By Charles Hubbard, Film & TV Deputy Editor
We have come to the beginning of yet another autumn festival season. It feels like only yesterday that Paul Thomas Anderson’s superbly prescient One Battle After Another (2025) swept the above-the-line categories and Michael B. Jordan deservedly took home the acting world’s biggest prize for Sinners (2025) at last year’s Academy Awards.
However, the annual grind of awards season stops for no one and the first stop on the pre-Oscars hype train - the Venice Film Festival - is already here, starting on 2nd September. The second most prestigious film festival in the world (after Cannes, which took place in May), Venice is prime real estate for filmmakers wishing to plant their flag in the ground early on in awards season. Last year’s offerings included Guillermo Del Toro’s divisive Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos’ deeply disquieting state-of-the-nation tale Bugonia and Park Chan-wook’s wickedly funny satire of capitalism No Other Choice (all 2025).
And yet, for reasons known only to Jury President Alexander Payne - director of The Holdovers (2023) - the Golden Lion, Venice’s top prize, went to Jim Jarmusch’s monotonously slight Father Mother Sister Brother (2025). Let’s hope that this year’s jury, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actor-director whose film The Bride (2026) certainly left an indelible, if not necessarily positive, impression on me, chooses slightly more wisely. They’ve got an embarrassment of riches with which to do so.
I’m only going to be able to spotlight a few of the films in this article but here’s the full list:
Back to Buenos Aires (directed Marco Bechis)
A Bit Before Midnight (directed by Nicolas Pariser)
A Bit of Light (directed by Ali Asgari)
Bucking Fastard (directed by Werner Herzog)
Bunker (directed by Florian Zeller)
Company (directed by Casey Affleck)
DAU (directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky)
The Echo Chamber (directed by Andrea Pallaoro)
The Fire Within You (directed by Edoardo De Angelis)
Good Little Soldier (directed by Stephane Brize)
Ink (directed by Danny Boyle)
It Will Happen Tonight (directed by Nanni Moretti)
Look Back (directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? (directed by Shinya Tsukamoto)
A Place to Heal (directed by Cedric Kahn)
Possible Love (directed by Lee Chang-dong)
Primetime (directed by Lance Oppenheim)
The Spiral (directed by Paolo Strippoli)
Wild Horse Nine (directed by Martin McDonagh)
Woman Unknown (directed by May el-Toukhy)
Bucking Fastard
This cheekily titled offering from German existentialist filmmaker Werner Herzog, who you might know from his on-screen appearances on The Mandalorian (2019-), made quite a splash in film nerd circles when it released its first trailer a few weeks ago. The sneak peek sees Rooney Mara and Kate Mara, dressed identically, being questioned in court and answering with the exact same words simultaneously (I’d highly recommend checking the trailer out - it definitely piqued my interest). This clip, already made fascinating by the metatextual casting of real-life sisters, calls to mind the work of movement director Akram Khan, who specialises in this kind of simultaneous delivery of verbatim dialogue. Herzog is certainly no stranger to experimentation - it’s perhaps why his films have struggled to find major distribution since the box office failure of Queen of the Desert (2015) - and this is a tantalising hint of what we can expect from his latest work. While little is known about the plot of the film, it is reported to star Orlando Bloom and Domhnhall Gleason in smaller roles.
Ink
Adapted from James Graham’s Olivier and Tony-winning 2017 play of the same name, Ink retells the story of how Rupert Murdoch (due to be played by Memento’s (2000) Guy Pearce) bought The Sun from its parent newspaper The Mirror’s editor Larry Lamb (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell) and thus began his long-term consolidation of the British media ecosystem. Danny Boyle, while a relative stranger to the festival circuit outside of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, has proven himself to be a master of detailing the ugly corporate backstabbings known to go on behind the closed doors of our biggest companies with his electric and thoroughly underrated 2015 biopic of Steve Jobs. Newly reinvigorated by the critical and commercial success of his zombie threequel 28 Years Later (2025), it seems that Boyle is making a defiant play to win back highbrow respectability outside of the horror genre and I can’t wait to see the result.
Ella Saxton
Primetime
It’s no secret that Robert Pattinson has been having a hell of a year. With the fierce online debate over his brutally subversive anti-rom-com The Drama, the billion-dollar success of a little film you might’ve heard of called The Odyssey and his much-anticipated appearance in Dune: Part Three (all 2026) still to come, the fact that Pattinson is playing Chris Hansen, the host and creator of the deeply controversial TV show To Catch a Predator (2004-2007) has been somewhat lost in the shuffle. Well, if you need reminding, take a look at the immediately arresting (no pun intended) trailer A24 recently posted and you won’t soon forget it again. The film marks the narrative debut of Lance Oppenheim, best known for his 2020 documentary Some Kind of Heaven, and his choice to make his first film a biopic of Hansen when the political and cultural climate around the term ‘predator’ is this volatile is definitely a bold one. However, if any major movie star has proven that they can pull off this tricky of a balance, it’s undeniably Pattinson - so I will be there opening weekend if and when the film gets distribution.
Wild Horse Nine
Since the out-of-the-box success of his deeply divisive Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), which won Oscars for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, Irish playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh has become an awards season mainstay with his funny but devastating The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) missing about four golden statuettes by a hair’s breadth. So it’s no surprise why his most recent effort, which tells the story of two CIA officers (played by John Malkovich and the aforementioned Rockwell) trying to navigate government conspiracies on Easter Island in the runup to the 1973 Chilean coup, is being placed in prime position for Oscar consideration. The film’s trailer invites comparisons to McDonagh’s first film, In Bruges (2008), which also portrays two mismatched men-on-a-mission trying to keep a low profile in a foreign country, and, if Wild Horse Nine (2026) is going to have even half that film’s wit and heart, it’ll be one to remember.
Featured image: IMDb / Venice Film Festival 2026
Which film do you think is going to take home the Golden Lion?
