The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs Sept. 2-12, 2026. Traditionally, Venice marks the beginning of the end-of-year awards push for film, with recent Oscar darlings Bugonia and Frankenstein coming off the Lido last year.
It's always a star-studded affair. This year has already seen Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr. arriving by water taxi with Wicked lead Jonathan Bailey for Armani, and Sinners villain Jack O'Connell turning heads in a scarf and coat on the red carpet.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is jury president. George Clooney received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Studio titles are largely absent, continuing the Cannes 2026 trend and setting up an unusually auteur-heavy line-up.
Here are five movies we're excited about this year.
Ink
The aforementioned O'Connell stars in Ink, a biopic directed by Danny Boyle that opened the festival. James Graham adapted Ink from his own Olivier- and Tony-nominated play. It stars Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch, O'Connell as Sun editor Larry Lamb, and Claire Foy as Jules Davies. The film dramatizes Murdoch's 1969 acquisition of the failing tabloid and his partnership with Lamb to eventually build a media empire. This is Boyle's first time at Venice, and it's reported he got a four-minute standing ovation at the premiere.
There are challenges to writing stories based on real people, such as the fact that those people might have an opinion about the work. Graham spoke to Murdoch after a staging of the play at one point.
"I remember he was very good at sort of not really giving anything away," Graham said (via Variety). He recalled Murdoch enjoying a sequence about the printing press and "the dirt and the steam and the filth that used to go into making a paper on a daily basis."
Company
This is Casey Affleck's third feature as director, and his first since 2019's Light of My Life. Company was co-written with novelist Ron Hansen (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).
The film is a complex triptych with nesting storylines. A 1975 framing story follows a mysterious woman named Evelyn as she crashes a holiday gathering. She tells a story set in 1953 Colorado (Nick Nolte plays Tom, a hermit who saves a stranded actress). The actress then tells a story in which a 1903 farming couple takes in a young drifter during a wave of frontier murders. The 1903 story is apparently the focus.
Ben Mendelsohn, Scoot McNairy, Emily Alyn Lind, and Caylee Cowan fill out the cast, and Affleck cast his son Atticus in a lead role in the 1903 tale.
"Atticus was never going to be in the movie, but I couldn't find anybody that felt right to me, and our dates kept changing," Affleck told The Hollywood Reporter. "He didn't want to miss any school, and I didn't want him to miss school, but now it was his one week of spring break that we were going to shoot, and he said, 'Listen, if you want me to come do it, I'll do it.' I said, 'Thank God.'"
It's an ambitious story structure we're eager to see pulled off.
Bucking Fastard
Werner Herzog and the Mara sisters? What more could you ask for?
This is Herzog's first narrative feature since 2019, based on the true story of British identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, who became infamous in 1980s Britain for dressing alike, speaking in unison, and harassing a local truck driver.
Rooney and Kate Mara play the twins (renamed Jean and Joan Holbrooke in the film). Domhnall Gleeson plays a government-appointed social worker. Orlando Bloom plays their former lover.
Bucking Fastard is written and directed by Herzog, and he's been trying to make it for years. It's another case of a real-life story inspiring drama, and Herzog chose to approach them through secondary sources, per IndieWire.
"We cannot see the world as Jean and Joan Holbrooke see it, but we do see how the world reacts to them—through the courts and the press, through those that want to help and those who want to use them, through the eyes of beasts both tame and wild, and even through their own echoes in the core of the earth."
Wild Horse Nine
You've probably already seen the trailers for Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, which is his first film since The Banshees of Inisherin. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA agents Chris and Lee on a mission to Easter Island, with Steve Buscemi as their bureau chief, MJ.
This is also the third McDonagh/Rockwell collaboration (after Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards). It's clear they like to collaborate, but the bond is deep enough that McDonagh wrote the part for the actor.
One major challenge of the film was getting the central relationship right.
"They almost needed to be like an old married couple," McDonagh told Entertainment Weekly. "They've been in a partnership in the CIA together for years and years, so you need to feel that implicitly. And you also need to feel the love between the two characters."
Learn more about developing characters and relationships.
Primetime
You've almost certainly heard about this one, too. Robert Pattinson's turn as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen has all the A24 acolytes buzzing, and it's one of the most anticipated movies at Venice. The film is based on Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die," and is directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut.
We're seeing a trend in these real-life stories about media figures. But this one perhaps has not been so readily embraced by its subject. It's been reported that Hansen visited the production offices to see the film, but after being asked to sign an NDA, he left without viewing his screener.
"I get a call today saying, 'Well, you know, everybody's concerned. They want you to be happy with the film,'" Hansen told Fox News' Jesse Watters in August (via The Wrap). "Well, then why didn't you tell me about it when you started shooting the film?"
Bucking Fastard changed some characters' names, while Ink got an implicit blessing. Here, the film doesn't purport to be a biopic; instead, it's "inspired by true events," which is one way to present your take on a fictionalized event.
What films are you most excited about coming out of Venice?