Ten Films to See at This Year’s Venice Film Festival

New films from Martin McDonagh and Werner Herzog are among the big draws at the 2026 Biennale, already in the news for its male-heavy lineup of directors

In Venice, the 83rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival opens next week, with newcomers and established stars descending on the Lido for the ten-day event. Scandals have already started, as just one film by a woman director was announced among the 20 films in competition – aptly called Woman Unknown (by May el-Toukhy). The controversy only slightly abated when Naza by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor was announced as a late addition to the lineup last week. Along with other high-profile titles, such as the latest from A24 starring Robert Pattinson, Primetime, other corners promise gems, including the unveiling of Avec Kim, a new Miu Miu Women’s Tales short directed by Claire Denis in collaboration with Kim Gordon, and classic restorations from John Cassavetes and Luis Buñuel.

Bucking Fastard [Head image]

In Werner Herzog’s latest embrace of ambitious nonconformists, sisters Rooney and Kate Mara play Joan and Jean Holbrooke, siblings and mirror-images of one another who dress alike and dream in unison. Their symmetry extends to longing for the same man (Orlando Bloom) with an obsessiveness that leads to their court trial, conducted side by side amid a media frenzy, and sparks their radical plan to achieve true love. The title stems from a synchronised slip made by twins Greta and Freda Chaplin in a real-life 1980s case in Britain.

Bunker

On the heels of her sharp performance as a sexologist in Olivia Wilde’s edgy hit black comedy The Invite, Penélope Cruz stars in another film about a long-term relationship on the brink, this time alongside real-life husband Javier Bardem. Florian Zeller’s thriller Bunker is set to be a more sinister affair that speaks to our existential fears of ecological threat and a technofeudalist overclass, as an architect takes on an ethically questionable project building a billionaire’s survival bunker, sparking problems with his wife of 17 years.

Life of Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine writer Borges is legendary for his ingenious philosophical fables about libraries, maps and labyrinths, conjured from impossible paradoxes and infinities. His fellow countryman Mariano Llinás, who made the mysterious 14-hour amorphous bloom of tales about storytelling La Flor, explores the life and the work of the literary icon in the only way suitable: through a sprawling and irreverent, circuitous film that rummages around for the key to the biography in objects and archives around the world, from Texas to New York, Geneva and Reykjavik.

My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile

When filmmaker Julia Loktev travelled to Moscow five years ago to shoot a documentary about independent journalists facing repressive laws, she couldn’t anticipate that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was about to begin, and all of the subjects of My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air In Moscow (2024) would flee into exile. The highly anticipated, epic-length sequel picks up where the first left off, as women from the shuttered channel TV Rain land in whichever cities they could at sudden notice. Scattered across the globe, they try to broadcast the truth from outside and make sense of how they lost the country.

Naza

“Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” is how co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor describe Naza, a documentary executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Abraham and Szor, along with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, comprised the cooperative Palestinian-Israeli activist collective behind 2024’s Oscar-winning No Other Land, which charted the displacement of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and became a flashpoint for political tensions in Germany after its Berlinale award.

Possible Love

It’s been eight years since Burning, Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s acclaimed slow-burn thriller of class rivalry, triangulated love and pyromania. Anticipation is high for Possible Love, billed as a drama of the complex entanglements and hidden desires that arise when the paths of two married couples intersect after a funeral. Parasite actress Cho Yeo-jeong plays Ye-ji, who is making a documentary about job losses. When Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), whose spouse has been laid off, agrees to participate in the project, she finds herself attracted to Ye-Ji’s husband and marital cracks ensue.

Ink

In a UK tabloid landscape notorious for ruthless, sensationalist reporting, no paper is more controversial for its populist rabble-rousing and salacious celebrity coverage than The Sun. British director Danny Boyle’s Ink, adapted for the screen by James Graham from his own play, opens the festival. Set in 1969, the year Rupert Murdoch launched the paper, the film follows the media mogul (Guy Pearce) and his team – including Jack O’Connell and Claire Foy – as they abandon any semblance of a moral compass in pursuit of higher circulation.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

A mysterious, surrealist 1970 gem of the Czechoslovak new wave, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders by Jaromil Jireš is among the restorations in this year’s Venice Classics section. Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová), who is just entering her teenage years, has her earrings stolen in her sleep and contends with priests, vampires and masked figures in a disquieting dreamscape. The film is based on a 1935 novel by Prague avant-gardist Vítězslav Nezval, with the “queen of Czech film design” Ester Krumbachová on board to write and craft its sumptuous gothic vision.

Union Town

Barbara Kopple’s raw and stirring 1976 documentary from the frontlines of an Appalachian miners’ strike in Harlan County, USA is widely regarded as one of the great films about American labour. With Union Town she turns to a key battleground for employment rights in our new era of online shopping, capturing portraits of the delivery workers who, in any weather, transport 2.4 million packages and 300,000 meals every day in New York City, and their fight for better pay and conditions from the likes of UPS, Amazon and food apps DoorDash and Grubhub.

Wild Horse Nine

Easter Island is the setting for Martin McDonagh’s latest black comedy about an off-kilter pairing, Wild Horse Nine. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play eccentric CIA agents sent by their handler (Steve Buscemi) to the tropics to intervene in global events just before the 1973 Chilean military coup. There, amid the ancient stone statues, they are thrown off course by two rebellious students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), as they wrestle with dark pasts, conspiracies and shifting loyalties. Tom Waits and Parker Posey round out the star cast.

Venice Film Festival runs 2-12 September.