The 5 Most-Awaited Films Premiering at the 2025 Venice Film Festival

The Venice Film Festival has long been the unofficial starting gun of awards season, but its role in shaping the cultural conversation feels sharper this year. The 82nd edition, which runs from August 27 to September 6, arrives with one of the festival’s strongest lineups in recent memory.

In front of the camera, the star power is unmistakable: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Julia Roberts, Idris Elba, Emma Stone, Ayo Edebiri, and Jacob Elordi are just a few of the names leading competition titles.

Behind the camera, it is a season of returns, with Kathryn Bigelow releasing her first film in more than a decade, Jim Jarmusch offering his latest meditation on melancholy, Guillermo del Toro unveiling his long-awaited take on Frankenstein, and Sofia Coppola stepping into documentary filmmaking for the first time.

Here are the five films expected to dominate attention on the Lido this year.

1. Marc by Sofia (Sofia Coppola)

It’s almost too obvious: Sofia Coppola directing a documentary about Marc Jacobs. The two have been collaborators, companions, and co-conspirators in aesthetic languor for decades. Now, for the first time, Sofia turns her camera to fashion, which is not so much an industry here as it is a mood.

Expect diffused light, elongated pauses, and Marc speaking with the candor reserved only for old friends. The documentary promises to be less an archival survey than a portrait of intimacy: a designer seen through the eyes of someone who has, quite literally, dressed him for decades.

2. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo has been circling Mary Shelley’s novel for years, as if waiting for the right storm to strike. That storm arrives in Venice, with Oscar Isaac as the haunted scientist and Jacob Elordi as the creation who looks like a man but carries the ache of a monster. Mia Goth, naturally, slips into not one but two roles, because Guillermo’s Gothic universe is never satisfied with a single mirror.

The last time he premiered here, he walked away with the Golden Lion (The Shape of Water) and, eventually, the Oscars. To say Frankenstein is anticipated feels like an understatement; it feels like prophecy.

3. The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)

Dwayne Johnson, once the most bankable smile in Hollywood, is about to look devastatingly human. In The Smashing Machine, he plays real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr, a man whose fists could break bone but whose private life fractured just as easily.

Benny Safdie shoots the story on 16mm film, all grain and grit, as though reminding us that celluloid still has blood in it. Emily Blunt co-stars, lending the film the sort of emotional ballast that could turn this into Dwayne’s career-redefining role. Think Uncut Gems with headlocks.

4. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Park Chan-wook, the maestro of desire and revenge, returns with a comedy, or at least his version of one. No Other Choice stars Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin in the story of a man who, after losing his job, decides to settle scores with the reckless abandon of someone who has finally run out of patience. It is at once thriller and satire, the type of film that begins in laughter and ends with a corpse. Venice audiences are ready.

5. After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)

Luca’s cinema is lush, tactile, occasionally infuriating, always magnetic. After the Hunt places Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield in the cloistered world of academia, where they are professors navigating the implosion of their careers when a gifted student, played by Ayo Edebiri, levels allegations that ripple through their campus.

Luca seems poised to test the boundaries of cancel culture discourse, all with the precision of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score humming beneath it. If this is the film people fight about at the festival, then it has already succeeded.

Photos courtesy IMDB