is the season for film-watching. The major fall film festivals are on their way—Venice, Telluride, Toronto, and New York, in that order—with each serving as a precursor to awards season as films large and small jockey for position and early buzz that (if they’re lucky) they’ll ride all the way to the Oscars in March. The 83rd Venice International Film Festival, complete with its gondolas and Golden Lions, kicks things off on Wednesday, September 2, with an opening night ceremony honoring George Clooney with a lifetime achievement award, followed by the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s Ink.
Italian film critic Alberto Barbera has served as chief of the Venice Film Festival 19 times over the span of almost three decades. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Barbera highlights the impact a positive reception at a film festival can have on a smaller movie. Last year the standing ovation for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab went on for 22 minutes, only cut short because the next film was scheduled to start; otherwise, Barbera says, “it would have simply gone on and on.” The film went on to get nominated for best international film at the Oscars earlier this year. “[The standing ovation], of course, was the spark that ignited all the media interest and interest among everyone who hadn’t seen the film,” Barbera says. “As soon as people left the theater, the whole world knew there had been an incredible and unprecedented reaction.”
Much has been made about the dearth of Hollywood studio films on the film festival circuit this year. The 79th Cannes Film Festival, which occurred in May, was notably more muted than in years past, with Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, taking home the Palme d’Or. However, the lack of titles made room for unexpected films, like Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid and Los Javis’s La Bola Negra, to soak up all the buzz, turning them from art house films into serious awards contenders overnight. When the Venice Film Festival released its lineup in late July, the conversation was quite familiar: Where were all the major Hollywood movies?
For his part, Barbera is aware of the criticism and “rejects [it] outright,” instead blaming Hollywood for not showing up. “If they aren’t there, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Barbera says. “The studios are producing fewer and fewer films, which are getting more and more expensive, and that obviously increases the risk. The result is that their debt increases, and they have to merge with one another because they can’t keep going.” As a result, Barbera believes there’s a “serious identity crisis” in the American film industry: “An entire world has disappeared, literally vanished.”
But the lack of studio films doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of buzzy titles at play at Venice this year. The most highly anticipated of those is A24’s Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as none other than Chris Hansen, the host of the infamous early-aughts series To Catch a Predator. Based on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” and directed by Lance Oppenheim, Primetime follows production on a particularly fraught episode of the controversial series about ensnaring potential predators on national television. The film, which premieres in competition at Venice on September 5, also stars Emmy winner Merritt Wever, Superman’s Skyler Gisondo, and musician Phoebe Bridgers in her acting debut. But all eyes are on Pattinson, fresh off critically acclaimed turns in The Drama and The Odyssey. Let’s just say the awards buzz is palpable.
Ahead of its Venice bow, Primetime has been making news. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Hansen has bought ad spots before every upcoming showing of Primetime, using them to plug his new streaming network, TruBlu, which is dedicated to the same predator-exposing content that made him a household name some two decades ago. On Jesse Watters’s Fox News program, Hansen said that while he was invited to a private screening of Primetime, he declined the opportunity because he would have had to sign an agreement preventing him from taking legal action against A24. (A source close to the studio told Variety that Hansen was asked to sign an NDA that’s standard for preview audiences seeing unreleased films.) He’ll have a chance to see Primetime when it premieres nationwide on September 25.
Then there’s Bucking Fastard, starring real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara and written and directed by Werner Herzog. Despite the fact that Kate is two years older than Rooney, the sisters play twins Jean and Joan Holbrooke, who live on the fringes of society and decide to dig a tunnel through a mountain range “in search of an imaginary land, the Orkneys—where true love is possible.” The film also stars Orlando Bloom as the twins’ ex-lover, Gareth Mulroney, and Domhnall Gleeson as Timothy, a social worker who attempts to help the twins adjust to modern life after a brush with infamy. Bucking Fastard, which premieres in competition at Venice on September 3, marks the Mara sisters’ first appearance in a film together.
There’s also the opening night film, Ink. Directed by Slumdog Millionaire’s Danny Boyle and adapted from James Graham’s stage play of the same name, Ink stars Guy Pearce, an Oscar nominee for The Brutalist, as a young Rupert Murdoch building his media empire. When he acquires The Sun and hires editor Larry Lamb, played by Sinners star Jack O’Connell, the pair wind up creating a newspaper that will upend British print journalism. “I really do believe that that meeting between them had more of an impact on our world than the men landing on the moon,” Boyle exclusively told Vanity Fair.
Oscar-winning actor Casey Affleck also makes an appearance with his latest directorial effort, the gothic drama Company, premiering in competition on September 8 and starring his actual partner, Caylee Cowan. The film centers on Evelyn, a mysterious woman who turns up at a holiday party uninvited. Speaking of real-life couples, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem star opposite each other as husband and wife in Bunker, which premieres on September 8. Directed by The Father’s Florian Zeller, Bunker finds Bardem playing an architect tasked with building an underground bunker for an eccentric billionaire, a job that impacts his marriage.
On the documentary front, there’s already a lot of chatter about Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour Elon Musk documentary, appropriately titled Musk, which will premiere at the festival on September 8. Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, a documentary featuring rare behind-the-scenes footage of hit rock band Oasis and the often feuding brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, premieres on September 5. There’s also the last-minute addition of NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the Oscar-winning filmmakers behind No Other Land. Shot in Tel Aviv at night, the documentary promises to explore the systems behind Israel’s bombing of Gaza, resulting in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. NAZA premieres in competition on September 10.
Plenty of other interesting things are happening outside of competition at Venice as well. Fifty years after Taxi Driver, the seminal movie he penned, Paul Schrader is back with The Basics of Philosophy, a drama about a repressed philosophy professor, which premieres out of competition on September 4. Saoirse Ronan makes her directorial debut with a short film, Paper Plane, which she also wrote herself. And Maggie Gyllenhaal is pulling double duty, serving as president of the festival’s main international jury and also premiering her own short film, Flesh Impact, dedicated to Marilyn Monroe and starring Ellen Burstyn, who’s receiving a lifetime achievement award at the festival.
There’s only one solo female director in the main competition this year at Venice: Danish Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy, whose Woman Unknown premieres on September 6. Barbera says that’s not for a lack of trying. “The absence of films by women in the main competition—you can imagine how hard we searched for films directed by women to include,” he says. “Unfortunately, there just weren’t any.” He has a theory as to why this was the case. “The percentage of films directed by women has dropped this year. Last year it reached over 30%; this year we’re at 24%,” he says. “But I’ve never heard anyone complain during the year that there were too few films produced and directed by women. It’s when festival season rolls around that suddenly this problem is discovered. And then the festival is accused of not having invited films directed by women.”
It’s been almost six years since a film that premiered at a fall film festival took home best picture, with the last movie to do so being Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which premiered at Venice and won the Golden Lion in 2020. But despite the recent drought, Venice still remains a testing ground for awards season as the first official stop on the fall film festival circuit. I’ll be on the ground at Venice, covering the scene at the film festival for Vanity Fair. Check out our live blog to see whether any of the highly anticipated or unexpected titles have what it takes to win the coveted Golden Lion and, perhaps, go all the way.