Primetime, Wild Horse Nine, Ink: The movies making a splash at the Venice Film Festival 2026

The Venice Film Festival marks the official start of what is called “fall festival season”, fall being the Northern Hemisphere autumn.

Venice is the kick-off, followed closely by the US-based Telluride festival, Toronto, New York and London. Traditionally, the festivals are a bellwether for the Oscars with many awards aspirants choosing a prestigious festival debut to launch their films and their campaigns.

While in recent years, some studios have veered from that proscribed path (last year’s top contenders, One Battle After Another and Sinners both eschewed a festival launch), the “fall festivals” still have cultural cachet.

It can be risky. A lacklustre reception from those early reviews can kill a film’s momentum, which is what happened last year after the Venice premieres of After the Hunt with Julia Roberts and Jay Kelly with George Clooney.

But it can also draw a lot of attention to especially smaller films that don’t have massive marketing budgets. There were some stand-outs from the Venice Film Festival this year, some of which are already buzzing all over social media, and will, undoubtedly, penetrate the zeitgeist in the coming months.

These are the films, for better or worse, you’ll be hearing a lot more about.

PRIMETIME

Robert Pattinson being weird in a strange film is the best kind of Robert Pattinson – he’s just so great at playing discombobulating characters who make you feel deeply uncomfortable.

In Primetime, he portrays Chris Hansen, the real-life former host of the 2000s gotcha TV series, To Catch a Predator, which set up stings against alleged paedophiles and filmed it all for broadcast TV.

The movie, directed by 30-year-old Lance Oppenheim, is not just a recounting but an accounting of how the TV show supercharged reality TV and our digital self-surveillance and attention culture.

It’s great, and also features excellent performances from Merrit Wever as an amoral producer and Skyler Gisondo as an actor who is hired to impersonate underage marks.

WOMAN UNKNOWN

The film which won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion as well as the best actress gong, decided by a jury led by actor and filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal, was Woman Unknown, directed by May el-Toukhy, the only female contender in the official competition.

The Danish-Latvian-Swedish co-production is set in the years after World War II about a nanny who was previously in a relationship with a Nazi soldier, and that past is about to be uncovered as she is set to marry her employer.

The film explores how women, in Denmark just like they were in France, were shamed for being collaborators, and how their bodies became a plaything of politics and identity.

WILD HORSE NINE

John Malkovich has Oscar momentum for the first in years thanks to this funny and paranoid Martin McDonagh (Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges) film set in the months before the 1973 Chilean military takeover.

Malkovich plays an ageing CIA agent who’s become a little too loose with the truth as he faces his mortality, and Sam Rockwell portrays his partner and friend, who has two secondary missions, one of which is to keep him in line.

Easter Island makes for beautiful backdrop in this acerbic but ultimately humanist buddy story about political manipulation, purpose and a good death.

NAZA

Documentary NAZA won the festival’s special jury prize and it’s already, unsurprisingly, triggered the right-wing Israeli culture minister who has threatened to strip its filmmakers, Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, of their citizenship.

The film features 24 military or intelligence whistleblowers who describe how AI-powered systems are being used in the killing of Palestinian citizens in IDF strikes against Gaza. Military action in Gaza has been justified by Israel as a response to the October 7 attacks.

The movie’s title refers to an acronym used by the military to indicate the number of civilian deaths it expects from an airstrike. It received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere.

POSSIBLE LOVE

Korean master filmmaker Lee Chang-dong hasn’t made a film since the beloved 2018 suspense thriller Burning, so there was a lot of eyes on its superb follow-up, Possible Love.

This is a spiritual successor in that it is concerned with similar themes of the economic and opportunity disparity between classes, and contrasts two parties – this the case of Possible Love, two families – in different circumstances.

One is a working class family where the father was retrenched from his job after a high-profile strike, the true horrors and effects of which are slowly revealed, and the other is a rich couple, one of whom is making a documentary about that strike.

INK

Danny Boyle is back on fine form with Ink, a propulsive and clever drama based on a stage play by James Graham (Graham also wrote the film’s screenplay) about how The Sun became the top-selling newspaper in the UK.

Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the film follows Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), the maverick editor Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce, who is fantastic here) hired to shake up the stodgy establishment, and tracks how The Sun popularised a form of no-f..ks tabloid journalism, as well as the mistaken kidnapping of the wife of a Murdoch executive.

Ink starts off as a fun underdog story before it morphs into something more serious as it tries to draw a line from Murdoch and Lamb’s bomb-throwing to the political morass of the 21st century.

MUSK

OK, a four-hour documentary about Elon Musk doesn’t sound like a good time, and it’s not in a conventional “enjoyable” sense. Because there is nothing warm and fuzzy about this one man whose influence has become such a malevolent force across politics, business, culture and technology.

Award-winning documentary maker Alex Gibneys goes through a thorough accounting of Musk’s actions across the likes of Tesla, Space X, Twitter and the US government, and it’s a sobering and enraging watch.

Rest assured, there is nothing authorised about this biography and Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech absolulist, is already chucking a tantrum about it.

UN BON PETIT SOLDAT

This French film starring Alba Rohrwacher is a punch in the guts for anyone who has ever worked with in a corporate structure.

You’ll recognise the empty lip service about employee wellbeing all while C-suite operators prioritise so-called productivity and value. It’s like LinkedIn’s toxic positivity on acid.

Rohrwacher plays an HR manager who fully bought into the system, giving her company her all to the detriment of everything else in her life, only to be rudely awakened to the violence of a system that dehumanises everyone within it.