Venice 2026: Primetime and Possible Love explore sketchy journalistic ethics, by David Katz

David Thomson, one of the most celebrated writers on the movies, made the subject of his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, his skepticism about the very art form to which he’s dedicated his career. Cinema, he writes, is almost too powerful: the forcefulness of the big screen image, and the beautiful movie stars upon them, suspend our critical faculties and create dangerous illusions, and spring from a deeply corrupt industry themselves (although, he’s mainly referring to Hollywood here). 

Two of the most anticipated films at Venice this year, Primetime and Possible Love, also happen to explore the damage film and filmmaking can do, although stop short of scorched-earth critique.

The former is the A24-backed fiction debut of Lance Oppenheim - who’s had precocious early success with documentaries on American subcultural niches - and is maybe a premature step into the A-list festival limelight for the young director. Starring one of the Venice’s biggest red carpet gets, Robert Pattinson, it tracks the production of the notorious US network TV show To Catch a Predator, which followed journalist Chris Hansen (who the actor portrays) - in collaboration with vigilante groups and law enforcement - setting up sting operations for entrapping paedophiles. Very much in the sensationalist niche of that era’s TV, the show finally came under ethical skepticism of its own; the past decade or so has seen a retrospective condemnation of its impact, its stirring up of moral panic, and for seeding aspects of paranoid obsessions on the political far-right.

With Skyler Gisondo’s dim-bulb decoy performer as another focal perspective on the story, the film, in a a pacy thriller-style, depicts the show’s rise to pop-cultural prominence, with its final portion focusing on an ill-fated scheme to expose a high-ranked assistant district attorney. Beyond lighting the conventionally dramatic scenes in a way aiming for David Fincher and the Safdie brothers, although the execution comes up short, Primetime create the most interest as a time capsule of Bush-years madness, sending jolts of recognition through those growing up then, with its many archival-footage cutaways. It also adroitly sees how the show’s odd fusion of justice-seeking and show business prefigures the rise of Trump. Otherwise, last year’s excellent documentary on To Catch a Predator by David Osit, simply entitled Predators, does a better job of explaining the different facets of the programme, and exploring the surrounding context, and then its afterlife, in a clear-headed way.

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A key question filmmakers and commentators are asking in this era, beyond any previously, is analysing who has the right to make what film. Lee Chang-Dong’s Possible Love, his long-awaited follow-up to his excellent mystery Burning, is a very thoughtful and pragmatic response to this query, not just exploring a major incident of industrial action at a large Korean factory, and its effect on one of the families involved, but following a small documentary crew who’re trying to make a sensitive and ethical film about it.

Central to the dynamic are two married couples on either side of the production: Mi-ok and her PTSD-suffering and laid-off husband Ho-seok; and the filmmaker Ye-ji and her business investor and arts patron spouse Sang-woo. Their respective married lives of spartan modesty, and privileged largesse, are first seen contrasted in cross-cut sequences; then as they grow closer due to the documentary’s successful filming, they spend a weekend together at the latter’s summer house, where the tone happily starts to resemble both The Invite, and a good episode of The White Lotus. 

Even though Lee’s screenplay depicts the situation as often deeply awkward, with Ye-ji’s relationship to the events being the definition of an extractive one, it’s undeniably a transformative experience for both parties. For a nuclear family coping with long-term unemployment and mental health issues, the documentary is at once therapeutic, cathartic and invasive for them, and allows them to share and sneakily enjoy the privilege and glamour of the other couple. Beyond nonfiction as a whole, there is also something to this in all of cinema, for the roles of creator and spectator alike.