In a year teeming with excellent, as well as excellently marketed, films (anyone heard of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, or Project Hail Mary?), the start of the fall festival season marks the transition from manageably overwhelming to outright insane levels of hype. The notorious awards season is around the corner, and the larger the number of contenders, the greater the excitement. No less so at the Venice Film Festival 2026.
Alberto Barbera, Venice Film Festival’s director since 2012 and the person responsible for positioning the cinema Biennale as a favorite launchpad for statuette hopefuls, in recent years ahead of Cannes even, knows this all too well. He and his team understand the mechanics of the global cinephile community’s intense relationship with the film industry: the reliance on social networks to build momentum, the mandatory attendance of A-listers and designated heartthrobs, a prominent enough spot for international features for “diversity” purposes, and some (or plenty, this is Europe, after all) politics for “credibility”.
So the 83rd edition of the celebrated Venice Film Festival, running from the 2nd to the 12th of September, began. Maggie Gylenhaal presides over the jury deciding between 21 films in competition for the Golden Lion, among them Danny Boyle’s Ink, fresh releases from Martin McDonagh, Florian Zeller, Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, Nanni Moretti, and more. Lance Oppenheim’s hotly anticipated Primetime starring Robert Pattinson also debuts, as well as Naza, the new film by No Other Land’s co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli investigative journalists documenting their country’s genocide in Gaza. Out of competition, Amos Gitai’s The Road to Jericho tells a story of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and so does Raj’in (We Shall Return), a devastatingly immersive VR documentary.
Unlike Berlin and Cannes, whose officials flunked the many “loaded” questions from the press and public (causing plenty of outrage in the process), Venice Film Festival representatives didn’t repeat last year’s mistake, when jury president Alexander Payne said he was “unprepared” to answer any questions about Gaza. Major festivals always had a flair for “controversial” and politically charged releases, as they generate publicity, but this year, Mostra chiefs welcomed the political nature of film as a medium with open arms, though not without flinching. The jury press conference had initially been canceled, allegedly for scheduling reasons, but was put back on last minute after considerable backlash. The show must go on, with drama added. Just another day in the Mediterranean.
On the creative side, besides the support for the discourse on the Gaza genocide, works about the CIA’s ravaging of Latin America, the beginnings of Rupert Murdoch’s enablement of news sensationalism, the torture of Argentinian civilians during Videla’s Dirty War, and even the complicity of the Black man in the US war crimes in Vietnam coalesce to remind us of the very dark contemporary history much of the world might prefer to avoid.
Speaking of avoidance, this year’s chief heads at Venice Film Festival learned from Payne’s mistakes, elegantly diffusing the inevitable interrogations with pointed yet generic responses. The lifetime achievement award recipient and Venice darling George Clooney expressed support for “free speech” after Mark Ruffalo had been accused of “antisemitism” for criticizing the proposed merger of Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount.
“I support Mark Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely… we’re not going to ban speech,” Clooney said. “I believe in free speech even when I completely disagree with it. That’s important, right? In fact, it’s part of how a democracy works,” concluded Clooney amicably.
Gylenhaal was somewhat more specific when asked about the political nature of filmmaking. “I think that if movies really are an honest look into other people’s experiences, that they are… unavoidably political, as well as a lot of other things.” She also addressed the elephant in every filmmaking room, namely the lack of female directors in this year’s competition and the industry in general. Only two out of 21 competing films were directed or co-directed by women.
Despite the perennial unease around cultural debates, this year the cinephiles lucked out: many of the major films shown proved worthy of a spotlight. As life will have it, with Mediterranean temperament comes Mediterranean slapdash, so between 20-minute waits for a toilet or a cup of coffee, 30-minute waits to get into many of the venues, and 40-minute waits in check-in lines in scorching heat, much of the time to actually see the films is lost for us humble reporters. Still, what I managed to catch in my few days at Lido Island made for an intriguing portfolio of films that will fuel the conversation this season amongst hot-headed cinephiles and casual viewers alike.
The Basics of Philosophy – Director: Paul Schrader
In some ways, Paul Schrader is a stereotypical filmmaker: brash, obsessed with masculinity, and accused of sexual harassment by an associate. In others, he diverges sharply from the tired Hollywood script as a writer and director unafraid to acknowledge that, beyond the trope of the “complex” man, one will often encounter a monster. Not a redeemable, coyly admirable tortured soul, but a danger to himself and society.
The Basics of Philosophy, Schrader’s latest feature, shown Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival 2026, stays true to his dedication to rolling in the mud and picking at the scabs of a shaken humanity. Neither as lethal nor as propulsive as his other recent Venice Film Festival debuts, 2021’s The Card Counter and 2022’s Master Gardener, it is nevertheless a compelling, unapologetic character study of a man grappling with the darkness in him.
Jack Huston stars as John Jorrisen, a college philosophy professor struggling to find a foothold within “adult life”. As is Schrader’s standard, the protagonist converses with himself in voiceovers, exploring his own sense of ethics while writing a book on Baruch Spinoza. Despite continuous narration, little is known about John. He dates but struggles to accept his colleague Rebecca (Sofia Boutella) as his girlfriend; otherwise, John leads a solitary life, with no friends and a strained relationship with his ailing father, Melvyn (a stern Bill Pullman).
Unsurprisingly, John has a secret, something horrendous he’s done long ago that he doesn’t know how to think of or talk about. Without spoiling the major tension points, John’s fragile equilibrium is undone when his former piano student, Miguel (an excellent Daniel Zovatto), shows up at his father’s funeral. As John keeps questioning himself, he loses control of his own narrative, and what little peace he has threatens to disappear at any moment.
The epistolar texture is, in this case, not a cathartic confessional; rather, it ambiguously underlines what might be John’s inability, or unwillingness, to overcome his past sins and “rationally” become a better man. The “basics of philosophy” is just an ironic, self-referential phrase exposing the emptiness of John’s faked dialecticism. Even when he takes a new approach to things, his impulses seem to lure him back into the underbelly.
Given the extreme incendiary nature of the topics explored in The Basics of Philosophy, it’s a shame the film too often comes across as muted. So much so that, at times, it seems as though Schrader leaves the difficult, evidently self-reflective conversations he wants to have with the audience and simply flips to autopilot. Nevertheless, Huston and especially Zovatto find plenty to work with in the sparsity, the minimalist dialog and long silences, amplifying discomfort to the point that the viewer will be hearing their own intrusive thoughts.
A typical octogenerian, Schrader is not changing now. As The Basics of Philosophy escalates, hints of violence and self-harm envelop an ever-darker psyche of the main character, up until the utterly unnerving end. It’s a difficult and perverse watch, and just like John’s introductory course on philosophy, it will leave you wondering what an honest man’s truth is and if a person can ever really change.
Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? – Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto
Shin’ya Tsukamoto is among the most prominent filmmakers to go to for body horror; his legendary cyberpunk trilogy of sorts, Tetsuo, established the Japanese director’s oeuvre as an “extremist Cronenberg”; a man diving deep into the maladies of the physicality to explore the so-called “human condition”. A frequent guest at Venice Film Festival, where he sat on the jury in 1997 and 2019, Tsukamoto returns in competition this year with Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? (Neruson san, anata wa hito o koroshimashitaka?), a war drama based on the memoirs of the Vietnam War veteran Allen Nelson.
If one would think we’ve had enough of hollow moralizing in seemingly anti-war films that somehow mostly end up being about soldiers feeling bad for killing innocents, Tsukamoto does his darndest to take a somewhat different approach. While showing one man’s reckoning with the war crimes he committed, he disperses the narrative to address some bigger social topics. Sadly, maybe due to Tsukamoto’s overwhelming quadruple role as writer-director-cinematographer-editor, or perhaps because of his seemingly limited understanding of the moral weight of murder, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? ends up a confusing misfire.
Starring a superb Rodney Hicks as older Allen and an equally admirable Mark Merphy as young Allen during war, Mr. Nelson tells a non-linear story of a poor Black man who saw an opportunity in joining the military, only to end up slaughtering civilians half a world away, detonating his own sense of self in the process. To drive the more reflective points home, Geoffrey Rush comes in as an older Allen’s psychiatrist, seeking to transcend his PTSD by getting him to admit that he killed people because “he wanted to”, and not (just) because it was “his job”.
Between the many flashbacks of war horrors, poverty, and violence, the psychiatrist’s question, “Why did you kill people?” spins in an incessant centrifuge around Allen scene after scene, revealing Tsukamoto’s desire to show that murdering civilians is not something we should gloss over. That said, the setup fails to deliver, as the arc inevitably leads to Allen’s repentance and “war is bad” evangelism across the world, including Vietnam. Countless horrific close-ups of the bodies of civilians he willfully helped massacre will shock you and make you sick, but in the end, there’s nothing that can’t be forgiven if you cry over a sufficient number of sleepless nights.
Such resolution stands in astonishing contrast to the scenes of graphic torture and murder of women, children, and the elderly that Tsukamoto himself wanted to portray over Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?’s 116 minutes. One moment we watch Allen and his squad, some of whom are sociopaths collecting severed ears as trophies, massacre an entire village of civilians to lure in their Viet Cong family members and ensnare them. Next, we are invited to feel for Allen, who, you know, can’t get his marriage straight because of lingering feelings of… anxiety.
Tsukamoto tries hard to broaden the scope of the conversation about the military: he shows that it’s the poor kids who are drawn into becoming human shields for colonial superpowers and doesn’t shy away from exploring the complicity of the Black man in the genocides of the US (despite enduring systemic erasure back home). However, even these potent themes, and especially the redemption tale, which culminates in a group hug schoolchildren offer “Mr. Nelson” after learning he had killed people (no joke), cannot erase the image of a mother covering her child’s eyes as the two of them are brutally shot.
It’s funny that a blockbuster such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey manages to demonstrate with crystal clarity that every war “hero” is, in fact, a war criminal, while a biographical film about wrestling with one’s war crimes fails to do so, but here we are. Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? is an excruciating watch that does not sufficiently respect Allen Nelson’s victims or its viewers enough to recognize that there are crimes you cannot come back from, no matter how downtrodden you are about them.
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger – Directors: Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)
There are comebacks, and then there are comebacks, but a regrouping of the Gallagher brothers to bring their greatest hits back live surpasses the usual trajectory of either by orders of magnitude. Oasis, one of the most beloved rock bands in history and one of the rare working-class groups who actually spoke to the ordinary person, remains adored by so many around the world that seeing Liam and Noel together again feels like a second coming of Christ for millions.
Of course, music documentary veterans Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern (of the Shut Up and Play the Hits fame) understand that adulation is driven not by contemplation, but by feeling or, dare we say it, “vibes”. Just as well, Steven Knight, England’s most prolific TV and film writer, knows there is little new to be said about the iconic Mancunians. The bruvvers, who famously embody one of the most vitriolic sibling dynamics in pop culture, seemingly fell out for good at Rock en Seine in Paris in 2009; fans spend 16 years biting their fingernails, wondering if they’ll ever see their knobhead idols together in the same room.
The immediate cause of the horrific fallout was a jacket Liam wanted to wear that fateful night in 2009. By his own admission, Noel didn’t like it, and Liam smashed guitars and threatened the band in response.
Fast forward to 2025, and the pull of nostalgia in the air is too strong to resist: the Gallaghers are older but also, shockingly, wiser. They know their countless fans crave consolation, camaraderie, and reprieve from the darkness that’s swallowed our world since Oasis split up (that’s how they see it, anyway). Their tour would instantly become one of the biggest and, sure, most lucrative in history. With no new material to promote, we’d get a galore of hits and reminiscence, a hydrogen bomb of unmitigated ecstasy too wild not to be documented for posterity.
As a result, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger emerges as a lightly narrated but big-hearted documentary of Oasis’s reunion and the stadium tour that had 14 million people from 158 countries queuing up for about 2.28 million tickets. Simple and straightforward, it captures the timeless appeal of the Britpop icons by letting the music and people’s relationship to it speak for themselves.
Over the course of 122 minutes, Knight’s featherweight script dedicates a brief vignette to each of the major shows. Cardiff is about the excitement of getting back together and the uncertainty of anticipation; Manchester is a homecoming delight; Dublin is a tale of the Gallaghers’ Irish roots. Around the world, Seoul is about the new generation of Oasis admirers, and Buenos Aires shows Oasis as deities akin to Diego Maradona. Between the anthems, many of which are played almost in full, we get brief quips from Liam, Noel, and occasionally guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs (guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell float around like extras), with some input from the feverish fans.
Fantastic as the hits and crowds are, much remains underexplored in Don’t Look Back in Anger. Lovelace, Southern, and Knight don’t look back on Oasis’s wild history or their place within the broader cultural sphere. They also never wonder why the 2009 pre-breakup arena tour never even sold out, while today six Wembleys cannot contain all the eager Londoners getting drunk over “Cigarettes & Alcohol”.
Still, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is a potent concert film that—just like Liam Gallagher—thrives on grandiosity, goosebumps, and a generous side serving of cheeky humor. Like its protagonists, it’s uninterested in the past or, for that matter, the future, existing fully in a moment of jubilation in which the worries of the world slide away. Tonight, with these motormouth men of the people, we are all rock’n’roll stars.