volpi Cup for best actress back in 2017). Its screenplay is by Bernardo Bertolucci—the final one the film legend penned before his death eight years ago—and tracks a prolific music producer struggling with addiction who enters into an unlikely affair with an enigmatic physiotherapist. Laced with music, it looks set to be a fitting tribute to the dearly departed director.
Place to Be
The recent cinematic output of Hungarian auteur Kornél Mundruczó has been inconsistent at best—the Vanessa Kirby-led nerve-shredder Pieces of a Woman, from 2020, was praised; his recent Berlin Film Festival-premiering At the Sea, with Amy Adams, was not. So, it’s difficult to gauge the quality of this out-of-competition entry, though it certainly looks impressive on paper. Ellen Burstyn takes the lead as a no-nonsense nonagenarian who befriends a discombobulated divorcé (Taika Waititi, the Oscar-winning director of Jojo Rabbit, making a return to acting) as they travel from Chicago to New York to—wait for it—return a lost racing pigeon. Pamela Anderson, Édgar Ramírez, Lena Waithe, and The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett complete the glittering, Hollywood-friendly package.
Flesh Impact
Ellen Burstyn is also at the heart of this affecting, 17-minute short from Venice’s jury president, Maggie Gyllenhaal, billed as an ode to Marilyn Monroe on the centenary of her birth. Dakota Johnson is the ’50s screen siren at the height of her fame—at 36, the actor is the exact age Monroe was when she tragically died from a barbiturate overdose—while Burstyn is the veteran performer Marilyn never got to become. As a closer look at the myth of Marilyn, and the misconceptions that still exist about her, it’s poised to be a potent and thought-provoking watch.
This article was first published on Vogue.com.
