Venice 2025 Lineup: Del Toro, Bigelow, Lanthimos Lead

Venice 2025: The Auteur Era Fights Its Final War on the Lido

Contents

🎬 In Competition – Venezia 82 🎥 Out of Competition – Fiction 🎞️ Out of Competition – Non-fiction / Documentaries 🧭 Orizzonti

It's not every year you see del Toro, Bigelow, Lanthimos, Jarmusch, Park, and Baumbach all slugging it out in competition. In fact, it's never happened. The 82nd Venice Film Festival, running August 27 through September 6, isn't just a stacked lineup—it's a battleground. One last stand for the old guard of international auteur cinema before the walls close in.

You can feel the exhaustion behind the spectacle. The names are big, the titles are promising, the press conference was polished. And yet… it all feels vaguely familiar. Like a reunion tour where no one's quite sure who still wants to play.

Let's start with the competition. Del Toro brings Frankenstein—finally—a project that's been crawling through development hell since at least the Obama years. Yorgos Lanthimos returns with Bugonia, which, if rumor is correct, is his take on a Korean sci-fi cult film. Bigelow (A House of Dynamite) is back in the chair after an absence long enough to make you wonder if she'd walked away. And Baumbach's Jay Kelly sounds like a domestic character study with vague echoes of Greenberg, though no one's confirmed the tone. Even Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice) enters the ring—his first festival feature since Decision to Leave seduced Cannes in 2022.

These are not lightweights. They're generational stylists—names that built the 2000s festival circuit into the prestige pipeline that Hollywood now pillages for credibility. And yet the energy around this year's slate isn't quite celebratory. It's anxious. Defensive. Like the industry is clinging to its auteurs the way a sunken ship grips its barnacles.

Maybe it's the runtimes. Julian Schnabel's In the Hand of Dante clocks in at 150 minutes, uncut, after financier clashes. Festival chief Alberto Barbera casually admitted that 2h15 to 2h30 is now the “new international standard.” What used to be a length reserved for epics is now the baseline for stories that could often be told in 97.

Maybe it's the optics. Guadagnino's After the Hunt was bumped out of competition—by his own request, sure—but still, it's a curious demotion for a director Venice has historically coddled. Herzog, Van Sant, Poitras, Martel—once cornerstones of the conversation—are all shuttled out of competition, dropped into the documentary trenches or specialty sidebars.

Or maybe it's the absences. No Edward Berger (Ballad of a Small Player is Telluride-bound). No Chloé Zhao—Hamnet, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, is skipping Venice entirely. It's one thing to lose titles to Toronto. It's another to be ignored altogether.

Of course, there's still plenty of heat. Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee will test whether her quiet style can carry historical weight. Benny Safdie, on solo directorial duty, brings The Smashing Machine—a testosterone bomb if early whispers are to be believed. And Shu Qi, in a late-career pivot, makes her directorial debut with Girl. How that plays in a competition field notorious for chewing up first-timers will be worth watching.

There's also the eternal question of relevance. Are these films shaping the next decade of cinema—or are they the last echoes of a bygone one? It's hard to tell. Even Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother feels more like a cryptic puzzle piece than a statement. And with 5 of the 21 competition titles directed by women—a modest gain at best—we're still far from anything that could be called a transformation.

Barbera, for his part, has curated a thoughtful slate. Maybe too thoughtful. It's undeniably artful, but there's a lurking suspicion that these titles are less about provocation or evolution—and more about endurance. Survival. A festival designed to prove that cinema still breathes… even if it's wheezing.

So what are we really looking at here?

A celebration? Sure. A flex? Definitely. But also a farewell—if not to the filmmakers, then to the rhythm they once set. Venice 2025 looks like a lineup built to honor its veterans. Whether it accidentally exposes their limits… well, that's what critics are for.

Let's see if any of them still know how to knock us flat.