Venice Film Festival Reviews: 'The Smashing Machine,' 'Frankenstein,' 'After the Hunt,' 'Bugonia,' 'A House of Dynamite' and More J.
- - Venice Film Festival Reviews: 'The Smashing Machine,' 'Frankenstein,' 'After the Hunt,' 'Bugonia,' 'A House of Dynamite' and More
J. Kim MurphySeptember 3, 2025 at 5:41 AM
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Ciao! The 82nd annual Venice Film Festival is underway and the stars have hit the canals, with this year's world premieres including Yorgos Lanthimos kidnap thriller "Bugonia," Noah Baumbach's showbiz dramedy "Jay Kelly," Guillermo del Toro's lavish adaptation "Frankenstein," Luca Guadagnino's college campus thriller "After the Hunt" and Benny Safdie's UFC biopic "The Smashing Machine."
New films from Mona Fastvold, Kathryn Bigelow, Paolo Sorrentino, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, Gus Van Sant, Lucrezia Martel, László Nemes and Kaouther Ben Hania are also in the lineup. This year's jury is headed by Alexander Payne, the director of films like "The Holdovers," "Election" and "Sideways."
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Venice often serves as the launch of awards season, coming ahead of an onslaught of other fall festivals including Telluride, Toronto and New York that distributors use to lay the foundation for campaigning in the coming months.
See all of Variety's reviews from the 2025 Venice Film Festival below. The roundup will be throughout the festival to include the most recent reviews.
'Dead Man's Wire' (dir. Gus Van Sant)
Read Variety's review: Gus Van Sant and Bill Skarsgård turn a freak hostage incident from 1977 into a miniature "Dog Day Afternoon." The movie totally plays in a hair-trigger way, yet one can question how Van Sant has tweaked the facts.
'Marc by Sofia' (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Read Variety's review: Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs talk fashion, friendship and Fosse in a slight and sparkly documentary. Coppola's first nonfiction feature is built around the unveiling of Jacobs' Spring 2024 collection, while darting back and forth across a career spanning over 30 years.
'A House of Dynamite' (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
Read Variety's review: Kathryn Bigelow's nuclear thriller is a high-tension potboiler with pretensions. It replays the same lone-nuclear-missile-launched-at-the-U.S. scenario three times, with a lot of huffing and puffing but diminishing returns.
'The Stranger' (dir. François Ozon)
Read Variety's review: François Ozon adapts the Camus classic into a sharply cinematic enigma. Rising French star Benjamin Voisin delivers a superb portrait of disaffection in a bracingly lossless transfer of book to screen that relishes the novel's menace and mystery.
'Kin Novak's Vertigo' (dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)
Read Variety's review: One of the last living legends of Hollywood's Golden Age has plenty still to say for herself. The latest movie-mad documentary from the prolific Alexandre O. Philippe doesn't do much but hang out with its magnetic subject, and that turns out to be enough.
'The Smashing Machine' (dir. Benny Safdie)
Read Variety's review: Dwayne Johnson is a revelation in Benny Safdie's laceratingly humane sports biopic. In his first solo outing, the director tells the story of UFC fighter Mark Kerr, crafting a clear-eyed drama that feels like a cousin to "The Wrestler."
'Landmarks' (dir. Lucrecia Martel)
Read Variety's review: Lucrecia Martel's first documentary reflects potently on land theft and indigenous erasure. The Argentine auteur's signature rigor, if not her radicalism, carries over to nonfiction in a study that pivots on the 2009 murder of Chuschagasta leader Javier Chocobar.
'Father Mother Sister Brother' (dir. Jim Jarmusch)
Read Variety's review: A starry cast excels in Jim Jarmusch's charming triplicate portrait of familial (mis)understanding. Adam Driver, Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore and more imbue the American indie pioneer's three-part dramedy with trademark wry humor but also new notes of mellow, generous wisdom.
'The Wizard of the Kremlin' (dir. Olivier Assayas)
Read Variety's review: Jude Law, as Vladimir Putin, and Paul Dano, as his right-hand shadow, give ace performances in what is basically a glorified TV movie. The two actors are compelling, but Olivier Assayas's film has an episodic, one-thing-after-another quality that doesn't allow it to gather force.
Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin)
Read Variety's review: George MacKay and Callum Turner set sail on a bewitching, time-surfing voyage. Cornish indie auteur Mark Jenkin's third feature combines the analog throwback approach of his debut "Bait" with the genre experimentation of his follow-up "Enys Men," to thoroughly satisfying effect.
'The Holy Boy' (dir. Paolo Strippoli)
Read Variety's review: A valley of smiles is really a vale of tears in a clever, creppy Italian chiller. Under cover of an enjoyably eerie horror movie, director Paolo Strippoli investigates the dangers of displaced grief in a secretive Italian village where no one is ever in any pain.
'Late Fame' (dir. Kent Jones)
Read Variety's review: Willem Dafoe is a lost poet who gets rediscovered in Kent Jones's enchanting drama of Bohemia, then and now. Dafoe gives a performance that's like a slowly unfolding wildflower in a movie that confirms Jones's lyrical gifts as a filmmaker.
'Frankenstein' (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
Read Variety's review: Guillermo del Toro's dream project has been gestating so long, the master's creation arrives overstuffed and unwieldy. Whxat should have been the perfect pairing of artist and material proves visually ravishing, but can't measure up to the impossibly high expectations del Toro's fans have for the project.
'Below the Clouds' (dir. Gianfranco Rosi)
Read Variety's review: Nothing erupts in Gianfranco Rosi's lyrical Vesuvius portrait, but it brims with life and contrast. The Italian docmaker spent three years filming in and around Naples for this layered, rewarding study of modern living amid remnants of ancient history.
'Broken English' (dir. Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard)
Read Variety's review: An adoring hybrid ode to Marianne Faithfull that gives her the last salty word — the fictional accoutrements of Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth's doc can be bothersome, but interviews and performance footage centering the woman herself are riveting.
'No Other Choice' (dir. Park Chan-wook)
Read Variety's review: Park Chan-wook's dazzling murder comedy is a masterclass in controlled chaos. The Korean director of "Oldboy," "The Handmaiden" and "Decision to Leave" lights up the Venice competition darkly, with a deliriously entertaining satire on the derangement of being downsized.
'At Work' (dir. Valérie Donzelli)
Read Variety's review: A writer is both inspired and exploited by the gig economy in Valérie Donzelli's perceptive character study. Bastien Bouillon is wonderful as a shambling, self-unmade hero in this French drama, a quiet gem in Venice competition.
'After the Hunt' (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Read Variety's review: Luca Guadagnino's sexual-accusation drama plays like a muddled "Tár," with Julia Roberts as a scheming professor. The film is made with craft and intrigue, yet too much of it leaves us scratching our heads.
'Cover-Up' (dir. Laura Poitras)
Read Variety's review: Laura Poitras' enthralling portrait of Seymour Hersh makes you ask, "Where have all the investigative reporters gone?" Fifty years later, the stories that Hersh reported — like the My Lai massacre — now look iconic. But the documentary captures how uncovering corruption is always a mountain to climb.
'Jay Kelly' (dir. Noah Baumbach)
Read Variety's review: George Clooney plays a version of himself in Noah Baumbach's lightly diverting but overly soft inside-Hollywood drama. The lead character is a beloved movie star just like Clooney… except for the cold dark side we don't quite believe.
'Bugonia' (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Read Variety's review: Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons descend into a riveting duel in Yorgos Lanthimos' scaldingly topical kidnap thriller. The director is at the top of his visionary nihilistic game in a movie about what's happening to the world.
'Orphan' (dir. László Nemes)
Read Variety's review: László Nemes returns with a heavy dose of sepia-tinted childhood torment. The "Son of Saul" director's portrait of a 12-year-old boy confronted with ugly family secrets in 1950s Soviet-occupied Hungary is handsomely mounted but narratively inert.
'Memory' (dir. Vladlena Sandu)
Read Variety's review: A haunting memorial collage crafted from a child's experience of war, Ukrainian director Vladlena Sandu's strikingly illustrated recollections of war-torn Grozny form an anguished, urgent, mesmerizing portrait of self-replicating generational trauma.
'La Grazia' (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)
Read Variety's review: Paolo Sorrentino opens the Venice Film Festival with a presidential drama more understated than usual for him, and better for it. Toni Servillo plays the president of Italy, who is staid to a fault (just like the movie), though with hidden depths.
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