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Written by David O’Mahony, Head of IFI Cinema Programming
The Venice Film Festival marks the unofficial start of awards season, which stretches all the way to the Academy Awards ceremony on March 15th, 2026; its late summer position overlaps with Toronto and Telluride film festivals, and between them we can expect to be introduced to the films that will be at the forefront of the conversation. Of course, we cannot overlook the primacy of Cannes in the international film festival hierarchy where last year Anora reigned supreme, ultimately adding a haul of five Oscars, including Best Film and Best Director for Sean Baker, to its Palme d’Or win. The major breakthroughs at Venice last year were The Brutalist and I’m Still Here, and at time of writing, they are among IFI’s top performing films of 2025.
This year’s Venice Film Festival arrived freighted with several major films dated for imminent release – look out for The Smashing Machine and Bugonia in IFI’s October programme – while others enticed by virtue of their pedigree: the line-up includes new films from Jim Jarmusch, Mark Jenkin, Olivier Assayas, Sofia Coppola, to name but a few. As ever, it is the potential surprises that elicit the greatest anticipation, the sense of discovery validating the process of wading through the packed schedule.
After last year’s unseasonable heat, the festival opened to a backdrop of persistent thunderstorms, with torrential downpours that made for a few soggy viewing experiences.
Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Lido with Bugonia having won the Golden Lion with Poor Things in 2023; the new film sees Jesse Plemons kidnap Big Pharma CEO Emma Stone, believing she is an alien conducting clandestine experiments on unsuspecting humans. Lanthimos’s remake of the 2003 Korean film, Save the Green Planet, is an uproarious satire of conspiracy theories and fake news.
Three Netflix films vied for attention in the main competition: Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro), Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach), and A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow). Cannes famously forbids the streamer’s participation on account of that festival’s strict adherence to France’s theatrical release window (the period a film is shown exclusively in cinemas before appearing on other formats, such as physical media and streaming), whereas Venice and Toronto are more flexible on this front. Bigelow’s nerve-shredding and all-too-plausible nuclear attack thriller was the clear standout from that troika.
In a neat (and surely not accidental) mirroring of last year’s sensational 70mm screening of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold – Corbet’s romantic and business partner, proved to be a mid-festival highlight. The quasi-musical film, a speculative, highly cinematic, and defiantly idiosyncratic retelling of the life of the titular Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), charismatic leader of the Shakers (a celibate Christian sect founded in England in 1747), was shot on film and demands to be seen on that format; here’s hoping a brave distributor takes it on.
Speaking of mirroring, I saw two films with Al Pacino (Gus Van Sant’s grimy 70s set kidnapping drama Dead Man’s Wire, and Julian Schnabel’s gonzo In the Hand of Dante), two with Oscar Isaac (Dante again, and Guillermo del Toro’s extravagant Frankenstein), and two with George McKay (Rose of Nevada, the latest enigma from Mark Jenkin, and experimental Marianne Faithfull doc, Broken English).
Elsewhere, Jim Jarmusch was at his charming best with Father Mother Sister Brother, which is partly set in Dublin (look out for Cate Blanchett’s car breaking down in Stonybatter), a delightfully droll triptych of thematically linked stories concerning the relationships between adult children, their distant or deceased parents, and each other.
Other highlights in competition include The Stranger, François Ozon’s stark adaptation of Camus’s enduring novella; The Wizard of the Kremlin, a portrait of Vladimir Putin’s (a convincing Jude Law) adviser in chief, and Silent Friend, a surprising standout that explores the influence of a majestic gingko tree on three characters across multiple timelines.
Late in the festival, The Voice of Hind Rajab received a rapturous response at the Sala Grande, with producer Joaquin Phoenix present in the audience. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s wrenching and distressing film is a dramatisation of the real life emergency call from Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. Told from the perspective of the Palestine Red Crescent volunteers who took her call, the docudrama incorporates the actual recordings of Hind’s voice, adding a chilling note of raw authenticity to an already urgent film.
As the festival wound down it became clear that it was not going to be a vintage year, but a very respectable one, with several standout films that will hopefully show at IFI in the coming months.
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BLUE MOON 13.40, 18.40
BUGONIA 20.45 (35mm)
DIE MY LOVE 16.10
NUREMBERG 13.10
PALESTINE 36 20.50
PILLION 16.00 (OC), 20.30
THE DOORS: WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE
THE MASTERMIND 15.50
The IFI is supported by The Arts Council
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