The 2026 Venice Film Festival gets underway with both uncertainty and cautious optimism, by David Katz

The 2026 Venice Film Festival gets underway with both uncertainty and cautious optimism

Despite the justified criticism of this year’s competition line-up, sight unseen, the opening few days of Venice always deliver. With the curators knowing that Wednesday-to-Thursday is the short window where the festival has maximum industry and press attention, before Telluride and Toronto kick off, us lucky folk in the press corps get to see three or four of the year’s most significant movies almost back-to-back, projected on one of the world’s greatest screens, the Sala Darsena. The mid-film clapping responses if a film is working can be over-the-top, but it’s still interesting to note how something is playing, and if your own reaction is in sync. TÁR, from 2022, was an especially memorable one in hindsight, where you could feel the audience totally locked in: from the feeling of relief, from some in the audience, as Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) excoriates political correctness in a Juilliard lecture, then being mesmerised by the change in tone as it tracks her steep downfall.

Whilst you sense festival head Alberto Barbera would’ve loved to begin this year’s edition with Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s Digger, or David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, he still had some prime directors to select, with Danny Boyle’s Ink opening the competition, followed by premieres of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard and Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. To begin with the first and last of those, Ink proved a slightly disappointing return for Boyle, after he reminded us in 28 Years Later just how dynamic and imaginative he can be with the right script. With acclaimed writer James Graham adapting his 2017 West End play, the film hews too close to the fast-talking playbook of Aaron Sorkin, who Boyle already collaborated with on Steve Jobs, setting up a rote moral rise-and-fall narrative, and vouching for The Sun’s significance to Trumpian right-wing politics a bit too much. 

Wild Horse Nine should be a great crowdpleaser in cinemas, and McDonagh’s growing directorial skills give his peppery dialogue exceptional comic timing. But in a film that critics so far have characterised as a retread of his key tropes, I was most surprised by its sentimental streak: with their similarly thinning white hair, and round, handsome faces, John Malkovich’s political assassin feels like a surrogate or stand-in for the director, and a bit of a repository for some of his expected concerns about ageing and the passage of time. In spite of its sincerity, our heartstrings are tugged at a bit too aggressively in this film by the end, although Malkovich’s charisma salvages it, with his smart underplaying of some of the outrageous dialogue McDonagh gives him.

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When I was becoming more interested in heavy auteur cinema in my late teens, Werner Herzog was one of the most immediately appealing, and a bit of an art-film gateway drug. Not coincidentally, that late noughties era also coincided with one of his richer artistic periods, the moment just before his trademark, grandiose voice-over started to become a comic cliché. The mainstream news magazine TIME called him one of the world’s most 100 influential people in 2009, which scans correctly. Simply, he was cool.

In 2026, he seems more of a fading giant, but interest rightly returned with news of Bucking Fastard, his first major fiction work in more than a decade. In film festival line-ups, in spite of their geographic and sometimes-stylistic diversity, there’s a commonly held baseline of realism. Even if various other aspects are heightened and exaggerated, a sort of transparently familiar reality is the norm. Whilst based on an obscure real-life case, Herzog allows his eccentricity and fabulism to flourish as he grants the actress siblings Rooney and Kate Mara the roles of sisters Joanie and Jeanie Holbrooke, whose most discerning feature is that they talk almost in unison.

Herzog isn’t interested in explaining the source of or rationale for this, instead exploring how they can (and mostly can’t) fit in throughout contemporary working-class Dublin. The film begins with a harassment court trial, as they’re charged with stalking their next-door neighbour (played by Orlando Bloom, once pined-over for his role as Lord of the Rings’ Legolas). Declaring their abiding love, they won’t accept his marriage, after he breaks off a brief affair with them (with Herzog not sparing the quasi-incestuous visual detail of this). After being granted the expected restraining order, they embark on an existential journey to fulfil the dreams and passion in their hearts, a sentiment that feels endearing because Herzog himself completely believes in it, and isn’t patronising or condescending towards them.

The details of the Holbrooke’s social status makes a mockery of plausibility: how have they supported themselves over their adult life, and could they be suffering from a mental health issue, for instance? Yet, Herzog treats them at utter face value, as another of his “beautiful” freaks after Klaus Kinski and Bruno S., although the sentiment provided is richer than how he actually builds and fleshes them out as characters, no matter their idiosyncrasies.