The 2025 Venice Film Festival has blessed us with divisive discourse-generators (After the Hunt), misty-eyed Hollywood navel-gazing (Jay Kelly), and some real head-scratchers (In the Hand of Dante), but also, thankfully, some truly great cinema—searing dramas, ravishing Gothic epics, pitch-black comedies, wild musicals, and fascinating documentaries. These are the nine debuts from the Lido you need to look out for.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
There are countless (very valid) political reasons that it would be meaningful for this year’s Venice jury to award the Golden Lion to Kaouther Ben Hania’s breathless and heart-wrenching retelling of the true story of the titular six-year-old who was trapped in a car under fire in Gaza City in 2024. But on a purely cinematic level, this was also the only film at this year’s festival that shook me to my core. With the permission of her family, the real voice of Hind Rajab is carefully inserted into a partly dramatized narrative set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s emergency call center, where volunteers stayed on the line with the child for hours as they tried to arrange a rescue mission. Motaz Malhees and Saja Kilani, in particular, are exceptional as the two employees who are with Hind the longest, and the startling restraint Ben Hania displays—showing us live maps on the team’s screens instead of a recreation of debris-filled streets; voices on phones rather than additional supporting characters—keeps you gripped throughout without tipping into full-blown melodrama. Then comes a more documentary-style ending, featuring Hind’s mother, real footage of the wreckage Hind lay in as she awaited aid, and clips of the little girl in happier times, frolicking on the beach—a sequence that left everyone around me weeping. If enough people see this film, it’s one that could actually change the world.
No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook is one of the great filmmakers of our time, so when he noted in interviews ahead of No Other Choice that this was a project he had spent 20 years trying to make, anticipation in Venice was high. Could this be the film that finally gets Park that richly deserved Oscar nomination?
For the brilliant premise alone, it deserves one. A timely, pitch-black comedy with an undercurrent of something altogether bleaker—it touches on everything from the endless grind of late-stage capitalism to the climate crisis to the insidious rise of AI—the film follows a Korean man (an exceptional performance by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun) who gets fired from a paper factory and finds himself turned down for every other job to which he applies. In order to maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle for his wife (played by a delightful Son Ye-jin) and children, he schemes to murder other potential applicants for similar jobs to reduce the competition, leading to plenty of hilarious, cleverly staged set pieces that find a twisted humor in this clumsy suburban dad going on a killing spree. It occasionally attempts to bite off a little more than it can chew, and subtlety is not always Park’s strong suit—the film’s bold stylistic flourishes and zig-zagging plot lines may prove too distracting for some—but the fact he’s able to harness this sprawling, delirious tale into 139 minutes of furiously captivating cinema is proof enough that you’re in the hands of a master. Don’t be surprised if it ends up taking one of Venice’s top prizes—and takes him all the way to the Oscars. —Liam Hess
Frankenstein
Of Netflix’s three major Venice premieres—the streamer also brought the disappointing Jay Kelly and Kathryn Bigelow’s at first riveting and then strangely inert A House of Dynamite—the strongest, in my view, is Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous staging of the Mary Shelley classic. The three-time Oscar winner pours all his love for the source material into a deeply sentimental homage that is cloying at points, but also reduced me to tears about halfway in. The sets are lavish, the CGI is the best that money can buy, and the jewel-toned costumes delectable, but its heart and soul is a transformative turn from Jacob Elordi as the monstrous creature brought to life by the titular mad scientist (a bombastic Oscar Isaac), and later comforted by his enchanting sister-in-law-to-be (a luminous Mia Goth). Sensitive and gentle, and then pained and rageful, his transformation into a swirling vortex of destruction is captivating to watch and deserves all the plaudits. At a festival where almost all of the films were far too long, this was the only two-and-a-half-hour epic that seemed to fly by.
Dead Man’s Wire
Alongside so much weighty, awards-chasing fare, it’s a relief to see a film like this intentionally low-key, incredibly dark, high-wire comedy from Gus Van Sant on the line-up. A true-life tale that plays out in ’70s Indianapolis, it centers on a disgruntled striver (Bill Skarsgård) who arrives at the shiny offices of a mortgage company to meet with its slimy head (Al Pacino). Passed over to his hapless son (Dacre Montgomery), our (anti-)hero wires a shotgun to his head and takes him hostage, claiming that the organization’s business maneuvers cheated him out of a substantial fortune. Cue a both hilarious and terrifying romp through city streets to our lone wolf’s apartment, a rabble of press coverage (Industry’s Myha’la plays a striving reporter on his tail), frantic negotiations, and the crucial intervention of a charismatic, silky-voiced DJ (the always magnetic Colman Domingo). Its nostalgic aesthetics and soundtrack are a treat and you never feel like you quite know where it’s going. The tense final scene and credits prompted wild cheering at the screening I was in—and leave you with much to think about.
Bugonia
The festival’s other major eat-the-rich polemic is, in the grand scheme of Yorgos Lanthimos’s oeuvre, a minor work, to be sure, but still a riveting, twisty, and raucously funny one. It pits a pallid, greasy-haired Jesse Plemons, as an erratic conspiracy theorist, against a bald and conniving Emma Stone, as the ruthless big-pharma CEO he abducts, convinced that she’s an alien responsible for the reduction in the honeybee population that’s slowly killing the planet. The Greek auteur has worked with better scripts in the past, but in terms of its commanding performances, design, sharply precise cinematography, gleefully cruel humor, and bizarro ending, this madcap thriller can’t help but hit the spot for existing devotees.
Kabul, Between Prayers
With a focus similar to Jonathan Glazer’s masterful The Zone of Interest, Aboozar Amini’s beautifully shot documentary is the eye-opening story of Samim, a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan’s capital, and his wide-eyed younger brother, Rafi, who dreams of becoming a fighter, too. It opens on Samim praying, his devotion to his cause apparent, and as we get to know him, we’re astonished to find a funny, goofy, sometimes charming and often dissatisfied young man just trying to do his best—to fix his marriage, set an example for his family, and follow orders. The same is true of Rafi, a 14-year-old who loves to play rough in bucolic surroundings and has a new crush, but also dreams of martyrdom. It’s a remarkably bold and effective choice—while most recent documentaries about the region, very understandably, depict such figures as the embodiment of evil, this confronts us with their humanity and, without ever spelling it out or washing away their sins, the radicalization that’s shaped them. It has an ending that’s been imprinted on my brain ever since, and feels inherently, profoundly cinematic in a way that many of the other, more high-profile documentaries at Venice (Below the Clouds, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, Landmarks) did not.
Marc by Sofia
Amid a recent influx of fashion documentaries, Sofia Coppola’s first foray into non-fiction stands out for its freewheeling, fleet-footed, and unconventional approach—no linear structure, talking heads, or piercing questioning, but a highly entertaining ride nonetheless through one of the most successful careers in the industry: that belonging to her longtime friend and collaborator Marc Jacobs. Expect snapshots of all his key influences—his beloved talent agent father, the films of Bob Fosse, the Supremes, the effortlessly cool ’70s-era babysitters whom he idolized growing up in New York—as well as some glorious archival gems featuring the prolific director herself, too, including a ’90s MTV interview in which she discusses the now infamous X-Girl show that followed one of Jacobs’s presentations. It’s a stylishly made shot of pure fashion nostalgia that will leave you hungry for more.
The Testament of Ann Lee
I’m not fully convinced that Mona Fastvold’s wacky 18th-century musical about the Shaking Quakers and their fearless titular leader (a footloose Amanda Seyfried) works as a coherent whole—the final third of the just-over-two-hour-long period piece is something of a drag—but I’ve thought so much about its bonkers and ecstatic first hour since seeing it that I had to include it on this list. When Ann and her acolytes break into song and dance, as soundtracked by Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, who reimagined existing Shaker spirituals for the occasion, the movie soars—as it does when showing our troubled heroine’s tumultuous rise to power. With its mad, unbridled ambition, vision, and resourcefulness (staggeringly, this grand saga was shot in just over a month with a budget of under $10 million), there was no bigger swing at Venice.
Cover-Up
Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s documentary portrait of the formidable, hard-headed Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is too sprawling for its own good, seemingly concerned with being comprehensive rather than easily digestible, but it’s another release that’s really stayed with me—an immaculately filmed, meticulously researched tribute to a legend who is still, to this day, dogged in his pursuit of the truth. In 1969, he exposed the Vietnamese My Lai massacre; in 2004, he reported on the US military’s secret torture of Iraqi prisoners; and he’s now covering Gaza—and yet he remains as unstarry and focused on his work as ever. At the film’s Venice premiere, he looked taken aback by the enthusiastic standing ovation he received, even asking the audience to turn things down a notch—and, in doing so, raised himself even higher in my esteem.
