London Today Venice opens the autumn, and a British film opens Venice
The autumn film season does not begin in London. It begins on a strip of sand outside Venice, and by the time it reaches a cinema here the argument about what is good has largely been had without us.
What opens on 2 September
The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from 2 to 12 September 2026 on the Lido, under artistic director Alberto Barbera. The competition jury is chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
It opens with Ink, directed by Danny Boyle, with Guy Pearce. It closes with God Laughs, by Giovanni Veronesi. Honorary Golden Lions go to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney.
The British end of the competition
Two of the twenty competition titles announced on 23 July come from directors working out of these islands: Boyle’s Ink, and Wild Horse Nine from Martin McDonagh.
Around them: Werner Herzog with Bucking Fastard, Hirokazu Koreeda with Look Back, Lee Chang-dong with Possible Love, plus Nanni Moretti, Florian Zeller and Shinya Tsukamoto. Barbera warned that this year’s selection runs long; the longest is Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau, at 210 minutes.
Why a Londoner should care about the Lido
Venice is the first of three festivals — Venice, Telluride, Toronto — that between them settle which autumn films get bought, which get a proper release and which quietly go to a streaming service. A title that lands well on the Lido this fortnight is a title that turns up on a London screen with a poster full of stars on it.
It is also the reason the next fortnight matters here specifically. The BFI London Film Festival publishes its full programme on Wednesday 2 September — the same day Venice opens — and runs 7 to 18 October. A good part of what appears on that programme is being shown to an audience for the first time this week.
The honest caveat
A Golden Lion is a jury of seven people in a room. It predicts distribution far better than it predicts what anyone will actually enjoy, and the films that turn out to matter from a given September are regularly the ones that left Venice with nothing.
The useful thing to do with the Venice reviews is not to build a watchlist from the winners. It is to note the titles that reviewers disagree about most sharply — those are the ones worth seeing at a festival rather than waiting for, because a consensus film will still be a consensus film in March, and a divisive one is best seen before you have been told what to think of it.
Source: Screen International checked against the source
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