Venice Film Festival 2025: The Must-See Films

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Ninety-three years into its formidable run, the unsinkable Venice Film Festival continues to draw the stars. The annual showcase remains an unbeatably stylish launchpad for films seeking early momentum in awards season – whether that means a warm reception from crowds in the Sala Grande, a glamorous photo shoot aboard a freshly varnished vaporetto, or, for one lucky director, heading home with the coveted Golden Lion for Best Film. A host of Lido regulars will return this year, including Noah Baumbach (Jay Kelly), Luca Guadagnino (After the Hunt), Werner Herzog (Ghost Elephants), Lucrecia Martel (Landmarks) and Paolo Sorrentino (La grazia). They will be joined by previous winners debuting new films – Sofia Coppola (Marc by Sofia), Yorgos Lanthimos (Bugonia), Laura Poitras (Cover-Up), Gianfranco Rosi (Below the Clouds) and Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein) – alongside Venice competition first-timers such as Shu Qi (Girl) and Benny Safdie (The Smashing Machine). Most audiences will have to wait months before getting a look in, but rest assured: with everyone from The Rock to Charli XCX set to appear, the memes will be unavoidable. Here are my picks for the standout films to watch at this year’s festival.

South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook was notably overlooked for an Oscar nomination for Decision to Leave (2022). In fact, the master director has yet to win the top prize at any of the three major European festivals, despite having taken his most widely acclaimed films – Oldboy (2003) and The Handmaiden (2016) – to the Cannes Film Festival. The former lost out on the 2004 Palme d’Or to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), in a jury decision that continues to cause rancour among cinephiles. This year’s jury president, Alexander Payne, and his team will have a chance to make amends when No Other Choice premieres in competition. The film features Lee Byung-hun, a hugely popular star in South Korea who, despite appearing in several big-budget Hollywood action movies in the 2010s, has only recently gained recognition in the West. The story is adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax – previously made into a film by Costa-Gavras in 2005 – an anti-capitalist satire about a man who loses his job and decides the best route to re-employment is to kill off his competitors. If the trailer is anything to go by, it looks like a hoot.

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold haven’t rested on their laurels. One year on from The Brutalist’s Venice premiere, the filmmaking duo return to the festival with The Testament of Ann Lee. Directed by Fastvold – her first feature since delighting audiences here with The World to Come (2020), a queer, pre–American Civil War romance starring Vanessa Kirby – and co-written with Corbet, the film focuses on the life of the eponymous Englishwoman who founded the Shaker movement in the mid-18th century, a religious sect that incorporated dance, chanting and song into its worship rituals. The film reportedly features a new score from The Brutalist’s Oscar-winning composer, Daniel Blumberg, and was likewise shot on 70mm – so we can expect more footage of canisters arriving by water taxi. Amanda Seyfried stars alongside Christopher Abbott, Thomasin McKenzie, Tim Blake Nelson and Lewis Pullman. It’s still unclear how much of a musical this will be, but Seyfried’s casting – she’s a veteran of Les Misérables (2012) and both Mamma Mia! films (2008 and 2018) – suggests it could be the real deal.

Jude Law is set to portray none other than Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin, a juicy political thriller from versatile French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel of the same name (Le Mage du Kremlin, 2022), the film’s main character is loosely based on eccentric Russian spin doctor Vladislav Surkov. Paul Dano takes the lead alongside Zach Galifianakis, Alicia Vikander and Jeffrey Wright – a cast that hints at a more comedic, or at least absurdist, approach – but Law’s performance is sure to draw the most attention. Since the release of his debut feature, Disorder (1986), Assayas has demonstrated a chameleonic ability to move between genres. He is often at his best when experimenting with metaphysical themes (Irma Vep, 1996) or crafting understated family dramas (Summer Hours, 2008). His political thrillers have been less consistent – Carlos (2010), strong; Wasp Network (2019), less so – but the buzz surrounding this one is bound to be palpable.

As long as the relationship between Netflix and the Cannes Film Festival remains frosty, Venice will continue to serve as a stage for the streaming giant’s prestige projects. Alongside new features from Baumbach and del Toro, Netflix executives will be hoping for big things from A House of Dynamite, their first collaboration with Kathryn Bigelow – and the director’s first movie in eight years. Penned by Jackie (2016) and Zero Day (2025) screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, the story follows a military scramble to determine the source of a single missile headed for the United States. The cast – which includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris – is unsurprisingly stacked. It has also been reported that the 112-minute film, shot by Bigelow’s regular director of photography Barry Ackroyd, unfolds in real time, promising a nail-biter in the vein of The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Whatever you think of those films, they have become time capsules of their political eras – and it will be fascinating to see if Bigelow can still capture the zeitgeist.

Few films in this year’s selection are as likely to divide opinion as László Nemes’s Orphan, partly because the director’s criticism of Jonathan Glazer’s 2024 Oscars acceptance speech – which addressed Israel’s role in the Gaza conflict – has cast the Hungarian filmmaker’s work in a different light. The former Béla Tarr protégé’s Sunset (2018) – a film I still think about regularly – remains the only work he has released since Son of Saul (2015), one of the most celebrated directorial debuts of the century. Orphan, which Nemes co-wrote with frequent collaborator Clara Royer, is set in 1950s Budapest in the wake of the uprising against the communist regime. The story follows Andor, a 12-year-old Jewish boy (played by newcomer Bojtorján Barabás), who is forced to confront the truth behind his mother’s version of their past when a brutish man arrives at their doorstep claiming to be his father. Shot on location using 35mm cameras by Nemes’s regular cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, the film is certain to look phenomenal. The 82nd Venice International Film Festival is organized by La Biennale di Venezia and directed by Alberto Barbera. It will run on the Lido di Venezia from 27 August to 6 September 2025.