The Venice 2026 Films That Could Define This Awards Season

The Venice Film Festival opened today, and with it, awards season began. It happens here every year: months before the Oscars, before the Globes, before anyone has filled out a single ballot, the contenders make their first appearance on the Lido. Venice is where the conversation starts, where a performance becomes "the one to beat," where a film goes from title to phenomenon. So while everyone else is watching the red carpet, we're watching the lineup. Here are the films we think could define the season ahead.

Possible Love

For cinephiles, this might be the title of the entire festival. Lee Chang-dong — the South Korean master behind 'Burning', one of the most acclaimed films of the last decade – is returning to feature filmmaking for the first time in eight years.

Possible Love follows two married couples from very different worlds – a laid-off worker and his wife, and an affluent documentary filmmaker, Ye-ji, and her husband – whose lives become entangled when Ye-ji begins filming a project about laid-off workers, dragging repressed emotions and hidden desires to the surface. It's led by an extraordinary Korean ensemble, including Jeon Do-yeon and Parasite's Cho Yeo-jeong. And it already carries awards weight beyond the Golden Lion: South Korea has selected Possible Love as its submission for the Best International Feature Oscar.

Primetime

Of everything premiering at Venice, Primetime might be the boldest swing. Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen – yes, the host of To Catch a Predator – in a crime thriller set in 2006, following Hansen as he runs high-stakes hidden-camera sting operations, chasing ratings and television history while the ethics of the whole enterprise quietly rot underneath. It's the narrative feature debut of documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim ('Ren Faire', 'Some Kind of Heaven'), and Pattinson produced it, alongside Ari Aster's Square Peg, for A24.

That combination alone – Pattinson in full transformation mode, Oppenheim's documentarian's eye, A24's awards muscle, and a subject as culturally loaded as 'To Catch a Predator '– makes this one of the festival's most talked-about titles. Pattinson has spent the last decade proving he'll take the strange, difficult, fascinating role over the easy one, and this looks like exactly that. Expect a real Best Actor conversation if it lands.

Wild Horse Nine

If there's a safe bet at Venice, it's Martin McDonagh. He's won the screenplay Silver Lion here twice – for 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing', 'Missouri' and 'The Banshees of Inisherin' – and both went on to serious Oscar runs. Now he returns with 'Wild Horse Nine' and a cast that reads like a dream ensemble: John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as veteran CIA officers exiled to Easter Island ahead of the 1973 Chilean coup, alongside Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey. McDonagh's particular blend of the brutal and the hilarious tends to translate directly into nominations. This is likely your frontrunner out of the gate.

Bunker

Florian Zeller knows how to build an awards film. His debut, 'The Father', won Anthony Hopkins his second Oscar; his follow-up, 'The Son', premiered right here at Venice. Now comes 'Bunker', a thriller about an architect who takes on a morally compromising job – building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire – and the toll it takes on his marriage. It stars real-life husband and wife Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, alongside Stephen Graham, Paul Dano, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, and it's already been snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics for North America. A director with a track record, a starry cast, and a distributor that knows how to campaign: all the ingredients are here.

Ink

The festival itself opened with Danny Boyle's 'Ink', a drama chronicling Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Sun and the birth of the modern tabloid. Starring Jack O'Connell, Guy Pearce, and Claire Foy, it's Boyle doing what he does best: taking a real, thorny piece of history and making it pulse. A film about media, power, and corruption, opening a festival in a year defined by exactly those anxieties, is no accident.

Also on our radar

Beyond the frontrunners, a few more titles worth watching: 'The Echo Chamber', from Andrea Pallaoro, brings together Susan Sarandon, Alicia Vikander, and Luca Marinelli. Werner Herzog returns with 'Bucking Fastard', starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara as mirror-image siblings who dress alike and dream in unison – a film he pointedly pulled from Cannes to premiere here instead. And Casey Affleck's gothic mystery 'Company', his first film as director since 2019, rounds out an unusually strong indie-leaning competition. Any of these could break out.

But no honest look at this year's Venice lineup can skip the obvious. Of the twenty films in competition, only one – May el-Toukhy's 'Woman Unknown' – was solely directed by a woman. One. Meanwhile, women directed forty-five percent of the films screening outside competition.

That gap is exactly what jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal named on day one, when she was asked about it and answered, after a pointed deadpan, that "there's a systemic problem – it's harder for women to get films financed." She's right, and the numbers say it plainly: it isn't that women aren't making films. It's that they aren't being funded to make the big ones – the ones that land in competition at the world's most prestigious festival, the ones that define a season.

What happens next

Venice runs through September 12, and these are only the opening moves. From here, the race travels to Telluride, to Toronto, and onward through the fall, and the films that premiere on the Lido this week will follow us all the way to the Oscars in March. We'll be tracking every step of it.

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