Murdoch and Musk in the crosshairs at Venice film festival
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- Danny Boyle's "Ink" opens the 83rd Venice Film Festival on 2 September, with Guy Pearce portraying Rupert Murdoch in a film about the tycoon's 1969 purchase of the Sun; the script is by playwright James Graham
- Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary "Musk" profiles Elon Musk and screens out of competition, part of a festival lineup that the source frames as taking direct aim at the print and digital era's most powerful media figures
- Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine" brings John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell to the Lido as unlikely CIA agents in Chile on the eve of Pinochet's coup, in the director's first feature since The Banshees of Inisherin
- Real-life spouses Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in Florian Zeller's "Bunker," while real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara appear in Werner Herzog's first dramatic feature in seven years, "Bucking Fastard," which has shifted from a Chaplin twins biopic to a mountain-tunneling odyssey
- Nanni Moretti returns to Venice competition for the first time since 1989 with "It Will Happen Tonight," ending a two-decade preference for showing his work at Cannes
- Female-directed competition films dropped from six in 2025 to just one — May El-Toukhy's "Woman Unknown" — among the 20 titles in this year's main competition, a reversal the source flags explicitly
- Liam and Noel Gallagher are confirmed to attend the premiere of the Oasis reunion documentary "Don't Look Back in Anger," while Russell Crowe is expected for his band documentary "What Love Builds."
Why it matters: Venice is doubling down on its pitch as the glitziest of Europe's three major festivals, stacking A-list stars and politically charged content against Cannes and Berlin. The two-pronged targeting of Murdoch and Musk signals an unusually confrontational editorial stance, but the collapse from six female-directed competition entries in 2025 to a single film in 2026 is a reversal festival artistic director Alberto Barbera will inevitably be pressed to explain.
