Venice Festival Opens Bold Lineup

Venice launches the fall awards race with premieres from Lanthimos, Baumbach, del Toro and other major talents.

Venice Festival Opens With Bold Lineup Set to Shape Awards Season

The 82nd Venice Film Festival has started with a slate of world premieres led by Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt and Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine. The lineup also spotlights work from Mona Fastvold, Kathryn Bigelow, Paolo Sorrentino, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, Gus Van Sant, Lucrezia Martel, László Nemes and Kaouther Ben Hania, among others. The festival jury is led by Alexander Payne, signaling a mainstream-leaning tone. Venice serves as the opening act of the awards season, with distributors plotting campaigns ahead of Telluride, Toronto and New York.

Preview coverage from Variety frames the event as a mix of social satire, intimate character studies and craft-forward filmmaking. The reviews suggest which titles could gain momentum for nominations and whether early buzz translates into wide releases as the season unfolds.

Venice is more than a showcase; it is a barometer for what kinds of stories and voices will travel through the fall season. The roster blends prestige projects with films that aim to lodge themselves in public memory, from Lanthimos’s topical kidnap thriller to del Toro’s lavish production and Sorrentino’s restrained political drama. The festival’s leadership under Payne hints at a crowd-pleasing but not pandering approach, where clear storytelling can still carry complex ideas. The real test, for studios and filmmakers alike, is whether early acclaim becomes sustained momentum in a crowded awards calendar. A potential risk is that standout titles polarize critics, creating competing narratives that complicate how campaigns are built. Still, Venice sets a confident tone that cinema can be both daring and accessible, a balance many studios seek as they plan months of marketing and premieres.

Highlights

The calendar moves quickly as reviews drop and campaigns take shape.