The Movies I Am Most Excited About at Venice 2026

The Venice Film Festival is considered one of the most important film festivals in the world, especially because of the quality of its Official Selection. In recent years, many movies that later enter the Oscar race have had their first release or an important stop at the Italian festival.

I am still more of a fan of the films at Cannes, which is why I have written four posts this year about directors releasing new movies there. Looking at the Official Selection in Venice this year confirms that for me: there are some names I am excited to see return, but nothing immediately got me as excited as some of the Cannes titles.

Still, there are several films that I will be looking forward to, and I am especially curious to see how they are received at the festival.

I have followed all of Martin McDonagh's films since I watched In Bruges. That movie made me fall in love with the Belgian city, but more importantly, it was a clever dark comedy that really entertained me. It had been a long time since I had seen a film that could mix thriller elements with comedy without taking itself too seriously, while still being emotional because of the characters and their interactions.

I was really surprised when I discovered that it was a debut film. It already felt like the work of a director with a very clear voice.

The international recognition came with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which took his dark comedy to another level. The topic is a sensitive one, but McDonagh manages to reach the emotional parts through characters that could almost be cartoons if they were written differently. Instead, every one of them has a connection to the story and takes the spectator through completely different emotions. For me, it was a masterful combination of direction, acting and, especially, screenplay.

Then came The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022, again with a great screenplay that explores masculinity, friendship and isolation in a small Irish town, while showing how the routine of everyday life can become its own kind of nightmare.

He comes back to Venice with Wild Horse Nine, where his two previous films have already brought him major recognition with two screenplay prizes and the Volpi Cup for Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin. This will be his third time in Competition, and as a fan of his movies, I trust him almost blindly. Maybe another screenplay prize or the Golden Lion for him this year?

I am not often putting debut directors on my most anticipated films for a festival, but this year Robert Pattinson has been everywhere, and Primetime is the one where I hope he finally gets the opportunity to show what he can really do. After several interesting choices and very different projects, I feel this could be the role where his performance becomes one of the main reasons to watch the movie, rather than simply being another strong title in an already busy year for him.

The story also caught my attention because it reminds me of the type of thriller I enjoyed in Nightcrawler, where television, crime and the search for an audience come together with a disturbing lack of morality. The idea of people willing to cross increasingly dangerous lines for attention and success is something that can work very well when the film does not try to give easy answers.

I am especially curious to see how Oppenheim handles this material in his first feature and how far Pattinson takes the character. The early reactions have been encouraging, but I would rather wait for the Venice screening before making any judgment.

The film has a cinema release at the end of September, so we will not have to wait too long to discover it.

One of the things I enjoy most about film festivals is discovering directors and following them afterwards. I have been following festival programmes seriously since 2013, so there are directors whose earlier films I missed and whose names I only started paying attention to when they returned to the major festivals.

That happened with Lee Chang-dong. I had not watched any of his films before Burning, but after seeing it I knew he was a director I wanted to follow. Burning was a film I had to watch twice to fully appreciate. Not because of a complicated mystery or a plot reveal that was difficult to understand, but because of the layers behind the film. The doubts and uncertainties of the characters play such an important role, and I was really impressed by how he managed them.

Then I started reading more about Lee Chang-dong and realised how much time he takes between films. Possible Love is his first feature in eight years, following Burning, and it brings him back to the festival circuit with a story about two married couples whose lives become intertwined.

I had been waiting for his next film for a long time. I would have preferred to see him in the Cannes selection, but because the film is a Netflix production, Venice became its main festival destination. I am still glad he is in Competition, and I hope the film's reception can help it reach as many cinemas as possible in Germany.

I have talked about Kore-eda before because of his presence at Cannes this year with Sheep in the Box. I watched it at the Munich Film Festival, and although it was still a film about the complexity of family relationships, I felt it was a minor work from a master of the subject.

His new film Look Back is very different in its starting point. It tells the story of two girls who become connected through their passion for creating manga and follows their friendship as they grow up. It is an adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga and is described as a coming-of-age story.

I feel that the friendship between the girls could be similar to what I found in The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, another story where passion for a craft becomes part of growing up and trying to find your own voice. I usually do not watch many series, but I watched The Makanai because of Kore-eda's involvement, and the sensibility that is such a characteristic of his cinema was still there.

He knows how to portray the innocence of childhood, but also the difficulties of growing up, often through silence and small gestures rather than heated or euphoric situations. That is exactly what I am expecting from Look Back.

Florian Zeller had a huge debut with The Father. For his first film as a director, he adapted his own popular and critically acclaimed stage play, with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role and Olivia Colman playing his daughter.

Even though it was released during the COVID period, it became a major critical success, earned Zeller the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and gave Hopkins his second Best Actor Oscar.

After that, he went to the Venice Film Festival for the first time with The Son, again adapting his own stage play and bringing together a stellar cast including Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Anthony Hopkins. The reviews were not as strong as for The Father, and the film did not repeat the same awards-season success.

Still, I have a special appreciation for The Son. There were decisions that I found too dramatic, but I felt that Zeller always treated the depression of the younger character with a certain respect and tried to portray the situation realistically. It was a step down from his first film for me, but it still showed a director interested in complex family relationships.

Now he comes back with an original screenplay, this time not based on one of his stage plays, and with Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as the main couple. The film follows a marriage that is tested when the husband accepts a project to design a bunker for a billionaire. The fact that Zeller wrote the film specifically with Bardem and Cruz in mind makes me even more curious about how their relationship will work on screen.

I like both actors, I believe in the director, and this is definitely high on my list.

I had seen Andrea Pallaoro's name before in the Venice Official Selection lists, but I only really noticed him when I read that Charlotte Rampling won the Volpi Cup for Hannah. I still have the film on my watchlist, but until now that award was my main connection with his work.

When I was reading this year's Official Selection and saw the cast of The Echo Chamber, with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon, I immediately became more interested. Then I discovered that the screenplay was based on the final script written by Bernardo Bertolucci together with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi before his death. That alone makes this a particularly interesting project.

I have already watched the clips and trailer released ahead of Venice, and I am curious to see what Pallaoro does with the material. I also decided to watch his previous films before the festival because I want to understand his style before seeing this one, especially after discovering that his previous work has often centred on women.

For me, this could be a hit or a flop. That is exactly why I am looking forward to the reactions to this film at Venice.