The Venice Film Festival's main competition narrows the year down to a shortlist that rarely exceeds 21 films, all world premieres, all in the running for the Golden Lion, all screened before a jury tasked with picking a single winner. It is the most closely watched section of the festival, the one that tends to produce the films people are talking about come awards season.
This year's 83rd edition runs September 2 to 12, with Maggie Gyllenhaal, fresh off directing Jessie Buckley in The Bride, presiding over the jury. Ellen Burstyn, who is still working with directors half a century her junior, receives a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement alongside George Clooney.
This year's 21-film lineup is a wide spread: a Herzog film with two Maras sharing the screen for the first time, a Robert Pattinson vehicle that turns a piece of television history into something close to horror, and a late Bernardo Bertolucci screenplay finally making it to screen. We went through the competition list and picked out the 9 films we are most excited to watch. Here is the list for you:
Kore-eda, a Venice regular and the director behind Shoplifters, adapts Tatsuki Fujimoto's beloved manga about two teenage girls, Fujino and Kyomoto, whose shared devotion to drawing carries them through thirteen years of friendship and ambition. The manga's 2024 animated version was a substantial hit in Japan, and Kore-eda's live-action take promises the same attentiveness to small, unglamorous detail that has defined his work for decades.
Robert Pattinson produces and stars in this feature debut from documentarian Lance Oppenheim, whose prior work, including Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, has built a career out of finding the strange poetry in American subcultures. Here he turns to television journalist Chris Hansen and the reality-show format that turned sting operations into primetime entertainment, a sharp premise about a media phenomenon built on public shame.
McDonagh reunites with Sam Rockwell, the actor he steered to an Oscar in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for a film that sounds as strange as it should: two CIA operatives are exiled to Easter Island on the eve of Chile's 1973 coup, where a bond with a pair of rebellious students threatens to unravel everything. John Malkovich, Tom Waits and Parker Posey fill out a cast built for McDonagh's trademark mix of menace and dark comedy.
Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli play Leo and Anne, two people who keep drifting apart and finding their way back to each other across time. The film is the final project written by Bernardo Bertolucci, completed alongside Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, with Pallaoro, whose Monica also competed at Venice, shaping it through his restrained, intimate style. Susan Sarandon co-stars, and the score comes from Clément Ducol, the composer behind Emilia Pérez.
Strippoli follows up his acclaimed The Valley of the Smiles with a family saga steeped in dread. Jasmine Trinca plays a mother in the psychological thriller who shows up unannounced at her daughter's home to confess a secret pact made years earlier with a mysterious figure played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Adriano Giannini rounds out the main cast in a film the director has described as blending the inherited weight of Buddenbrooks with the moral reckoning of Faust.
The only woman-directed film in this year's competition, a fact that has drawn scrutiny given how sharply the number has dropped from previous editions. El-Toukhy, the Danish-Egyptian director behind the acclaimed Queen of Hearts, returns to the Lido with her interest in moral complicity and desire intact. Details on the plot are being closely guarded, but her track record for unflinching, psychologically knotty character studies makes this one of the more quietly anticipated entries in the lineup.
Lee Chang-dong has not competed at Venice since 2002, when Oasis won him the Silver Lion for Best Director, making a new film after this gap an event in itself. This Netflix-backed melodrama reunites him with a formidable cast: Parasite's Cho Yeo-jeong alongside Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu and Zo In-sung. Lee has spent his career examining love and longing under the weight of Korean social conservatism, and at 164 minutes, this one is built for the kind of slow emotional accumulation he does better than almost anyone working today.
Boyle opens the festival with the story of how Rupert Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce, took over a struggling British tabloid in the late 1960s and, with editor Larry Lamb (Jack O'Connell) at the helm, rebuilt it into the country's biggest seller. Adapted from James Graham's stage play of the same name, the film traces the newsroom tension behind the birth of modern tabloid sensationalism. Claire Foy rounds out the cast as Jules Davies, Lamb's wife.
Asgari's sixth feature and his first in Venice's main competition follows a doctor in contemporary Iran who loses faith in the future after his medical practice is shut down and he is arrested. Determined to end his life, he spends what he believes will be his final day visiting his mother and siblings to prepare them for his departure, only for the day to slowly unsettle his resolve. Asgari has described the film as being about the invisible bonds that make life worth holding onto rather than a film about grief.