Eight Venice Titles Worth a Ticket Before the Lion Settles

The 83rd Venice Film Festival was supposed to end Saturday with a Golden Lion. NPR, using the Associated Press, filed on 12 September while the Maggie Gyllenhaal jury still had the envelope. I am not going to invent a winner because a live blog was behind a login. What we have is the ovation tape and Radhika Seth’s eight-film list in Vogue. That is enough to decide what to hunt on a streamer later, and what to skip.

We already ran the mid-fest Golden Lion math and a review of Florian Zeller’s Bunker. This is the viewing list, not a recap of the red carpet.

1. Wild Horse Nine

Seth puts Martin McDonagh first, and the AP file explains why the room clapped into the mid-teens. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA men sent from Santiago to Easter Island just before the 1973 Chilean coup. McDonagh has used Venice before. Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin both premiered there. He left with screenplay prizes and, for Farrell, an acting prize. Those films then went to the Oscars.

Malkovich has never won an Oscar. That sentence is doing a lot of work in every dispatch this week. I care more about whether the script is as mean as McDonagh’s last two. Seth says it is funny and melancholy and interested in American imperialism. If that is true, it is the Hollywood object that still has a brain. If it is only a two-hander on a volcano, it will still get a trailer. Watch it either way if you liked Banshees. Do not watch it as a geography lesson about Rapa Nui.

2. NAZA

The AP piece leads with this, and it should. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors of last year’s Oscar-winning No Other Land, brought a documentary in which Israeli military insiders describe what they call the systemic killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Twenty-five minutes of standing ovation. Longest on record, beating the 24 minutes for The Voice of Hind Rajab last year.

Last year that film took the Silver Lion. Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother took the Gold. Kaouther Ben Hania, who directed Hind Rajab, is on this year’s jury. So is Johnnie To, Daniel Blumberg, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat, and Gyllenhaal. I will not pretend I know how that table votes. I will say a 25-minute ovation is not a prize. It is a room telling you the film landed.

NAZA was a late add. It is the only documentary in the 21-film competition. Szor is one of two women directing in that slate. The Guardian and James Wilson produced. Jonathan Glazer executive-produced. If you only watch one Venice title because you think festivals are where the news gets into the cinema, this is the one. It is also the one most likely to be argued about in comments you should not read.

3. They’re Here

Seth’s second title is a 22-minute short. Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller on ICE operations in Minneapolis at the start of this year. Masked men, people commuting in trunks, detainees on planes, maps of pins. Seth says the city’s pushback scaled the operation down. I have not seen it. A 22-minute documentary from Poitras is still a better use of a lunch break than most features on this list. It will be harder to find. Shorts always are.

4. Ink

Danny Boyle, Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun in 1969, Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb, Claire Foy as a composite women’s editor. Seth’s write-up is a warning about tabloid gravity. If you wanted a Fleet Street costume picture, this is it. If you wanted Boyle to surprise you, wait for a review that is not a festival card. I am including it because a Murdoch origin story will get a streaming home faster than a Korean slow burn.

5. Possible Love

Lee Chang-dong, eight years after Burning. Jeon Do-yeon as a wife, Sul Kyung-gu as a husband who lost a job, Cho Yeo-jeong from Parasite as a wealthy documentarian who wants the husband’s story and pulls the wife into dinners and a beach house. Seth calls it a slow burn about desire and class. Lee does not make casual films. This will not be the Saturday-night pick. It is the one I would actually get on a plane for if it still needed a festival ticket.

6. Primetime

Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, about To Catch a Predator, Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. Seth’s paragraph cuts off in the crawl I have, mid-sentence, which is an annoying way to leave a list. The premise is enough to flag it. True-crime television eating itself, with Pattinson doing a stilted-host walk. I want to see whether Oppenheim, who came from documentary, can stand a script. I do not need it on night one.

7. Bunker

Not in the Vogue eight I could fully scrape. It is in the AP ovation paragraph, 14-plus minutes, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, Florian Zeller writing and directing. We already reviewed it. A marriage, a Zoom client, a Venice split. If you only trust our own file, start there. Ovation length is not quality. It is stamina and celebrity density. Still, 14 minutes is not nothing.

8. The rest of the room

Seth promised eight. The crawl I have dies inside Primetime. I am not going to hallucinate the last two titles from a photo caption. The AP file also flags Wild Horse Nine and Bunker as the star-driven ovations next to NAZA. Herzog’s Bucking Fastard with the Mara sisters was in the competition preview. So was May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown. We already did Mayday with Reynolds and Branagh as a Cold War buddy movie that worked. Different slot, same festival season.

Telluride already started the Oscar conversation. Venice is the louder European half. Toronto is next. If you are making a personal queue, put NAZA, Possible Love, and Wild Horse Nine at the top. Put Ink on a plane. Put They’re Here on a reminder for whenever a public link exists. Wait on Primetime until someone who is not writing a Vogue card describes the third act.

How to use a list like this

Festival lists lie in two directions. They overrate whatever got the longest clap. They underrate whatever played at 9 a.m. to a jet-lagged room. NAZA’s 25 minutes is a data point. Last year’s 24 minutes did not win. Gyllenhaal’s jury is not a clap-o-meter.

Screen Daily ran a live awards blog I could not extract past the navigation chrome. If you need the Lion itself, wait for a bylined winners piece, then come back. The films do not change because a statue moved.

A note on ovations, because they will be in every awards preview from now until March. Clapping for 25 minutes is a physical act. People stay standing because leaving looks worse than staying. Stars in the box seats keep the camera pointed at the row. None of that is fake, exactly. It is also not a ballot. Last year’s Hind Rajab ovation did not beat Jarmusch. This year’s jury includes the director of that film. You can tell a story about correction. You can also tell a story about a jury that does not want to be bullied by a clock. I have no idea which story is true. I am putting NAZA on the list because the reporting says the room could not sit down, and because Abraham and Szor already made a film that went to the Oscars. That is a track record. It is not a Lion.

Distribution is the part festival lists skip. Wild Horse Nine will get a studio campaign if Searchlight or whoever is on it smells Rockwell plus Malkovich plus McDonagh. Possible Love will play two weeks in New York and Los Angeles if we are lucky, then live on a boutique streamer with subtitles you cannot turn off. They’re Here may show up in a documentary shorts block and then vanish into a festival link that expires. Ink will be sold as a night out. Plan your watching around that, not around a ranked eight.

We are also in the stretch where Venice, Telluride, and Toronto launder the same titles through three sets of quotes. If a film is on all three lists, that is not three opinions. That is one publicist. Seth’s Vogue card is still useful as a menu. Use it that way. Order two dishes. Do not eat the menu.

I am not ranking these against Supergirl on Max. That was this week’s couch list. Venice is the other job: note what exists, say which ones have a reason to exist, and refuse to fill in a winner we do not have.

If you only have one evening, I would spend it on Possible Love or NAZA, not on collecting all eight. Festival FOMO is how people watch nothing. Two films, a note in a list, done.