Venice Film Festival continues its mission to outshine Cannes. And this year’s offering may very well achieve that aim with a glittering array of features from filmmakers at the zenith of the careers, along with a few new faces.
The 82nd Venice International Film Festival takes off on the August 27 to September 6, 2025, at the Venice Lido in Italy. This prestigious festival is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1932. There was a brief wartime break before it continued to dazzle local audiences and attract visitors from all over. Now it professes to be the catwalk for the Oscars.
Paolo Sorrentino will be there with his festival opener La Grazia carried by the one and only Toni Servillo. The festival will come to a close with Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero based on Isabel Greenberg’s best-seller and starring Richard E Grant and Felicity Jones.
The Jury, presided by Alexander Payne will decide the winner of this year’s Golden Lion award, and Lifetime Achievements will be presented to Werner Herzog and Kim Novak.
Amongst the main competition there are much-anticipated new features from Olivier Assayas with a political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin tracing the rise to power of Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) seen through the eyes of a young Russian filmmaker.
Noah Baumbach has assembled an eclectic and copious cast for Jay Kelly a showbiz-based comedy drama which he directs and co-writes with Emily Mortimer who also stars alongside George Clooney as the eponymous hero.
A House of Dynamite sees a return to centre stage for Kathryn Bigelow with a hard-hitting political drama centred on a White House missile crisis and starring Jason Clarke and Rebecca Ferguson.
Mexican maverick Guillermo del Toro turns his talents to a recreation of Frankenstein played by Jacob Elordi with Oscar Isaac as the famous doctor.
Silent Friend is the latest offering from Hungarian auteuse and Golden Bear winner Ildikó Enyedi . Starring Tony Leung and Lea Seydoux it centres on a storied and lonely old tree standing in a botanical garden.
After her success script-wise with The Brutalist Norwegian filmmaker and actor Mona Fastvold presents The Testament of Ann Lee, co-written by Brady Corbet it follows the real life story of cultish founder leader of the Shaker Movement played by Amanda Seyfried.
Six years after his zombie outing The Dead Don’t Die Jim Jarmusch explores family conflict in Father Mother Sister Brother starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling and Vicky Krieps.
A comedy invasion movie called Bugonia is Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow up to his awkward psychological oddity Poor Things that won the 2023 Golden Lion and went on to bag four Oscars amongst others awards.
Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes shocked audiences with his Oscar-winning Venice title Son of Saul in 2015, and then went on to charm them on the Lido with Sunset (2018) another wartime story set in his native Budapest. His latest Venice hopeful Orphan is set in the aftermath to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and ponders the complexities of parenthood and false memory from the perspective of an orphaned boy.
With L’Etranger François Ozon tackles the famous novel by French literary hero Albert Camus. The black & white drama explores a crime that took place in 1930s Algeria by an apathetic young Frenchman played Benjamin Voisin. Denis Lavant stars in the second of his cameo roles in this summer’s festival circuit (the first is at Locarno).
South Korea’s Park Chan-wook finds an ironic solution for unemployment in his dark comedy Eojjeol Suga Eopda (No Other Choice), based on a book by the late Donald E Westlake the murderous premise suggests; ‘if you can’t beat them, eliminate them’
Documentarian Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Bear in 2016 for his maritime meditation on immigration in Lampedusa Fire at Sea His latest, a black&white visionary documentary, three years in the making, explores everything under the clouds and each random encounter around the Bay of Naples which teems with all sorts of life in the shadow of Vesuvius.
ONES TO LOOK OUT FOR
After the Hunt – a Julia Roberts’ starring drama from Luca Guadagnino
The Hand of Dante – Julian Schnabel New York set story about the discovery of a manuscript purportedly written by the great Italian poet
The Last Viking – Anders Thomas Jensen casts Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as bankrollers in a comedy caper
Dean Man’s Wire – Al Pacino stars in this crime drama from Gus Van Sant
Marc by Sofia – a documentary on Marc Jacobs by Sofia Coppola
Ghost Elephants – Werner Herzog follows a tiny herd of elephant in Angola
Nuestra Terra – Lucrecia Martel‘s doc longtime in the making documentary about an indigenous tribe in Argentina headed by Javier Chocobar.
Kim Novak’s Vertigo – Alexandre Philippe‘s doc about Novak with a focus on Vertigo
Cover-Up – Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
Broken English Jane Pollard, Iain Forsyth look at the life of Marianne Faithfull
Director’s Diary – a five-hour exploration from the Golden Lion winning Russian director Alexander Sokurov
Hui Jia (Back Home) Stray Dogs director Tsai Ming-liang is one of the leading figures in New Cinema in Taiwan. The winner of many international awards, he was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice in 1994 for Vive L’Amour. This Year hé presents his latest, a documentary
VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2025 | 27 August – 7 September