Ten Films You Shouldn’t Miss At Venice Film Festival 2025

The Venice Film Festival unofficially kicks off the fall award season. As usual, it’s a starry roster–Cate Blanchett, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Emma Stone, Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Idris Elba, Amanda Seyfried etc. Six of the Competition titles are directed by women. Two-time Oscar winner Alexander Payne presides over the jury. Werner Herzog and Vertigo star Kim Novak will be bestowed with honorary Golden Lions at the festival.

Here are ten films to look out for in the latest edition of one of the most anticipated festivals in the world:

Former Golden Lion winner Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone for the fifth time in this remake of 2003 South Korean sci-fi film Save The Green Planet! (2003). A twisted dark comedy, Bugonia circles two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap a CEO (Stone), convinced she’s an alien seeking to destroy the planet. Jesse Plemons—who won Best Actor at Cannes for Lanthimos’ previous outing Kinds of Kindness (2024)—also stars in this Competition highlight.

In Venice veteran Luca Guadagnino’s latest, a Yale professor (Julia Roberts) finds her life thrown upside down after her colleague and friend (Andrew Garfield) is accused of sexual assault by a student (Ayo Edebiri). This is the Call Me By Your Name (2017) director’s sixth film to play at Venice. After the Hunt is also the opening film at the 63rd New York Film Festival.

Returning to Venice competition two decades after Lady Vengeance (2005), Park Chan-wook brings together two of Korea’s most celebrated stars together, Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin. An adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, it revolves around a man who literally sets about eliminating competition after his layoff. The director’s last film Decision to Leave had won Best Director at Cannes in 2022. Neon is already on board for the film’s North American distribution.

Guillermo Del Toro’s riff on Mary Shelley’s classic precedes two other forthcoming adaptations, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride and Radu Jude’s Sebastian-starrer Frankenstein in Romania. In Del Toro’s film, Oscar Isaac essays Victor, Jacob Elordi the monster. In interviews, Del Toro has insisted it’s not horror he’s going for, but a more personal story about “being a father, being a son”. It’s a Netflix release. The last time the Mexican filmmaker brought a film here—2017’s The Shape of Water—it racked up the Golden Lion and netted several Oscars.

Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s bestseller, Olivier Assayas’ film stars Jude Law as a young Vladimir Putin, gradually ascending to power through the 90s. Paul Dano essays Putin’s right-hand, a TV producer who plots his rise. This marks the French filmmaker’s return to Venice Competition after 2019’s Wasp Network.

Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel has been working on her first non-fiction feature since 2010. In between, she made a fever dream of a period piece, Zama (2017). Previously titled Chocobar, Nuestra Tierra looks back at the 2009 murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar by a white landowner. Touted for years to be an easy Competition lock-in at Cannes/Venice, it’s among the expanded Out of Competition-non-fiction berth. The doc stitches together voices of the Chuschagata community, courtroom footage to present a bloody chronicle of colonialism and land dispossession in Latin America. Confessing that making the doc has been more “difficult and exciting” than fiction outings, Nuestra Tierra examines a vast question: what has changed in Latin America over the last 500 years?

A delirious pairing of director Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson in the lead, it’s the hotly tipped biopic of MMA legend Mark Kerr. An A24 release, it’s said to sweep through obsession, the pursuit of perfection and its price. Emily Blunt re-teams with Johnson after 2021’s Jungle Cruise.

Best known for the Golden Bear-winning, Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul (2017), Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s latest foregrounds a majestic tree observing humans.

Starring Tony Leung in his first European outing and Lea Seydoux, Silent Friend surveys the human realm shaped and shaded by the ecological over three eras—1908, 1972 and 2020.

Noah Baumbach’s fourth collaboration with Netflix has George Clooney as an A-list movie star, forced into a personal reckoning while he and his manager (Adam Sandler) journey through Europe and reflect on their choices and mistakes. Linus Sandgren, who’s lensed Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016) and Babylon (2014), has shot Jay Kelly, while the score is by Succession (2018) composer Nicholas Britell.

Tunisian documentary filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania scored an Oscar nom for Four Daughters (2023) and was all set to make another film, when she heard an audio recording of Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza along with her family. In January 2024, Rajab was caught with six of her family members in a car under shelling, while they were trying to escape Gaza. In her director’s statement, Hania stressed cinema’s capacity to resist amnesia.