French director Stéphane Brizé has screened his last three features — A Woman’s Life (2016), Another World (2021) and Out of Season (2023) — in competition at Venice, and it would be a shock if his latest doesn’t make the Lido cut. Gaumont has set a Nov. 25 release in France, so a Fall festival bow looks certain.

Venice faves Alba Rohrwacher (2014 Best Actress winner for Hungry Hearts) and Vincent Lindon (Best Actor winner for 2024’s The Quiet Son) star in this corporate drama, with Rohwacher playing a devoted HR executive caught between caring for her colleagues’ well-being and the performance goals of her demanding boss (Lindon).

After two decades of kicking out cultish projects at Sundance (Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, Sasquatch Sunset), the Zellner brothers could be poised for a splashy launch on the Lido. Alpha Gang, described as an eccentric alien invasion comedy, wrapped in Hungary last July. Cate Blanchett stars as Alpha One, leader of an extraterrestrial strike force disguised in human form as a 1950s leather-clad biker gang, whose ruthless conquest of Earth unravels when the crew catches, per the film’s official description, “the most toxic, contagious human disease of all: emotion.”

Chris Pine, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Lily-Rose Depp, Adria Arjona and Doona Bae fill out the gang with memorable faces, with It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis shooting. Mk2 Films is selling internationally, with CAA Media Finance handling North American rights.

Fourteen years after his last feature — and fresh off the universally acclaimed Star Wars series Andor — Tony Gilroy returns to the big screen with what he’s called the most personal project of his career. Drawing on his own youth as a musician, the director of Michael Clayton describes Behemoth! as a movie that “surfs on music.”

Pedro Pascal plays a cellist from a family of musicians who returns to Los Angeles for session work, with the film’s score reportedly triggering flashbacks across two decades to reveal why he left and why he’s come back. Will Arnett — stepping in for Stranger Things‘ David Harbour, who exited after the shoot began — co-stars alongside Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Matthew Lillard. Gilroy reunites with his acclaimed Andor cinematographer Damián García. Searchlight hasn’t dated the film yet, but it’s expected to launch during the fall awards corridor, which could set the stage for Gilroy’s European festival debut. 

Sian Heder’s follow-up to her Oscar-winner CODA is an adaptation of the memoir of disability rights activist Judy Heumann, following her 28-day occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977, a landmark protest for disability rights and accessibility legislation. Ruth Madeley stars as Heumann, Mark Ruffalo plays her advisary, U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr..

An obvious awards play, Being Heumann will land at one of the big fall festivals. If not Venice, than Telluride or TIFF. It may come down to Apple, which is producing and releasing the feature, and who have taken a liking to Venice in recent years, using the Lido to platform their high-end series Disclaimer and the Brad Pitt/George Clooney action comedy Wolfs. Seth Rogen also caught a vaporetto to the festival last year, using Venice as a backdrop for Season 2 of AppleTV’s The Studio.

Zeller’s London- and Madrid-shot psychological thriller finished filming early this year and has been in post since spring, which precluded a Cannes entry. The director’s first original screenplay, after adapting two of his own plays for the screen (The Father, The Son), Bunker stars real-life spouses Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a couple whose marriage buckles after he, a celebrated architect, accepts a commission to build a bunker for a billionaire.

Zeller has said he wrote the script expressly for the Spanish pair, hoping to draw on the texture of a real long-term cohabitation. Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger co-star. FilmNation is handling sales. None of Bunker‘s principals are Venice newcomers. The Son premiered in competition there in 2022, and both leads have won Volpi Cups — Bardem for Before Night Falls (2000), Cruz for Parallel Mothers (2021).

If Warner Bros. wills it, Digger will be this year’s event of the Lido. The studio has dated Iñárritu’s first English-language film since The Revenant for U.S. release on Oct. 2, the very same frame Joker claimed in 2019 weeks after winning Venice’s Golden Lion.

Billed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, “the most powerful man in the world,” racing to prove he’s humanity’s savior before a disaster of his own making destroys everything. Although technically a studio comedy, the film is suffused with awards season pedigree. Emmanuel Lubezki shot Digger on 35mm VistaVision, and Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy fill out the $125 million production. Iñárritu is also a Venice regular — 21 Grams, Birdman (en route to best picture), and Bardo also premiered there. Cruise got his fighter-jet moment in Cannes just a few years ago; perhaps it’s time for an armada of water taxis.

Warner Bros. has set Villeneuve’s trilogy-closer for release on Dec. 18 — head-to-head with Marvel-Disney’s Avengers: Doomsday, a clash some have already dubbed “Dunesday.” At this point, a December tentpole of Dune‘s scale hardly needs a festival. But Villeneuve and Venice have history: the director premiered Arrival in competition in 2016 and launched Dune: Part One to tremendous fanfare out of competition on the Lido in 2021.

Shot on 65mm film and IMAX formats, largely in Budapest, the Dune Messiah adaptation wrapped in November 2025, plenty of time for the project’s prodigious VFX to be ready by September. Timothée Chalamet’s emperor Paul faces the conspiracies of Frank Herbert’s follow-up novel alongside Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Jason Momoa, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem, with Robert Pattinson joining the saga, reportedly as shape-shifting villain Scytale. Part Two, released in March 2024, skipped festivals entirely — but Barbera is undoubtedly taking his shot.

Netflix paid seven figures for Simon Kinberg’s spec script back in 2020 — Jason Bateman was once attached to direct — and the long-gestating heist thriller, told in nonlinear fashion, has finally come together under City of God director Fernando Meirelles. Denzel Washington, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Robert Pattinson star in the tale of a bank guard, a teller and a master thief locked in a deadly game of cons and double crosses, with Danai Gurira, Sean Harris and Justin Kirk supporting.

The film was shot in New Jersey through late January, with Meirelles reuniting with his City of God DP César Charlone. Netflix hasn’t dated Here Comes the Flood yet, nor revealed whether it will be positioned as a potential awards contender or simply a commercial play with an especially high-end cast.

Yann Gonzalez has been a Cannes stalwart — his debut short By the Kiss (2006) premiered there, as have both his features, You and the Night (2013), and Knife + Heart (2013) — but his new feature was picked for last year’s Venice Gap-Financing Market, and those projects, once finished, tend to land on the Lido. The film seen Gonzalez re-teaming with Vanessa Paradis and his brother, M83 frontman Anthony Gonzalez, on what is described as a gothic fantasy romance.

Paradis plays a 50-year-old schoolteacher living in a remote mountain village who leads a double life as a one-night-stand seducer of lonely men. But the main attraction for Venice could be her co-star, Filippo Scotti, the young Italian who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award as best emerging actor at the festival in 2021 for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God.

I Play Rocky has been a hot title since FilmNation began shopping it to international buyers back in Cannes 2024. A Hollywood-behind-Hollywood feature, it follows Sylvester Stallone in his struggles to get his 1976 classic made, while insisting he, an acting no-hoper, will play the lead. Anthony Ippolito, who played a young Al Pacino in Paramount’s “making of The Godfather” series The Offer, is Stallone, with Jay Duplass as Rocky director John G. Avildsen, Stephan James as Carl Weathers, and Matt Dillon as Frank Stallone Sr.

Amazon MGM, who have domestic rights, have dated this for a Nov. 13 limited release, going wide Nov. 20, almost 50 years to the day of the original Rocky premiere (released Nov. 21, 1976). The film history hook, and Balboa’s Italian roots, would make this one a nice fit for Venice, but given Farrelly’s penchant for Toronto — he premiered both Green Book (2018) and The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) at TIFF — the Great North seems the most likely launchpad.

This could be the year Barbera claims back one of Italy’s most established festival favorites. Every Moretti feature since Caro diario (1994) has premiered at Cannes, but the Palme d’Or winner’s romantic drama — his second adaptation of an Eshkol Nevo work after Three Floors — shot through last autumn in Spain, Rome and Turin, was conspicuously absent from the Croisette in May. A Venice bow would be his first since Palombella rossa in 1989.

Spanish distributor BTeam has dated the Italy-France-Spain co-production for Christmas, solid positioning for a Lido launch. Louis Garrel leads opposite Jasmine Trinca — the female lead of Moretti’s Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room some 25 years ago — with Moretti, who recovered quickly from a 2025 heart attack, taking a small role himself. Interweaving several of Nevo’s stories, the film, the director has said, “manages to describe our feelings today, our fears.”

After the success of A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg is poised to take his most ambitious swing yet: an original musical, for which he wrote the songs himself. Julianne Moore plays a shy woman unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production who goes to extremes as she loses herself in the role, falling under the spell of its strong-willed director, played by Paul Giamatti. Halle Bailey,  Havana Rose Liu and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters co-star, with Emma Stone producing through her Fruit Tree banner and A24 distributing.

The pedigree behind the camera is similarly stacked, with Anora DP Drew Daniels shooting, Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler staging the musical numbers, and A Complete Unknown’s Steven Gizicki supervising the music. Shooting wrapped after an April start in New Jersey. Eisenberg is a Sundance regular — both his prior features bowed in Park City — but a finished fall-ready musical of this scale makes sense for a step up into the European prestige leagues. 

With its Japan release date set for Sept. 11, smack in the middle of Venice, Look Back could give perennial Japanese festival favorite Hirokazu Kore-eda his second high profile European premiere this year. Completed not long after his speculative soft-sci-fi Sheep in the Box, which competed at Cannes in May, Look Back is the first live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s beloved manga, a coming-of-age story about two girls chasing their dreams of becoming manga artists.

Produced by start-up label K2 Pictures, Look Back was shot in Japan’s northern Nikaho City with Natsuki Deguchi starring as the cocky Fujino and Aju Makita as her reclusive classmate Kyomoto. As usual, Kore-eda wrote, directed and edited the feature. GKIDS has already snapped up U.S., U.K. and Irish rights, while Goodfellas is selling it elsewhere outside Asia. Kore-eda’s Lido history runs deep — his debut Maborosi bowed there in 1995.

Eight years after Burning, the elder statesman of Korean arthouse cinema returns. Backed by Netflix and already buzzed-about as one of the streamer’s leading international awards contenders of the year, Lee’s latest searing melodrama is said to follow two married couples leading completely opposite lives whose worlds collide, sending fractures through their daily existence.

Korean screen royalty Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu play Mi-ok and Ho-seok, opposite Zo In-sung and Parasite‘s Cho Yeo-jeong, with Lee co-writing alongside Oh Jung-mi. The casting is a homecoming in itself — Jeon won Cannes’ best actress prize for Lee’s landmark Secret Sunshine, Sul anchored his classics Peppermint Candy and Oasis, and this marks the pair’s fourth screen partnership. Lee is usually a Cannes stalwart, but Netflix is all but certain to bring him back to the Lido for the first time since he received the Silver Lion for best direction in 2002 for Oasis.

In astrology, a Saturn return is the planet’s roughly 29-year homecoming to its natal position — the cosmic deadline for growing up. Greg Kwedar’s follow-up to Train Dreams is a Chicago-set romance spanning the decade between aspirational college love and the complicated realities of adulthood, told across two timelines as former best friends Eve, Anders and Nathan reunite as virtual strangers at a funeral, the film tracing “what was lost in between and what can still be found.”

Charles Melton, Rachel Brosnahan and Will Poulter lead, with David Morse, Kim Dickens and Jean Yoon in supporting parts. Gaelyn Golde wrote the script — revised by Kwedar and his Train Dreams partner Clint Bentley — and Plan B produces for Netflix. Plan B’s awards pedigree and Melton’s rising star power make Venice a natural launch pad, with Toronto a potential fallback.

Seldom do you get to see such distinctive auteurs enter each other’s worlds. Quentin Tarantino created the characters and wrote the script, but, reluctant to make it his tenth and final film, handed the reins to David Fincher — who reunites with Brad Pitt for the first time since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, their fourth collaboration after Seven and Fight Club. Pitt reprises his Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time in Hollywood role, the story leaping forward in time to a “very different Hollywood” of 1977, where the former stuntman now works as a studio fixer.

Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Timothy Olyphant, Carla Gugino, Scott Caan and Peter Weller fill out the ensemble, with Fincher’s regulars Erik Messerschmidt shooting and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scoring the $200 million Netflix production. Just two years ago, Fincher and Netflix premiered The Killer in competition on the Lido, but that film launched on streaming on Nov. 10. Netflix has set an exclusive IMAX run for The Adventures of Cliff Booth on Nov. 25 ahead of its Dec. 23 streaming release — a long stretch, but here’s hoping Barbera pulls off a coup. 

“Venice is the Lion of my heart,” Paul Schrader declared in 2022, while accepting the festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. The Lido has become the go-to launchpad for the Taxi Driver scribe’s late-career output, having premiered First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021) before hosting Master Gardener (2022) out of competition.

Schrader’s latest extends his long-running man-in-a-room lineage: Jack Huston embodies the latest diary-keeping, damaged protagonist, following Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaac and Joel Edgerton, playing a repressed philosophy professor grappling with buried guilt over a past decision when the victim suddenly reenters his life. Sofia Boutella, Bill Pullman, Dana Delany and Daniel Zovatto co-star, with Good Time DP Sean Price Williams shooting his first Schrader picture and Card Counter producers Braxton Pope and David Wulf back on board. The film wrapped a brisk six-week shoot across Kansas City, New Haven and Los Angeles last July. After his detour to Cannes for 2024’s Oh, Canada, a Lido homecoming for Schrader feels highly likely.

The Echo Chamber has a powerful Italian pedigree behind it. The film is built on the final screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, who died in 2018. The maestro behind The Conformist and The Last Emperor co-wrote the script with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, and it has been entrusted to a fitting custodian: all three of Trento-born Pallaoro’s features have premiered at Venice — Medeas (2013), then Hannah (2017), which won Charlotte Rampling the Volpi Cup, and Monica (2022).

Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli star in The Echo Chamber as Anne and Leo, lovers trapped in a bond they can neither escape nor relinquish, with Susan Sarandon as Ava, a voice echoing across time and memory. Paolo Sorrentino’s home shingle Indigo Film produces with Rai Cinema; Paradise City is selling worldwide with UTA co-repping North America. Now in post — and unveiled via first-look images during the Cannes market — the project should be ready in time for September.

Sixteen years after The Social Network opened the New York Film Festival, Aaron Sorkin returns to the subject of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — this time directing his own script. Billed as a companion piece rather than a sequel, the drama recounts how Facebook engineer-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) enlisted Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to expose the platform’s most guarded secrets — the reporting published in 2021 as “The Facebook Files” — while Jeremy Strong assumes the Zuckerberg mantle from Jesse Eisenberg.

Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen and Betty Gilpin co-star. In something of a continuity flourish, David Fincher’s Social Network DP Jeff Cronenweth returns behind the camera, but Alexandre Desplat wrote this one’s score rather than Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Columbia has dated the film for Oct. 9. Venice would likely welcome the world premiere, though Telluride and a return to NYFF loom as rivals.

A Florida beachside resort, 1980: twenty scientists, activists and policymakers gather for a weekend conference on a curious new issue — CO2 emissions — with one congressional mandate, to “write a statement about what to do.” Tom McCarthy’s darkly comic origin story of the climate debate, adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth with Jacques Audiard’s regular writers Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, assembles an embarrassment of character-actor riches: Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany, Amy Ryan, Evan Peters and Jason Clarke.

McCarthy’s Spotlight world-premiered on the Lido in 2015 on the way to winning the best picture Oscar, and this is his first feature since Stillwater bowed at Cannes five years ago. Sony Pictures Classics would likely prefer to repeat Spotlight‘s playbook, but cameras only rolled in St. Petersburg, Florida this spring, which could make a fall festival bow a stretch. The film hasn’t yet been dated.

Paul Greengrass doesn’t have much history with Venice — his only Lido debut was Netflix real-life drama 22 July back in 2018 — but his latest effort could make the 2026 cut. Andrew Garfield headlines as a farmer who becomes a leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt, the 1381 uprising against King Richard II. The star-studded cast — Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, Jamie Bell, Tom Hollander, and Jonny Lee Miller — might tip the balance for Venice, though a Toronto or Telluride bow are just as likely.

Announcing the Naples shoot of Trick earlier this year, Martone offered an appealingly off-hand, entirely Italian logline: “Naples, a house, a grandfather, a four-year-old grandson. Enough of a synopsis?” Adapted with Ippolita di Majo from Domenico Starnone’s novel — translated into English by Jhumpa Lahiri — the chamber piece unfolds almost entirely within an apartment and its balcony over a few days, staging an unexpected duel between Toni Servillo’s Daniele Mallarico, a celebrated illustrator long accustomed to solitude, and his grandson, played by Lorenzo Perrotta, with Serena Rossi and Leonardo Lidi as the boy’s parents.

It’s the seventh Martone-Servillo collaboration, and Martone won Venice’s Grand Jury Prize with his 1992 debut Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, while Servillo arrives as the reigning Volpi Cup winner for last year’s La grazia. The film wrapped production in the spring, which makes the timeline tight — but after Martone’s recent detours to Cannes for Nostalgia and Fuori, the home turf of the Lido beckons.