Venice Film Festival 2026: The 10 Most Interesting Films of the Festival
Film & TV21 September 2026
AuthorPavel Tolmachev
PhotosImage: Andrejs Strokins
Over 80 films premiered at Venice 2026. Here are the 10 most interesting ones you need to know about, from the Golden Lion winner to Robert Pattinson's latest.
T
he 83rd Venice Film Festival, one of the most important annual events in the global world of cinema, has officially wrapped. With over 80 new films presented in the official selection this year (not including short films), it is quite easy to get lost in the sheer abundance of cinematic material.
But do not worry, we’ve got you covered. Here are the ten most interesting, artistically ingenious, and thought-provoking films from the Venice Film Festival 2026 that definitely deserve your attention.
1. Woman Unknown (Dir. May el-Toukhy)
The winner of this year’s Golden Lion, the Danish psychological thriller Woman Unknown tells the story of Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a nanny in postwar Copenhagen whose wedding is put at risk by a grave secret: she had a relationship with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation, which, in the eyes of victory-celebrating Danish society, is tantamount to treason. El-Toukhy uses the historically accurate setting of a brutal witch hunt against (exclusively female) “collaborationists” like Marie to pose a challenging question: how far can the desire for complete justice and universal punishment go? And if it can go quite far, should it?
2. Dau (Dir. Ilya Khrzhanovsky)
Dau is the culmination of a truly megalomaniacal project that Khrzhanovsky started roughly 20 years ago. A highly experimental film with a loosely written script, it focuses on the life of real-life physicist Lev Landau, who took part in the development of the Soviet atomic bomb—a Soviet Oppenheimer, if you will. For all its unquestionable cultural and cinematic value, Dau is most importantly a timely reminder that true happiness is impossible without individual freedom, and that the lack of it can corrupt even the most outstanding talents.
3. Possible Love (Dir. Lee Chang-dong)
Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years is about two South Korean families from completely opposite social backgrounds who are brought together by a chance meeting at a funeral. It is easy to see a number of similarities with Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 hit Parasite, which largely dealt with the same theme of social inequality. But if the latter refrained from coming to definitive conclusions, showing the good and bad traits of both social groups, Lee’s latest oeuvre is less ambiguous: for him, the real parasites are the hypocritical elites, whose care for the struggles of more disadvantaged classes is merely superficial and decorative.
4. Wild Horse Nine (Dir. Martin McDonagh)
Chile, 1973. Shortly before Pinochet’s military coup, two CIA agents travel from Santiago to the remote Easter Island. There, Chris (John Malkovich), a veteran intelligence officer suffering from terminal cancer, starts to ponder his life and work. A dark comedy full of bloodshed and gun-wielding action, Wild Horse Nine explores the timeless themes of guilt and shame, while also taking a critical look at American foreign policy, which is no less aggressive and intrusive today than it was in the ‘70s.
5. Ink (Dir. Danny Boyle)
The prolific English director is back with a film about The Sun newspaper, tracing its creation in 1964 to its subsequent transformation at the hands of the infamous media mogul Rupert Murdoch. But of course, when talking about the past, Boyle really means the present. Do people really want to know the facts and an accurate account of events, or does the general public simply want to be entertained? Is there any value left in modern journalism? Ink attempts to answer all of these pressing questions.
6. Imperium (Dir. Sergei Loznitsa)
The USSR ceased to exist more than 30 years ago but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the whole world that its imperialistic legacy still lives on. In his new documentary, the renowned Ukrainian director attempts to comprehend the everyday world of this gone empire and capture its essence with the help of amateur footage shot in the early 1970s by an Italian TV crew. Creating a vivid mosaic of different places and traditions, of street markets, parades, and folk celebrations, Loznitsa is not wrong in assuming that by understanding the past we can better understand the present - and perhaps even predict the future.
Primetime (Dir. Lance Oppenheim)
Oppenheim’s eerie feature debut is based on the real story of a scandalous American reality show To Catch a Predator in which the production team lured out real child sex abusers and handed them over to the police. Robert Pattison plays the show’s ambitious host Chris Hansen - the architect behind its astounding rise to nationwide popularity. Just like Ink, Primetime ponders the morality of mass media. Where is the line between provocative but socially valuable stories and irresponsible, harmful sensationalism?
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile (Dir. Julia Loktev)
The friends referred to in the title are independent Russian journalists who had to leave their country just days after the outbreak of the full-scale war. The geographical area of their exile is pretty much the entire world, from East to West, from North to South. A sequel to her 2024 documentary Last Air in Moscow, Loktev’s new work is essentially an Odyssean story—a heartbreaking tale of people cut off from their native land and forced to roam the world with a faint hope of someday finding a way back home.
9. Bucking Fastard (Dir. Werner Herzog)
Two peculiar Irish sisters who speak and move simultaneously (portrayed by actual siblings Kate and Rooney Mara) fall in love with the same man, played by the ever-charismatic Orlando Bloom. After getting rejected, they embark on a journey to find the land of true love, which they believe is hidden somewhere in a mountain range. This surrealistic tale is quite characteristic of the cult German director’s style; Herzog has been fascinated by such weird and yet partially true stories for most of his long career.
10. The Spiral (Dir. Paolo Strippoli)
It would be strange not to include an Italian film in an overview of one of the biggest cultural events Italy can offer. In Strippoli’s fourth feature film, following a horrible party incident, a highly prosperous family from southern Italy is visited by the Stranger—a mysterious woman exquisitely portrayed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Anne (Jasmine Trinca), mother of two, decides to make a Faustian deal with the unexpected visitor. But, like all such deals, it comes with a very unpleasant catch.
