Venice Film Festival 2026 preview: Boyle, McDonagh, Pattinson, Affleck and Oasis at the Lido as Clooney set for honorary Golden Lion

The Venice International Film Festival – the oldest in the world – returns for its 83rd edition from 2^nd to 12^th September 2026, when the film industry once again decamps to the Lido for 11 days of premieres, prizes and water-taxi arrivals. Of Europe’s big three, Venice has long been our favourite: it offers the red-carpet glamour Berlin can seldom muster, alongside a depth of programme that this year arguably outstrips Cannes – the best of both worlds. The lineup, unveiled by artistic director Alberto Barbera three weeks ago, sees Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch drama Ink open proceedings, with Martin McDonagh, Werner Herzog, Hirokazu Koreeda and Lee Chang-dong headlining a formidable competition, and Robert Pattinson, Penélope Cruz and Alicia Vikander leading the star contingent. Then there is the small matter of Oasis: Liam and Noel Gallagher are expected in person for the premiere of the reunion-tour documentary Don’t Look Back in Anger – frankly, we cannot wait. And, as of today, tickets are on sale to the general public.

Competition

The Venezia 83 competition gathers 20 titles, opening on 2^nd September with Danny Boyle’s Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 takeover of the Sun, adapted by James Graham from his own Tony-nominated play. Jack O’Connell stars as editor Larry Lamb, the man Murdoch entrusted with turning the paper into Britain’s best-selling tabloid, with Guy Pearce as Murdoch and Claire Foy as Jules Davies.

Martin McDonagh returns to the Lido with Wild Horse Nine, backed by Film4. The director has twice won the Silver Lion for Best Screenplay here, for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, and his new black comedy stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of veteran CIA officers who, on the eve of the 1973 Chilean coup, are posted far from the action on Easter Island. Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey co-star.

Florian Zeller, last on the Lido in 2022 with The Son, returns with the psychological thriller Bunker. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz play a married couple whose relationship buckles when he, a celebrated architect, accepts a commission to build a bunker for a billionaire; Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger complete the cast.

Robert Pattinson stars in and produces Primetime, the fiction debut of documentarian Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven). Pattinson plays NBC newsman Chris Hansen, whose To Catch a Predator format balloons into a queasy media phenomenon; A24 releases the film in the US.

Werner Herzog – who reportedly turned down an out-of-competition slot at Cannes for the privilege – brings Bucking Fastard, casting sisters Rooney and Kate Mara together on screen for the first time, alongside Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson.

Casey Affleck makes his competition debut as a director with Company, a 1970s-set gothic mystery starring Nick Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn, while Alicia Vikander leads Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, adapted from the final screenplay written by the late Bernardo Bertolucci: she and her co-lead play lovers trapped in a bond they can neither escape nor relinquish.

In one of the announcement’s genuine surprises, Cannes stalwart Nanni Moretti returns to Venice competition for the first time since Palombella Rossa in 1989. His romantic drama It Will Happen Tonight stars Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca.

Two of Asia’s most revered auteurs also feature. Hirokazu Koreeda, fresh from premiering Sheep in the Box at Cannes, presents Look Back, a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s beloved manga, while Lee Chang-dong delivers Possible Love, his first film since Burning eight years ago. The Netflix-backed melodrama stars Korean screen royalty Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, and marks Lee’s first Venice appearance since 2002, when he won the Silver Lion for Best Director for – fittingly enough this year – Oasis.

Danish director May el-Toukhy (Queen of Hearts) makes her Venice debut with Woman Unknown, a period drama set in the aftermath of the Second World War, in which a young housemaid’s engagement to her wealthy widower employer is threatened by her wartime affair with a German soldier. El-Toukhy is, dispiritingly, the sole female director among the competition’s 20 – nearly a decade after Barbera signed the 50/50 by 2020 gender-parity pledge, the needle has barely moved.

The remainder of the competition ranges from Shinya Tsukamoto’s Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? and Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau to new work from Cédric Kahn, Stéphane Brizé, Nicolas Pariser, Ali Asgari, Marco Bechis and a strong Italian contingent led by Edoardo de Angelis and Paolo Strippoli.

Out of competition: Fiction

The festival closes on 12^th September with Dio Ride, an Italian period drama from Giovanni Veronesi starring Pierfrancesco Favino. Elsewhere out of competition, Paul Schrader presents The Basics of Philosophy, with Jack Huston as a repressed philosophy professor confronted by a figure from his past; Filipino auteur Lav Diaz offers Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors; Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be stars Ellen Burstyn; and the Luc Besson-produced crime thriller Father Joe pairs Kiefer Sutherland with Al Pacino.

In the new Films on Film strand, Luca Guadagnino unveils Joie de Vivre, his long-gestating, seven-hour documentary on Bernardo Bertolucci. Guadagnino will also receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award on 8^th September, ahead of the film’s premiere. The section also includes Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias and Yonfan’s Intermission.

Out of competition: Non-fiction

The new Venice Open Non Fiction section holds some of the festival’s most anticipated premieres – chief among them, for this publication at least, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s chronicle of the band’s triumphant 2025 reunion tour, produced with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Barbera has confirmed that both Liam and Noel Gallagher are expected on the Lido for the premiere; the film opens in IMAX and select cinemas on 11^th September before streaming later in the year.

Alex Gibney’s long-awaited Elon Musk documentary, Musk, arrives at a bladder-testing four hours. Also screening are Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends Part II – Exile, continuing her account of Russia’s crackdown on independent journalists; Union Town from two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple; Wim Wenders’s portrait of architect Peter Zumthor; and Francesco Carrozzini’s Be Brave, a film about Diesel founder Renzo Rosso made almost entirely with artificial intelligence. Laura Poitras contributes They’re Here, a short co-directed with Rachel Mueller featuring never-before-seen footage of the Minnesota protests against President Trump’s ICE raids.

Venice Spotlight and Orizzonti

The Spotlight sidebar, opening with Erik Shirai’s Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing, skews notably political this year: highlights include Conversation With the Sea from Palestinian director Muayad Alayan, Gael García Bernal’s Hombre Al Agua, Gábor Reisz’s Ground Floor – described by Barbera as a metaphor for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – and Alina Serban’s I Matter, the first film by a Roma director to screen in the section.

In Orizzonti, India’s Anuparna Roy – winner of the section’s Best Director prize last year – returns with Lovers in the Blue Night, alongside Too Much Sugar, the new documentary from Procession director Robert Greene, and Jelena Maksimović’s Until the Day Ends, a love story set amid Serbia’s student protests. Completists will also note a second Oasis in the programme, from Austrian director Jannis Lenz – no relation.

Jury and honours

Maggie Gyllenhaal presides over the competition jury, and will additionally screen Flesh Impact, her short tribute to Marilyn Monroe on the icon’s centenary, starring Dakota Johnson and Ellen Burstyn. She is joined on the jury by Kaouther Ben Hania, whose The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Grand Jury Prize here last year, Hong Kong veteran Johnnie To, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat, Francesco Casetti and British composer Daniel Blumberg, fresh from his Oscar-winning score for The Brutalist.

George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn will each receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, while Italian actress Serena Rossi collects the Campari Passion for Film Award ahead of Mario Martone’s Scherzetto, in which she stars. Greta Scarano and Nicolas Maupas host the opening and closing ceremonies.

The build-up has not been without friction: Biennale chairman Pietrangelo Buttafuoco used the lineup announcement to condemn the European Commission’s withdrawal of a €2m grant from the Biennale’s art exhibition – a response to Russia’s readmission to the event – comparing the Commission to “wolves” and warning the shortfall would also affect the festival’s Biennale College fund and Venice Production Bridge.

The full Venice 2026 programme

Venice Competition
Ink, dir Danny Boyle (opening film)
Company, dir Casey Affleck
A Bit of Light, dir Ali Asgari
Ritorno a Buenos Aires, dir Marco Bechis
Un Bon Petit Soldat, dir Stéphane Brizé
Il Fuoco Che Ti Porti Dentro, dir Edoardo de Angelis
Woman Unknown, dir May el-Toukhy
Bucking Fastard, dir Werner Herzog
15/18 A Place to Heal, dir Cédric Kahn
Dau, dir Ilya Khrzhanovsky
Look Back, dir Hirokazu Koreeda
Possible Love, dir Lee Chang-dong
Wild Horse Nine, dir Martin McDonagh
It Will Happen Tonight, dir Nanni Moretti
Primetime, dir Lance Oppenheim
The Echo Chamber, dir Andrea Pallaoro
Un Peu Avant Minuit, dir Nicolas Pariser
L’Estranea, dir Paolo Strippoli
Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?, dir Shinya Tsukamoto
Bunker, dir Florian Zeller

Venice Spotlight
Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing, dir Erik Shirai (opening film)
Conversation With the Sea, dir Muayad Alayan
Hombre Al Agua, dir Gael García Bernal
Serpenti, dir Roberto de Paolis Maino
Furies, dir Rami Kodeih
Guria, dir Levan Koguashvili
Ground Floor, dir Gábor Reisz
I Matter, dir Alina Serban

Orizzonti Competition
La Ragazza con la Leica, dir Alina Marazzi (opening film)
The Burning Giants, dir Phuttiphong Aroonpheng
What Belongs to Others, dir Grzegorz Debowski
Una Storia, dir Anna Foglietta
La Città dei Vivi, dir Edoardo Gabbriellini
Falling House, dir Mohsen Gharaei
Too Much Sugar, dir Robert Greene
The Difficult Bride, dir Rubaiyat Hossain
La Maison du Vent, dir Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu
I Figli Della Scimmia, dir Tommaso Landucci
A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, dir Jacqueline Lentzou
Oasis, dir Jannis Lenz
Until the Day Ends, dir Jelena Maksimović
La Moula, dir Jérôme Pierrat
Lovers in the Blue Night, dir Anuparna Roy
Un Détour par Diane, dirs Ann Sirot, Raphaël Balboni
The Color of the Sun, dir Xavier Tera

Venice Open – Films on Film
Juso Per Ferie, dir Karen di Porto
Nino – Un Film su Nino, dir Walter Fasano
The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, dir Sophie Fiennes
Joie de Vivre, dir Luca Guadagnino
Twist and Shoot Mister Suzuki, dir Yves Montmayeur
Intermission, dir Yonfan

Venice Open – Non Fiction
Be Brave, dir Francesco Carrozzini
What Loves Builds, dir Russell Crowe
Burgundy, dirs Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw
Musk, dir Alex Gibney
The Road to Jericho, dir Amos Gitai
Citizen Osama, dir Ahmed Hassouna
Union Town, dir Barbara Kopple
Holy Wood Dust, dir Victor Kossakovsky
Letters from the Silenced Country, dir Andrei Kutsila
Biografia de Jorge Luis Borges, dir Mariano Llinás
My Undesirable Friends Part II – Exile, dir Julia Loktev
Boatbilders, dir Luke Lorentzen
Imperium, dir Sergei Loznitsa
Shumei – The Living Legacy of Kabuki, dir Takashi Miike
Queer Edward II, dir Theo Rollason
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, dirs Dylan Southern, Will Lovelace
Dust, dir Tsai Ming-liang
Everest: The Other Side, dirs Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin
From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, dir Wim Wenders

Venice Open – Fiction
Dio Ride, dir Giovanni Veronesi (closing film)
Nessun Dolore, dir Gianni Amelio
Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, dir Lav Diaz
Father Joe, dir Barthélémy Grossman
Scherzetto, dir Mario Martone
Place to Be, dir Kornél Mundruczó
No Paradise if You Are Killed by a Woman, dir Halkawt Mustafa
Arrested Memory, dir Sabu
The Basics of Philosophy, dir Paul Schrader
Un Bon Avocat, dir Tristan Séguéla
Jupiter, dir Alexandre Smia

The editorial unit