Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).

Peter Sarsgaard and Cailee Spaeny were among the winners at the 2023 Venice Film Festival!

Jessica Chastain is looking stunning at the premiere of her new movie!

Jessica Chastain is making a statement while promoting her new movie.

As is the case every year, September remains a notable film month mainly because so many overlapping and concurrent film festivals are taking place. As Venice, Telluride, and the Toronto International Film Festival begin and come to a close, with others such as Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival upcoming, there’s plenty on the horizon for exciting films even if they won’t be playing theatrically, for a few months.

Fremantle kicked off its presence at the Venice Film Festival with a bang this year with the announcement of its new €150M ($162.7M) Scripted Fund forged in partnership with Israel-based IBI Investment House. 

Marta Balaga Move over, Richard Donner. In “Behind the Mountains,” premiering in Venice’s Horizons section, Mohamed Ben Attia makes sure “you’ll believe a man can fly” once again. Although it might not be as graceful.

Jacob Elordi is getting ready for the premiere of his new movie.

Mads Mikkelsen and his son Carl Jacobsen Mikkelsen make quite a dashing pair!

The Venice Film Festival began August 30 with opening-night movie , an Italian World War II drama, kicking off a lineup for the venerable fest’s 80th edition that includes world premieres of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, David Fincher’s The Killer, Ava DuVernay’s Origins, and new films from lightning-rod directors Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Luc Besson.

Caleb Landry Jones hits the red carpet with longtime girlfriend Katya Zvereva for the premiere of Dogman during the 2023 Venice Film Festival on Thursday (August 31) in Italy.

Luc Besson’s Dogman had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday night, scoring a nearly six-minute standing ovation from the crowd inside the Palazzo del Cinema.

Patrick Dempsey cleaned up nicely before hitting the red carpet for the premiere of his new movie Ferrari at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. However, what really stole the show was his striking silver hair.

Michael Mann would seem a perfect fit for a biopic of Italian motorsports legend Enzo Ferrari, himself being a master technician and a director working at the high end of his commercial craft. The result, though, is a strangely tame beast, an introspective look at an in-between moment in its subject’s life, when his business hit the rocks, his marriage all but imploded and a series of fatal accidents kept his name in the papers for all the wrong reasons.

Rita Ora looked stunning walking around on Thursday (August 31) Venice, Italy!

At first glance, it might seem like Pablo Larraín’s last two films share only a couple of superficial commonalities: they are both biopics in the sense they tell stories of real-life people, Princess Diana in 2021’s “Spencer” and Augusto Pinochet in 2023’s “El Conde”; and they have both premiered in competition at the glitzy Venice Film Festival. Alas, scratch the surface and both films stand as an unlikely diptych about dysfunctional families dealing with the generational sins that have made and broken their bloodlines.

Pablo Larraín’s string of mostly 20th century biographical dramas hits a pinnacle of audacious brilliance with El Conde (The Count), a madly inspired reinvention of events embedded in the notion that longtime Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet became a vampire who ultimately tires of life and wants out after living some 250 years. 

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent As Chile prepares to mark 50 years since the Sept. 11, 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín is back in Venice – following “Spencer” in 2021 – with scathing satire “El Conde,” in which Pinochet, a symbol of global fascism, resurfaces as a 250-year old vampire living in a rundown rural mansion after faking his death. “Pinochet had never been portrayed in film or TV before,” Larrain said.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín returns to Venice this evening with his latest pic El Conde, a black-and-white satire of dictator Augusto Pinochet, which he co-wrote and directed for Netflix.

With six feature credits in the last decade, Pablo Larraín is among the most prolific filmmakers working today, but he returns to the Lido this week with a new proposition.