The Artistic Director of the Venice Film Festival is sounding the alarm, because nowadays, it seems that feature films have ballooned to lengths well over 120 minutes, often reaching 150 minutes. The development “is quite concerning for those who have to program the movies,” Alberto Barbera explained, “because packing all of them in our agenda is quite a problem.”

Twenty-one films are being screened in the main competition for the 82nd Venice Film Festival from August 27 to September 6, 2025. Despite scheduling pressures, the same number competed for the Golden Lion last year, when the lineup included Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. That 215-minute monster justified its runtime by earning the Silver Lion for Best Director.

Data scientists as we are (we are not), we set out to calculate the average length of films from recent years for comparison. But we stopped after entering three figures into a spreadsheet, because do you know what we realized? We don’t care! And there’s no time for crunching numbers when we’ve got another thrilling program, curated by experts at the world’s oldest film festival.

Here’s what they have in store for us this year!

Host                                                                                                             

Festival attendees are being guided through the opening ceremony to the final awards ceremony by this year’s host, actress Emanuela Fanelli. Although her acting career began just ten years ago, with Claudio Caligari’s Don’t Be Bad (2015), Fanelli is already a two-time winner of the David di Donatello award, the top prize from Italy’s film academy, Accademia del Cinema Italiano.

The first award was for a supporting role in Paolo Virzì’s Dry (2022), which premiered at Venice. The second was likewise for a supporting role, in Paola Cortellisi’s There’s Still Tomorrow (2023), which won a total of six David di Donatello awards.

Guests of Honor

This year’s winners of Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement are two filmmakers who have marched to the beat of their own drum – even when it alienated the rest of the orchestra, scandalized the viewing public, affronted God, and (gasp) irritated certain studio executives.

Actress Kim Novak won the Golden Globe® for Most Promising Newcomer for Phffft in 1955, but her work was not recognized by a major awards body again until 1997, when she received an Honorary Golden Bear at Berlin. That was not for want of stellar performances, the most memorable of which was her rendering of the split personality Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

Although Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures may have intended to use Novak as a pawn in games against Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, Novak became the first woman to found a production studio. She delivered numerous transcendent performances before leaving Hollywood to paint, write poetry, and care for horses and llamas. We suspect the llamas – notorious spitters – proved much better company than some of her former business associates.

Director Werner Herzog grew up without a television or phone in rural Bavaria, where his mother brought him as an infant to escape the horrors of World War II. Perhaps due to an unusual low-tech upbringing, Herzog became one of the most original directors of his generation, not only stunning the world with visionary films but also founding the countercultural Rogue Film School.

Herzog has received only one Academy Award® nomination, for Encounters at the End of the World (2007), but he is a prolific, inventive, and highly distinctive filmmaker, who has already made 70+ films over 7 decades. The most widely known is perhaps Grizzly Man (2005). Although Herzog still has many projects in progress, he told the story of his unconventional life in a memoir called Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2023).

Jury

The Chair of the Official Competition Jury is director and Academy Award®-winning screenwriter Alexander Payne. He won Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars® for The Descendants (with co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) in 2012 and Sideways (with co-writer Jim Taylor) in 2005. The same films, as well as his earlier film Election (1999), were first recognized with Film independent Spirit Awards. The most recent film that Payne directed was The Holdovers (2023), a holiday comedy featuring Da’Vine Joy Randolph in an Oscar®-winning role.

The other members of the jury for the main competition are director Stéphane Brizé (The Measure of a Man), director Maura Delpero (Vermiglio), director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), director Mohammad Rasoulof (There Is No Evil), actress Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here), and actress Zhao Tao (Shun Li and the Poet).

Films

Several past winners of the Golden Lion will screen films at Venice again this year, but not all of them are in competition. Looking over the full lineup, we also have our eyes on new works by auteurs who have not yet won Venice’s top prize.

Among the returning laureates, the one who most recently took home the Golden Lion is Yorgos Lanthimos. He was recognized for Poor Things in 2023. This year, he is trying for a second Golden Lion with Bugonia, once again starring Academy Award® winner Emma Stone.

Gianfranco Rossi, winner of the 2013 Golden Lion for his Roman roadside documentary Sacro GRA, returns to the Venice competition with Below the Clouds, a documentary about life around Mount Vesuvius. Meanwhile, Shangjun Cai, winner of the 2011 Silver Lion for Best Director for People Mountain People Sea, could now gain a Golden Lion with his heart-rending drama The Sun Rises on Us All.

They will face tough competition, of course. Other films in the official lineup include Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and more.

Out of competition, Laura Poitras is screening Cover-Up, a documentary (co-directed with Mark Obenhaus) on the U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh. Poitras won the 2022 Golden Lion for her opioid-crisis documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Another past winner of the Golden Lion who is now screening a documentary out of competition is Sofia Coppola. Coppola won the 2010 Golden Lion for Somewhere, a fictional portrait of a disaffected movie star. She has now completed Marc by Sofia, a documentary about the fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Finally, out-of-competition screenings of two films will provide further opportunities to celebrate this year’s winners of lifetime achievement awards, Novak and Herzog. Kim Novak’s Vertigo, the latest documentary about cinema from Alexandre Philippe, will be screened in honor of the Hollywood icon. Herzog will unveil Ghost Elephants, a nature documentary filmed in Angola.

Viva il Cinema!

We have barely begun to tell you about all the wonderful films at Venice this year, let alone the stars who might attend. (Julia Roberts will be there for the first time!)  As Artistic Director Barbera observed, there are too many exciting things to see, and that is a terrific problem to have.

Please join us in thanking the organizers of Venice 2025 – and in wishing the best of luck to all the filmmakers featured this year!