Marshall Shaffer
The late July announcement of the Venice Film Festival’s 2026 slate turned heads among cinephiles, and not in a good way. The lineup featured a noticeable downtick in prominent titles and starry premieres, with major studios and prestige indie labels alike mostly opting to sit the year out. Because the program comes into focus long past when attendees can change course on expensive flights and accommodations, a question lingered over festgoers: are the films really going to be as lackluster as they look?
The short answer is: yes. (Misery loves company, as many declared the 2026 editions of Sundance and Cannes to be disappointments, too.)
If I had to pick a single title that summed up the 2026 experience, it would be Paul Schrader’s The Basics of Philosophy. The esteemed octogenarian, who normally lands a coveted slot to vie for the Golden Lion, found himself relegated to an out-of-competition assignment that should have augured what was to come. The film once again finds Schrader playing with his favorite storytelling structure: the man alone in a room with a journal and his thoughts.
Except rather than Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaac, or Joel Edgerton, this story only managed to enlist the likes of Jack Huston to play out this variation of Schrader’s pet themes. (It’s OK if you need to Google him.) And despite enlisting cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who has shot vibrantly bustling films ranging from Good Time to Her Smell, The Basics of Philosophy looks as low-rent as Schrader’s B-tier cast. Rather than heading off for a prestigious slot at the New York Film Festival per the director’s usual trajectory, it’s instead set to open Manhattan’s more upstart Downtown Festival … if that’s any indication.
The experience was not entirely a waste. After all, there’s a higher-than-average floor on Schrader’s work. It’s still rare to see any film so earnestly grapple with shame through the lens of forgiveness in unabashedly spiritual and, well, philosophical terms. But this minor work yields only minor pleasures, and Schrader’s penchant for provocation when it comes to the types of sexual shame in which The Basics of Philosophy trades also dampens the earnestness a bit.
But as for the main attractions of Venice, after seeing about two-thirds of the competition, only Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love emerged as consensus standout titles. (Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine seemed to catch more fire among the Telluride crowd.) I usually leave the Lido with at least two titles locked for my year-end top 10, and this year, only Primetime seems likely to crack that list. To steal an infamous quote from Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen in the film: “You see how this looks, right?”
Yet for every bomb like Florian Zeller’s thuddingly obvious Bunker, Casey Affleck’s half-hearted Western-cum-vampire tale Company, or Shinya Tsukamoto’s woefully misconceived Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, something else offered milder but still satisfying pleasures. The conventional wisdom to watch the French films in Venice (just as one should watch the Italian films in Cannes) did not steer me wrong, as two social dramas from The Hexagon were lo-fi but high-quality breakouts. Cédric Kahn’s A Place to Heal and Stéphane Brizé’s A Good Little Soldier did not reinvent the mental institution or workplace dramas, respectively. Yet both found incisive commentary about contemporary life inside their setting. At this edition of the festival, I was happy to accept something familiar so long as it felt fresh.
As for emerging themes among the competition titles, thinly veiled deceptions and blurry lines between fiction and reality emerged as common threads across multiple films. None embodied all of them in such potent paranoia as May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, the year’s lone Golden Lion aspirant directed solely by a woman. As a former housemaid (Mathilde Arcel’s Marie) in Denmark prepares to marry the wealthy man of the house where she worked during World War II, dark secrets from her past threaten to shatter this fragile hope for a bright future. While it began in a slightly sedate register, it quickly became one of the festival’s most taut viewing experiences, simply by seeing just how far Marie would go to preserve the appearance of her propriety – and who she would be willing to let suffer in her place.
So without major fall releases doing their big Venice bows, what filled the festival calendar real estate? Many loooooooong movies, including new titles from Luca Guadagnino (435 minutes), Julia Loktev (355 minutes), Marian Llinas (330 minutes), and Alex Gibney (225 minutes) occupied theaters for blocks long enough to program two or three features. It ought to dispel any aspiring filmmaker (or someone with the clout and resources to pull this kind of a power move) from keeping a film at around 90 minutes simply to get booked at a festival.
These bladder endurance tests all happened to be documentaries, too. It was a big year for non-fiction in Venice, even if only the (as-of-yet unscreened) Naza was the only one to crack the main competition lineup. A whopping 25 of them played out of competition, a count far greater than the fictional features vying for the festival’s big prize.
While my schedule only permitted me to see Julia Loktev’s staggering My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile among the multi-part movies, that and other non-fiction films helped offset the disappointment from elsewhere in the lineup. While it only clocked in at a relatively slender 105 minutes, Luke Lorentzen’s Boatbuilders was a delightfully comforting blanket amidst the usual buffet of horrors on display in global cinema these days. The film offers exactly what its title portends as it tenderly observes with Wiseman-esque curiosity the handmade construction of a sailboat. It succeeds both as a chronicle of working-class craftsmen in Maine and as a sly social commentary on who gets to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
But any film festival on the scale of Venice has so much more to offer than its flashy topline competition and glitzy red carpet moments. The official Orizzonti section bestows the festival’s all-important laurels on smaller titles from emerging filmmakers who might leap into the official competition on their next go. The Giornate degli Autori keeps the focus on truly independent cinema. The Biennale College Cinema supports new filmmakers to get their micro-budget features off the ground and offers a showcase for their finished work. It’s not a challenge of there not being good work; it’s a challenge of knowing where to look for it amidst a sprawling official selection.
I had hoped that not feeling professionally obligated to see as many competition titles this year might free me up to do some actual discovery in the Venice lineup. More often than not, sleep, pasta, gelato, and the beach won out. (Sorry, do you want me to not take advantage of an Italian vacation when I’m not staring at a screen inside dark rooms?) But I was certainly glad I made time to see two titles tucked away inside the 2026 program that did not have actors or directors that made them immediately stand out.
Orrizonti selection The Color of the Sun, helmed by first-time feature director Xavier Tera, found uncommonly thoughtful and expansive territory for a coming-of-age story in this Okinawa-set high school drama. Tera hails from the world of photography, and that can show in the film, which can feel a bit more like he shot the lookbook than the screenplay. (Then again, when working with a DP who shot Uncle Boonmee and Challengers, why wouldn’t you?) But rarely do the stories about impulsive teens fold so neatly into such an elegant intergenerational tapestry, much less one that considers what legacy and historical memory mean in the context of American colonization.
The film that instilled the most hope in me for the future of cinema, though, was Gu Shi from the Biennale College Cinema section. Amie Song’s family drama fused with a ghost story nails the ethereal elements that make for the best examples of magical realism. It gently ebbs between the tactile details of nature and the evocative realm of memory, lulling viewers into a hypnotic rhythm as they come to understand what mysterious force engulfs this remote cabin. In just her first feature, Song already demonstrates such a masterful control of tone and style. Many established filmmakers, some programmed in much higher echelons of the festival than her, could seriously stand to take some notes here.
