Our Venice 2026 Must-See List

Lee Chang-dong returns with his first feature since Burning, ending an eight-year absence. No other film in the Venice lineup carries this combination of anticipation and proven dramatic control.

Florian Zeller builds a nuclear-crisis drama around a confined setting and a heavyweight cast. We want to see whether his stage-trained control can keep geopolitical stakes personal.

Werner Herzog directs Rooney and Kate Mara in a story that sounds stranger than anything else in competition. At 83, he is still making choices no safer filmmaker would make.

Lance Oppenheim examines the overlap between reality television and criminal justice. His access-driven documentary style should reveal how entertainment changes the lives of people placed inside the format.

Ali Asgari again focuses on ordinary people trapped by Iranian institutions. His precise attention to rules, paperwork and small humiliations gives the film immediate political weight.

Hirokazu Kore-eda adapts Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga about two young artists whose friendship grows through drawing. His work with children and grief makes the material an unusually strong fit.

Danny Boyle takes on Rupert Murdoch, tabloid power and the culture around British newspapers. His fast, abrasive style could turn media history into one of the festival's liveliest political films.

Martin McDonagh turns to the CIA after years of mordant plays and crime films. The mix of institutional power, dark comedy and his confrontational dialogue makes this an obvious priority.

Shinya Tsukamoto returns to war after Fires on the Plain and Killing. His physical, unsentimental filmmaking makes this one of the competition's most demanding—and potentially most powerful—films.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor bring the only documentary into the Golden Lion competition. Its presence among fourteen fiction films makes it the lineup's clearest formal and political wildcard.