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Venice 2026: the low down
First things first, if you’d like to partner with RecDek House this year at Venice, give me a shout by way of reply to this email
Now then, Festival Director Alberto Barbera laid out the 83rd Venice line-up. Its kinda Cannes-ish. 2026 will lean hard on independent auteurs, dusted with A-listers, notably light on Hollywood studio or streamer muscle. Quieter than recent years, less red-carpet sparkle, but no shortage of films to get worked up about, plus a Mancunian shot of rock 'n' roll.
Martin McDonagh chases another Golden Lion with Wild Horse Nine, a black comedy about CIA men sent to Easter Island on the eve of the 1973 Chilean coup: Malkovich, Rockwell, Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey, Searchlight distributing. Florian Zeller follows The Son with Bunker, a psychological thriller pairing real-life couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a tech mogul's mysterious building project creeps into their lives. Danny Boyle opens proceedings with Ink, his first Lido outing, Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Jack O'Connell as the editor who built The Sun into Britain's bestselling tabloid; Netflix has already snapped up the Americas.
Werner Herzog (who was invited to Cannes this year but walked when his movie wasn't offered competition!) turns up with Bucking Fastard - the first time Rooney and Kate Mara have shared a screen - twins tunnelling through a mountain in search of somewhere true love might survive. Lance Oppenheim, of Ren Faire fame, brings the A24-backed Primetime, with Robert Pattinson (also producing, alongside Ari Aster) as a reporter who upends television itself. And Casey Affleck resurfaces from the indie undergrowth with Company, a gothic mystery set on a winter night in 1975, his first film behind the camera since 2019.
The lone major-studio title is Disney's Oasis reunion doc, screening as a special event before an IMAX run from September 11 and a later home on Disney+. Expect the Gallagher brothers on the Lido and their first official joint interviews in a quarter-century. And who wouldn’t want to be reminded of their glorious return.
Some lads I know even got into the afterparty, said it was absolutely mad…
Elsewhere out of competition: Russell Crowe documents his own band; Luc Besson pens a Kiefer Sutherland–Al Pacino crime thriller; Paul Schrader extends his lonely-men-in-rooms sequence; and Kornél Mundruczó lines up Ellen Burstyn, Taika Waititi and Pamela Anderson for a road trip involving a lost racing pigeon.
And, Alex Gibney digs behind Musk in his latest doc, Barbara Kopple weaves New York labour stories, and Palestinian filmmaker Ahmed Hassouna follows a photographer-father through the war in Gaza.
A lot on to take in, all rather exciting.
And…this weekend
Your very own cinema-near-you will provide plenty of opportunity to see stunning storytelling on the big screen - how’s about a quite delightfully weird comedy.
OUR PICK OF THE WEEK
Two unknown Canadian musicians will apparently do anything to land a gig at Toronto's Rivoli, and that gloriously daft premise powers the maddest film (premiered at SXSW 2025).
It comes from comic duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, whose long-running bit started back in 2007 as a scrappy, copyright-ignoring web series and runs on one rule: the pair go out in character as hopeless, deluded versions of themselves and rope real members of the public into the gag, Sacha Baron Cohen / Nathan Fielder style. It grew into a TV show in the late 2010s. Now it's a film, which means everything has to be bigger, sillier and somehow still legible to people who've never heard of them.
So Matt hatches a plan to skydive into the Rogers Centre mid-baseball-game, leaping off the CN Tower to do it. Cue the pair trying to smuggle cable cutters past tower security, Matt shuffling through the metal detector with a parachute-shaped bulge under his blazer. The recurring joke is that he physically cannot keep his schemes to himself, blurting them to every stranger he meets, Wile E. Coyote sketching out his own doom. The reactions are unbuyable: a hardware-store clerk hears the parachute plan and gives his blessing purely on libertarian principle. You couldn't script it, and cinematographer Jared Raab shoots most of it guerrilla-style from hidden vantage points.
Things get unhinged. Jared himself becomes a character when the RV gets converted into a Back to the Future time machine that won't run without a bottle of Orbitz, the long-dead Canadian soft drink. There's gatecrashing Drake's house, infiltrating a police press conference, all done without permits and held together by improvisation and nerve.
Under the cartoon chaos, though, there's a real thread: the friendship itself, and what happens when Jay finally tires of playing along and wants out. It stages the breakup during a sneak preview of The Hangover, which doubles as a merciless reminder of how poorly that film's comedy has aged.
The biggest laugh is meta, marvelling that this thing exists at all. A love letter to the daft junk culture that lodges in impressionable heads and never leaves.
See you next time.
Ed
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