Last week, Venice opened its 83rd edition with an honorary presentation to George Clooney, with back-to-back standing ovations that immediately set the awards conversation in motion.
Telluride unveiled its secretive lineup and delivered its own round of breakout reactions. As both festivals ran in parallel, Focus Features confirmed a sweeping Oscar campaign for the year’s most unlikely box office phenomenon.
Venice Opens With Clooney, Boyle, and McDonagh’s 14-Minute Roar
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened on September 2 with Danny Boyle’s Ink, a competition entry starring Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Sun editor Larry Lamb. The film follows Murdoch’s acquisition of the British tabloid in 1969 and its lasting transformation of the press.
Netflix’s decision to give the film a theatrical distribution rather than have it go straight to streaming has sparked speculation of an attempt to position it as a contender in the 99th Academy Awards.
The opening night also served as a tribute to George Clooney, who received the Honorary Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from Laura Dern.
The week’s biggest Venice moment arrived Thursday evening when Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine premiered in the Sala Grande to a 14-minute, 44-second standing ovation, the longest yet in this edition.
Wild Horse Nine is McDonagh’s first film since The Banshees of Inisherin. It is a darkly comic CIA drama set on Easter Island in 1973, just before the Chilean military coup. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell star as longtime agency partners dispatched from Santiago as history shifts around them.
Backed by Searchlight Pictures, the film is set for a November 6 release. McDonagh has now opened three consecutive films at Venice, and each of the previous two earned the festival’s Best Screenplay prize before converting into Oscar nominations.
Florian Zeller’s Bunker, an elevated psychological thriller starring real-life couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, premiered during the week. The film has also drawn strong early attention from awards observers.
Telluride Unveils Its 2026 Lineup With Several Films in the Oscar Conversation
The 53rd Telluride Film Festival, running September 4 through September 7, unveiled its lineup the morning of opening day as usual.
Rebecca Hall serves as guest director, curating a sidebar of her movie influences that includes Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, and Joseph Losey’s The Servant, among others.
Tributes went to John Malkovich, Sandra Hüller, and Andrew Haigh, each accompanied by a screening of their new work.
Just like at Venice, Danny Boyle’s Ink screened on the first day of Telluride, marking its North American premiere at the region’s film festival that is traditionally considered the unofficial kickoff to the Academy Awards race. While speaking about its critical acclaim and the making of the film, Boyle revealed that the production featured generative AI.
NYFF Lands Guadagnino’s Artificial as a Surprise World Premiere
The week also brought a significant addition to the 64th New York Film Festival (NYFF). On September 1, Film at Lincoln Center confirmed that Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which Amazon MGM declined to release, will have its world premiere at the festival on October 5.
Guadagnino’s take on Sam Altman traces the two decades of AI research that led to the current moment. It stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim called it “the movie for its moment.” The festival had previously provided the launch pad for the Academy Award-winning The Social Network, which also explored a controversial take on another tech boss and starred Garfield.
NYFF runs September 25 through October 12. Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth serves as the festival’s centerpiece, with Ava DuVernay’s 14th also set for a world premiere.
Focus Features Launches Obsession’s Oscar Campaign
Fresh off her breakout performance in the box-office hit Obsession and her casting as Rogue in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Inde Navarrette has taken a step towards her Hollywood A-list ascent.
On Tuesday, Apple Original Films and Plan B officially acquired a screenplay by Andrew Nunnelly, entitled The Waffle House Index. Both companies will produce alongside Navarette, who will serve as an executive producer.
Louis Paxton is attached to direct Navarette in the story, which follows a graveyard-shift waitress navigating a chain of apocalyptic events.
Before the announcement, Variety confirmed the day before that Focus Features is mounting a full-scale Oscar campaign for Obsession, which has now grossed more than $505 million worldwide against its $750,000 production budget.
Inde Navarrette will campaign in the Best Actress category. Director Curry Barker will be pushed across Best Director, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. The studio is treating this as a front-runner campaign ahead of the 99th Oscars set for March 14, 2027.
