Venice 2025 Lineup

Venice’s eighty-second edition will open on August 27 with Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia, starring Toni Servillo as a fictional Italian president, and close on September 6 with Cédric Jimenez’s dystopian thriller Dog 51, featuring Gilles Lellouche, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Louis Garrel, Romain Duris, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. In Rome on Tuesday morning, festival director Alberto Barbera spent nearly two hours rolling out the full lineup for the official selection of ninety-one features, twenty-five short films, and four television series. Let’s have a first look at some of the immediate standouts.

Jude Law plays a young Vladimir Putin on the rise in Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, but the real star here is Paul Dano, who plays the fictional Vadim Baranov, an artist who becomes an invaluable spin doctor. Cowritten with Emily Mortimer, Baumbach’s Jay Kelly gives us George Clooney and Adam Sandler as a famous actor and his manager traveling through Europe. The cast is almost comically stacked: Mortimer, naturally, and Greta Gerwig, too, but also Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Stacy Keach, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Alba Rohrwacher, Isla Fisher, Lars Eidinger, and many, many more.

In Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, a hopefully crackerjack White House team scrambles to deal with a single missile headed toward the United States. Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke lead the cast.

Frankenstein is the movie del Toro has yearned to make for decades. “It’s an emotional story for me,” he said in Cannes earlier this year. “It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son . . . I’m not doing a horror movie.” Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi plays his creation. Cowritten with Brady Corbet and shot on 70 mm, Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical starring Amanda Seyfried as a founding leader of the Shakers who led her followers from England to New York in 1774.

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, has been simmering for fifteen years. Lee Byung-hun (Squid Game) plays a middle-aged man who has worked at a paper company for twenty-five years when he’s suddenly and unexpectedly fired—leading him to take some very desperate measures. With Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos has remade Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult favorite Save the Green Planet! Jesse Plemons plays a beekeeper who kidnaps a high-rolling CEO (Emma Stone) because he believes she’s an alien intent on wiping out humanity.

Two years ago, Venice presented a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and this year, Leung appears in his first European film, Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend. He plays a neuroscientist, but the three stories—set in 1908, 1972, and 2020—are told from the point of view of a majestic tree planted in a German university town. With Father Mother Sister Brother, Jim Jarmusch also tells three tales. His center on the somewhat distant relationships between adults and their parents, with the episode “Father” set in the northeastern U.S., “Mother” in Dublin, and “Sister Brother” in Paris. The cast features Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, and Charlotte Rampling.

Dwayne Johnson plays former wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, François Ozon’s The Stranger is a black-and-white adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, and Girl is the first feature directed by Shu Qi (Millennium Mambo, The Assassin). Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion with Sacro GRA in 2013, is back with another nonfiction film, Below the Clouds, a study of the ways Neapolitans deal with their proximity to Mount Vesuvius, the only volcano on Europe’s mainland to have erupted in the last hundred years.

Charlie Kaufman’s How to Shoot a Ghost runs twenty-seven minutes and stars Jessie Buckley and Josef Akiki, and that’s about all that’s known about it at this point. Marc by Sofia will trace the long “one-of-a-kind friendship” between Jacobs and Coppola. And with Director’s Diary, Alexander Sokurov will incorporate archival footage in to a personal and historical reflection on his life and career.

Among the other surprises in this program are films we might have expected to see in the main competition. Al Pacino appears in both Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, starring Bill Skarsgård as real-life kidnapper Tony Kiritsis, and Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, which tracks a handwritten manuscript of the Divine Comedy from the Vatican library to a mob boss in New York. Led by Oscar Isaac, Schnabel’s cast also includes Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, John Malkovich, Franco Nero—and Martin Scorsese.

Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts as a professor facing down a serious accusation, and the supporting cast includes Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny. Anders Thomas Jenson’s dark comedy The Last Viking stars Mads Mikkelsen, and Scarlet, the story of a brave princess who transcends time and space, is the latest animated feature from Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time).

Venice will screen the first two episodes of Marco Bellocchio’s Portobello, the series that tells the story of Enzo Tortora, a television host accused of trafficking drugs for a Neapolitan crime syndicate. Eventually, his conviction was fully overturned, but only after he’d served time.

Fifteen nonfiction features will premiere out of competition, including Nuestra Tierra, Lucrecia Martel’s long-awaited interrogation of the murder of Javier Chocobar, an activist fighting for the land rights of Argentina’s Indigenous peoples. Werner Herzog, who will receive this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, will bring Ghost Elephants, a group portrait of a mysterious herd in Angola.

Laura Poitras has teamed up with Mark Obenhaus on Cover-Up, which focuses on Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been a thorn in the side of the powers that be ever since he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969. Tsai Ming-liang’s Back Home will give us six shots playing out in just over an hour. Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) reassesses his approach to his life and work following the death of his son in Remake. And among the documentaries added to the Venice Classics program are Daniel Raim’s The Ozu Diaries and Alexandre Philippe’s Kim Novak’s Vertigo.

Nineteen features have been selected to premiere in Orizzonti, the competition “dedicated to films that represent the latest aesthetic and expressive trends.” The program will open with Teona Strugar Mitevska’s Mother, starring Noomi Rapace as Mother Teresa, the controversial nun who was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

Coproduced by Christine Vachon, Kent Jones’s Late Fame stars Willem Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, a poet coping with newfound fame when he’s discovered and championed by a group of artists led by Gloria (Greta Lee). Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) directs George MacKay and Callum Turner in Rose of Nevada, a story of the return of a fishing boat to a small village thirty years after it disappeared. And Pin de Fartie is the new film from Alejo Moguillansky, a core member of the Argentine collective El Pampero Cine.

Seven debut features have been selected for the main competition in this year’s Venice Critics’ Week, the independent and parallel section founded in 1984. The fortieth edition will open and close with films screening out of competition. Featuring a cast that includes Léna Garrel and Emmanuelle Béart, Caroline Deruas Peano’s Stereo Girls centers on seventeen-year-old best friends who, in the 1990s, dream of leaving the south of France for Paris. The closing night film, Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero, is an adaptation of Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel about two women who tell stories to survive. Jackman’s cast includes Emma Corrin, Charli XCX, Richard E. Grant, and Felicity Jones.