Venice Film Festival 2026 Movie Reviews Compilation

The 2026 Venice Film Festival got underway on Wednesday, September 2, with Oscar-winning English director Danny Boyle’s Ink — starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy — kicking off an 83rd edition that includes films starring the likes of Robert Pattinson, Penelope Cruz & Javier Bardem, Jack Huston & Sofia Boutella, Dakota Johnson, John Malkovich & Sam Rockwell, Alicia Vikander & Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte and Kate & Rooney Mara in their first movie together.

Along with Ink, this year’s competition lineup includes such buzzy titles seeking awards-season glory as Florian Zeller’s Bunker, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, Casey Affleck’s Company and Warner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard.

Studio titles largely are absent this year, but the overall lineup also includes new films by Luca Guadagnino, Paul Schrader and Wim Wenders along with Laura Poitras’ short about ICE protests in Minnesota, and Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s doc on the comeback of rock band Oasis.

Check out Deadline’s reviews out of Venice, and keep checking back as we add more. Click on each headline to read our full review.

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Paul Schrader
Cast: Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Daniel Zovalto, Bill Pullman, Dana Delany, Shiloh Fernandez, Karl Glusman, Elizabeth Petruso, Santiago Cabrera, Trevor Dolden, Richard Gere
Deadline’s takeaway: With this introspective character study, Schrader continues to making the kind of grownup films we rarely get to see anymore, outside of Europe at least. He never presents easy answers in his movies — same with this deep dive into the philosophy of life and the key question we can ask of many Schrader characters, “Can we change?” — PH

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Werner Herzog
Cast: Kate Mara, Rooney Mara, Orlando Bloom, Domhnall Gleeson
Deadline’s takeaway: Although it appears to start with a tone of gentle mockery, there’s something quite sweet and generous at work beneath the stylized strangeness of the tale of two sisters played by Rooney and Kate Mara, a tone that Werner Herzog has never really struck before in his fiction work, with the possible exception of 2019’s Family Romance LLC. — DW

Section: Venice Open – Out Of Competition
Director: Barthélémy Grossmann
Cast: Kiefer Sutherland, Ever Anderson, Al Pacino, Michael Rispoli
Deadline’s takeaway: Amazingly, Al Pacino is about the only thing that isn’t over the top here, generously giving center stage to Kiefer Sutherland in a role that’s fun, unbelievable — and sometimes unbelievably funny. Is it any good? Who knows. It’s certainly the most balls-out, no-f*cks-given rock ’n’ roll phenomenon to hit the Lido this year — DW

Section: Orizzonti
Director: Alina Marazzi
Cast: Emilia Schüle, Aaron Altaras, Luna Wedler, Lucas Englander, Thomas Schubert, Sebastian Schneider, Idan Weiss, Lia von Blarer, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Jeremy Mockridge, Joel Basman
Deadline’s takeaway: The jazzed-up, unconventional biopic of the late photojournalist Gerda Taro asks questions about the the fine line between bravery and ego in the process of bringing back dispatches from the front line, but its structure over-complicates a simple yet quite profound meditation on an artist’s identity and legacy. — DW

Section: Competition
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce, Claire Foy, Jonathan Hyde, Lucy Russell, Abigail Amin, Bertie Carvel, Brian Gleeson, Christopher Fulford, Patrick Kennedy, Blake Harrison, Georgie Henley
Deadline’s takeaway: Danny Boyle with his whip-smart, in-your-face stye is the perfect filmmaker to bring this world set in 1969 London to life as the brash if trash visionary Rupert Murdoch and his hand-picked editor-in-chief launch what would become a new era of tabloid journalism, changing the media world for better or worse in the process. Here all the cylinders are firing, and it is thrilling stuff indeed. — PH

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Alex Gibney
Deadline’s takeaway: The documentary, which might be Alex Gibney’s most important, depicts the world’s richest man as petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel and detached from humans at a personal level while purporting to want to save humanity by colonizing Mars. In other words, it gives Elon the takedown he richly deserves. — MC

Section: Venice Open – Out of Competition
Directors: Dylan Southern, Will Lovelace
With: Liam Gallagher, Noah Gallagher
Deadline’s takeaway: The great mystery about why Noel and Liam Gallagher put aside their differences for a heavily promoted multimillion-dollar world stadium tour is never really addressed in this more-than-feature-length documentary. Instead, the directors look at what came out of it for the estranged brothers, offering an insider’s view one of the most crazily oversubscribed reunion tours of all time. — DW

Section: Competition
Director: Lee Chang-dong
Cast: Jeon Do-Yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung, Cho Yeo-Jeung
Deadline’s takeaway: As you might expect from this master filmmaker, the story takes time to develop, and at nearly three hours it takes a little too long here. But the cast of top South Korean actors here is well chosen, and they deliver Lee Chang-dong’s vision on the screen in this handsomely filmed and pertinent film. — PH

Section: Competition
Director: Lance Oppenheim
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Anna Faris
Deadline’s takeaway: Primetime is a film about the way populism fuels moral decadence — but in such a subtle way that its proponents don’t realize it. They usually do, however, when what goes around comes around, which is very much the moral of the story here. Delivering a performance described as a mixture of Jerry Maguire and Count Dracula, Robert Pattinson may finally be entering the Christian Bale period of his career. — DW

Section: Competition
Director: Paolo Strippoli
Cast: Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
Deadline’s takeaway: Does Paolo Strippoli’s unashamedly commercial horror-thriller reinvent the wheel? No, it doesn’t. But instead of lecturing us about the parlous state of the world today, he is happy to give us a grand guignol morality play that tells us not so much that we’re doomed but reminds us that it’s the things that we might yet do that may throw our lives off-track. — DW

Section: Competition
Director: Martin McDonagh
Cast: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Mariana di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Deadline’s takeaway: John Malkovich gives a career performance in a perfect if unexpected casting. This so-called “buddy movie” of a wildly different stripe easily is one of the year’s best films, and in its own peculiar way the most spiritual. Martin McDonagh now is 5-for-5 as a writer-director. — PH