Venice Film Festival 2026: American monsters dominate the 83rd edition Joseph Fahim on Wed, 09/16/2026 - 09:20 Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk were the focus of two stand-out movies, and despite neither being American-born, they owe their success to its culture Musk appears alongside US President Donald Trump on the campaign trail in Butler, Pennsylvania on 4 October 2024 (Jim Watson/AFP) Off For the larger part of the past 20 years, Venice has been the glamorous sibling of the world’s top film festivals: a launchpad for the awards season and a more welcoming showcase for Netflix productions, which continue to be persona non grata in Cannes. Politics have been integral, if not central, to the Venice movies, including last year’s edition, which hosted the world premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, along with Gaza protests and a host of Palestine-supporting speeches. The 2026 lineup, however, has amped up the tempo, making it the most unabashedly political selection in Venice’s recent history. The Middle Eastern lineup comprises a whopping 11 features and multiple shorts, more than the number of Mena films that premiered in Cannes, Locarno and Toronto combined. The Russia-Ukraine war continues to have a ubiquitous presence at the festival, as does Iran, which is represented by two features in the official sections. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); It’s the US, however, that largely dominated the 83rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival, even in films not directly about America. At Venice ’26, America has been given a moral reckoning over its imperialist past, its racist military, its bankrupt media and its power-hungry oligarchs. Ink Danny Boyle’s opening film, Ink, is an inherently British story, but in tackling the origin story of The Sun and its founder Rupert Murdoch, the Trainspotting director has tapped into the core of what defines right-wing American media. The film opens in 1969. Young Australian newspaperman Murdoch (Guy Pearce) is taking his first steps toward establishing a media business in the UK. After acquiring News of the World, Murdoch turns next to the struggling daily The Sun, then an anonymous paper with little identity. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Murdoch hires Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a working-class Yorkshire reporter with boundless charisma and questionable journalistic methods. Together, the pair usher in the age of the modern tabloid, where truth becomes a superfluous commodity. Danny Boyle taps into the core of what defines right-wing American media in Ink (Studio Canal) “The only thing that matters is not why; it’s what’s next?” Lamb asserts. Ink is not the Murdoch biopic some initially assumed it would be, but it does provide an indispensable look into the mind of the man who would become the world’s most powerful media tycoon. Like Trump, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, Murdoch comes off as a man with no discernible ideology or principles; a man whose life and career are built on maximising profit and selling anything to anyone. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Murdoch was, after all, the owner of the left-wing Village Voice from 1975 to 1985. A clash he has with Lamb over a hugely controversial decision at the end of the picture is spurred not by ethical concerns per se, but by a fear of losing readership and endangering the business. “Let’s make something loud. Something dangerous. Something fun,” Murdoch tells Lamb at one point, thereby laying the foundation for a media ethos designed to entertain, to titillate and not to inform. In its heyday, The Sun was the best-selling newspaper in the world. The type of sensationalism it popularised would provide the building blocks for Fox News, The Daily Wire, Newsmax and the entire social media spectrum. Primetime Greed, ethical bankruptcy, and the voracious desire to be number one are front and centre in Lance Oppenheim’s competition entry Primetime. The latest A24 release chronicles the real-life account of Chris Hansen, the former host of To Catch a Predator, one of the biggest reality TV shows of the noughties. Venice Film Festival 2025: Hind Rajab and western cinema’s Palestine ‘awakening’ Read More » In the show, men are set up by members of the crew who pretend to be minors and engage in sexually explicit conversations with them. The men are lured into coming to a house, believing they are meeting children. When they arrive, Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson in the film, confronts them on camera, often asking the famous question: “Why don’t you take a seat over there?” In its heyday, NBC pitted To Catch a Predator against Lost in the same time slot and averaged a little more than seven million viewers. Like the iconic media satire Network (1976), Primetime depicts a morally hollow American media landscape fixated on winning the ratings war. In one key scene of the film, Hansen tells the conflicted actor-turned-crew member Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) that their conceptions of what’s right and wrong are vastly different. Hansen never questions the moral validity of his actions: he’s too punch-drunk on fame, too fixated on sustaining his position, to acknowledge the fundamentally corrupt nature of his enterprise. Like Ink, Oppenheim’s American information ecosystem is all about cheap thrills and disposable entertainment. Hansen, a self-righteous modern-day crusader, exacts justice as a purely capitalistic token for financial and professional success. The picture Oppenheim paints of post-9/11 America is not dissimilar to the present: a society mired in schadenfreude, orgasming in the spectacle of punishment and latching onto an illusory moral certainty divorced from the complexity of reality. Wild Horse Nine More damning is Wild Horse Nine, the latest dark comedy by In Bruges director and playwright Martin McDonagh. Like In Bruges, McDonagh’s film is a buddy comedy centring on two hitmen and set in an unusual location. Romania's secret CIA prison: Two decades of denial and unanswered questions Read More » Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are CIA agents who travel to Chile on the eve of the military coup of 1973. Chris, who is dying of cancer, has asked Lee to kill him on Easter Island. But with his memory fading and regret creeping in, the elderly operative ventures to record his memoirs, much to the chagrin of handler MJ (Steve Buscemi), who may or may not be a heroin addict. Wild Horse Nine is an acidic criticism of the CIA and the “awful things they’ve done all around the world” over the past 60 years, as McDonagh put it in the film’s press conference. Chris may be lamenting the people he has killed, but he still believes in violence as a necessary creed in life, and he never fully denounces US foreign policy. In one of the most startling scenes of the film, Chris mentions Patrice Lumumba, the former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo whom the US and Belgium assassinated in 1961. “Lumumba said if you kill me, you kill democracy in Africa for the next 50 years,” Chris recalls, referring to an interaction that has haunted him yet did not stop him from disengaging from the state agency more than a decade afterwards. Chris (John Malkovich, pictured right) and Lee (Sam Rockwell, pictured centre) are CIA agents who travel to Chile on the eve of the military coup of 1973 (Film 4) Chris, Lee and MJ are no different from Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and Kristi Noem: they’re buffoonish, self-absorbed and nowhere near as bright as you’d expect such personnel in crucial positions to be; their bullish demeanour mirrors a similarly idiotic, imperialist foreign policy built on nothing but sheer hubris and self-interest. In McDonagh’s universe, the US is not “the force of good” President Joe Biden claimed it to be. Their loyalty to their jobs surpasses any sense of universal morality. In nearly all the films tackling different facets of the American experience, individuality is only expressed in capitalistic terms. Yet even the most rebellious of these protagonists never attempt to change a political system motored by capitalist intentions. They may have deep-seated qualms with it; they may question their position within it; but they’re content to reap its financial returns, no matter how hefty the moral price may be. Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? A sole exception to the rule is Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s war drama Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? Rodney Hicks plays the eponymous Allen Nelson, a 23-year-old Black American soldier who returns home with PTSD after serving in Vietnam. Throughout many years in psychiatry, Nelson’s therapist, Dr Daniels (Geoffrey Rush), asks him a question that he finds elusive: why did he kill these people in Vietnam? The long-winding answer exposes a system of oppression in which African Americans and other underprivileged groups are forced into state apparatuses for lack of better choices. Nelson was born to an abusive father in a hostile environment mired in poverty. Joining the army never granted him the class mobility he coveted; instead, he ended up recycling the violence inflicted on him, redirecting the abuse he experienced onto another hapless populace. His healing only starts when he unreservedly rejects the military; when he rejects the racist, expansionist, profiteering structure that has long lost its moral compass. Musk Standing on the opposite end of the spectrum is Musk, Alex Gibney’s long-awaited expose on the world’s richest man. Over the course of four hours, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief weaves a rise-and-corruption narrative: a detailed character study that is by turns enthralling and unnerving. Gibney traces Musk’s early years as a wide-eyed entrepreneur with lofty ambitions for space travel and discovering alternate universes; a South African computer nerd who sought in video games and technology a shelter from the severe bullying he habitually endured. In the US, he found fertile ground for ambitious businesses - Zip2, PayPal, Tesla - that would function as a pretext for his grand SpaceX project, which he established in 2002. From the get-go, Musk learned that ethically wayward means were mandatory to run successful businesses in Silicon Valley. He double-crosses his business partners, exaggerates the capabilities of Tesla and ferociously shuts down his detractors and opponents. Over time, the dreamy inventor swiftly turns into a charlatan, a cult leader and ultimately a power-starved oligarch. He buys X and turns it into a hate-speech-infested, money-losing platform; he enters a ferocious legal battle against his ex-partner Grimes over custody of his children; he blames wokeism for his estrangement from his trans daughter Vivian Wilson; he backs Donald Trump, takes over the notoriously short-lived Doge department, which killed USAID and deprived millions of children and communities across the world of education and medicine. Gibney insinuates that Musk may have meddled with the last US presidential elections and that he may yet attempt to influence the forthcoming midterm elections. His support for the extreme-right party AfD in Germany, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina is well documented. However, what Musk truly believes, and what his real ideological position may be, remains a mystery. Worryingly, Gibney emphasises, the wealth and power he has accumulated have transformed him into a god-like figure: invincible, limitless and uncontrollable. And it was all enabled by every preceding US administration. The only point in the film when Musk feels vulnerable is when people around the world begin to burn Tesla cars and attack his factories As early as 2002, the US positioned itself as a primary customer for Musk, using SpaceX for cheaper, reliable launch capacity for NASA and the Defense Department. According to a report by The Washington Post, Musk and his various companies have received $38bn in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades. George W Bush, Barrack Obama, Trump and even Biden have all enabled the creation and proliferation of Musk through various programmes and policies that made his companies strategically valuable. That, for this writer, is the biggest takeaway from the film, a fact that Gibney shrewdly emphasises at different intervals throughout the documentary. Musk, in that sense, is an American monster through and through: a manifestation of the unbridled corporate capitalism, interventionist policies and unilateral approach to power that disregard the common good. Musk’s technological utopianism is now a faint trace of a different life led by a different man. The only point in the film when Musk feels vulnerable is when people around the world begin to burn Tesla cars and attack his factories. The power of the people he has been salivating to control proves too strident even for the almighty Musk. The American system will never willingly change from the inside, the Venice films suggest, and Washington's insatiable desire to shape the narrative for nations across the globe will never be sated. Chris in Wild Horse Nine dismisses protesting, claiming that demonstrations are only useful for bodies like the CIA to identify activists and kill opposition. Yet it’s these activists who would form nationwide grassroots movements and unseat the US-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988 in a democratic election. Solidarity and unification would eventually defeat Chris’s violent creed of kill or be killed; solidarity and unification are what shook the Musk kingdom; and solidarity and unification are the only potent means of changing an America that may be finally waking up from its moral slumber. The 83rd Venice Film Festival ran from 2 September to 12 September. Film Discover Venice, Italy Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0
For the larger part of the past 20 years, Venice has been the glamorous sibling of the world’s top film festivals: a launchpad for the awards season and a more welcoming showcase for Netflix productions, which continue to be persona non grata in Cannes.
Politics have been integral, if not central, to the Venice movies, including last year’s edition, which hosted the world premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, along with Gaza protests and a host of Palestine-supporting speeches.
The 2026 lineup, however, has amped up the tempo, making it the most unabashedly political selection in Venice’s recent history.
The Middle Eastern lineup comprises a whopping 11 features and multiple shorts, more than the number of Mena films that premiered in Cannes, Locarno and Toronto combined.
The Russia-Ukraine war continues to have a ubiquitous presence at the festival, as does Iran, which is represented by two features in the official sections.
It’s the US, however, that largely dominated the 83rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival, even in films not directly about America.
At Venice ’26, America has been given a moral reckoning over its imperialist past, its racist military, its bankrupt media and its power-hungry oligarchs.
Danny Boyle’s opening film, Ink, is an inherently British story, but in tackling the origin story of The Sun and its founder Rupert Murdoch, the Trainspotting director has tapped into the core of what defines right-wing American media.
The film opens in 1969. Young Australian newspaperman Murdoch (Guy Pearce) is taking his first steps toward establishing a media business in the UK.
After acquiring News of the World, Murdoch turns next to the struggling daily The Sun, then an anonymous paper with little identity.
Murdoch hires Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a working-class Yorkshire reporter with boundless charisma and questionable journalistic methods. Together, the pair usher in the age of the modern tabloid, where truth becomes a superfluous commodity.
“The only thing that matters is not why; it’s what’s next?” Lamb asserts.
Ink is not the Murdoch biopic some initially assumed it would be, but it does provide an indispensable look into the mind of the man who would become the world’s most powerful media tycoon.
Like Trump, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, Murdoch comes off as a man with no discernible ideology or principles; a man whose life and career are built on maximising profit and selling anything to anyone.
Murdoch was, after all, the owner of the left-wing Village Voice from 1975 to 1985.
A clash he has with Lamb over a hugely controversial decision at the end of the picture is spurred not by ethical concerns per se, but by a fear of losing readership and endangering the business.
“Let’s make something loud. Something dangerous. Something fun,” Murdoch tells Lamb at one point, thereby laying the foundation for a media ethos designed to entertain, to titillate and not to inform.
In its heyday, The Sun was the best-selling newspaper in the world. The type of sensationalism it popularised would provide the building blocks for Fox News, The Daily Wire, Newsmax and the entire social media spectrum.
Greed, ethical bankruptcy, and the voracious desire to be number one are front and centre in Lance Oppenheim’s competition entry Primetime.
The latest A24 release chronicles the real-life account of Chris Hansen, the former host of To Catch a Predator, one of the biggest reality TV shows of the noughties.
In the show, men are set up by members of the crew who pretend to be minors and engage in sexually explicit conversations with them.
The men are lured into coming to a house, believing they are meeting children. When they arrive, Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson in the film, confronts them on camera, often asking the famous question: “Why don’t you take a seat over there?”
In its heyday, NBC pitted To Catch a Predator against Lost in the same time slot and averaged a little more than seven million viewers.
Like the iconic media satire Network (1976), Primetime depicts a morally hollow American media landscape fixated on winning the ratings war.
In one key scene of the film, Hansen tells the conflicted actor-turned-crew member Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) that their conceptions of what’s right and wrong are vastly different.
Hansen never questions the moral validity of his actions: he’s too punch-drunk on fame, too fixated on sustaining his position, to acknowledge the fundamentally corrupt nature of his enterprise.
Like Ink, Oppenheim’s American information ecosystem is all about cheap thrills and disposable entertainment.
Hansen, a self-righteous modern-day crusader, exacts justice as a purely capitalistic token for financial and professional success.
The picture Oppenheim paints of post-9/11 America is not dissimilar to the present: a society mired in schadenfreude, orgasming in the spectacle of punishment and latching onto an illusory moral certainty divorced from the complexity of reality.
More damning is Wild Horse Nine, the latest dark comedy by In Bruges director and playwright Martin McDonagh.
Like In Bruges, McDonagh’s film is a buddy comedy centring on two hitmen and set in an unusual location.
Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are CIA agents who travel to Chile on the eve of the military coup of 1973.
Chris, who is dying of cancer, has asked Lee to kill him on Easter Island.
But with his memory fading and regret creeping in, the elderly operative ventures to record his memoirs, much to the chagrin of handler MJ (Steve Buscemi), who may or may not be a heroin addict.
Wild Horse Nine is an acidic criticism of the CIA and the “awful things they’ve done all around the world” over the past 60 years, as McDonagh put it in the film’s press conference.
Chris may be lamenting the people he has killed, but he still believes in violence as a necessary creed in life, and he never fully denounces US foreign policy.
In one of the most startling scenes of the film, Chris mentions Patrice Lumumba, the former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo whom the US and Belgium assassinated in 1961.
“Lumumba said if you kill me, you kill democracy in Africa for the next 50 years,” Chris recalls, referring to an interaction that has haunted him yet did not stop him from disengaging from the state agency more than a decade afterwards.
Chris, Lee and MJ are no different from Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and Kristi Noem: they’re buffoonish, self-absorbed and nowhere near as bright as you’d expect such personnel in crucial positions to be; their bullish demeanour mirrors a similarly idiotic, imperialist foreign policy built on nothing but sheer hubris and self-interest.
In McDonagh’s universe, the US is not “the force of good” President Joe Biden claimed it to be.
Their loyalty to their jobs surpasses any sense of universal morality. In nearly all the films tackling different facets of the American experience, individuality is only expressed in capitalistic terms.
Yet even the most rebellious of these protagonists never attempt to change a political system motored by capitalist intentions.
They may have deep-seated qualms with it; they may question their position within it; but they’re content to reap its financial returns, no matter how hefty the moral price may be.
A sole exception to the rule is Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s war drama Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?
Rodney Hicks plays the eponymous Allen Nelson, a 23-year-old Black American soldier who returns home with PTSD after serving in Vietnam.
Throughout many years in psychiatry, Nelson’s therapist, Dr Daniels (Geoffrey Rush), asks him a question that he finds elusive: why did he kill these people in Vietnam?
The long-winding answer exposes a system of oppression in which African Americans and other underprivileged groups are forced into state apparatuses for lack of better choices.
Nelson was born to an abusive father in a hostile environment mired in poverty. Joining the army never granted him the class mobility he coveted; instead, he ended up recycling the violence inflicted on him, redirecting the abuse he experienced onto another hapless populace.
His healing only starts when he unreservedly rejects the military; when he rejects the racist, expansionist, profiteering structure that has long lost its moral compass.
Standing on the opposite end of the spectrum is Musk, Alex Gibney’s long-awaited expose on the world’s richest man.
Over the course of four hours, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief weaves a rise-and-corruption narrative: a detailed character study that is by turns enthralling and unnerving.
Gibney traces Musk’s early years as a wide-eyed entrepreneur with lofty ambitions for space travel and discovering alternate universes; a South African computer nerd who sought in video games and technology a shelter from the severe bullying he habitually endured.
In the US, he found fertile ground for ambitious businesses - Zip2, PayPal, Tesla - that would function as a pretext for his grand SpaceX project, which he established in 2002.
From the get-go, Musk learned that ethically wayward means were mandatory to run successful businesses in Silicon Valley.
He double-crosses his business partners, exaggerates the capabilities of Tesla and ferociously shuts down his detractors and opponents.
Over time, the dreamy inventor swiftly turns into a charlatan, a cult leader and ultimately a power-starved oligarch.
He buys X and turns it into a hate-speech-infested, money-losing platform; he enters a ferocious legal battle against his ex-partner Grimes over custody of his children; he blames wokeism for his estrangement from his trans daughter Vivian Wilson; he backs Donald Trump, takes over the notoriously short-lived Doge department, which killed USAID and deprived millions of children and communities across the world of education and medicine.
Gibney insinuates that Musk may have meddled with the last US presidential elections and that he may yet attempt to influence the forthcoming midterm elections.
His support for the extreme-right party AfD in Germany, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina is well documented.
However, what Musk truly believes, and what his real ideological position may be, remains a mystery.
Worryingly, Gibney emphasises, the wealth and power he has accumulated have transformed him into a god-like figure: invincible, limitless and uncontrollable.
And it was all enabled by every preceding US administration.
The only point in the film when Musk feels vulnerable is when people around the world begin to burn Tesla cars and attack his factories
As early as 2002, the US positioned itself as a primary customer for Musk, using SpaceX for cheaper, reliable launch capacity for NASA and the Defense Department.
According to a report by The Washington Post, Musk and his various companies have received $38bn in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades.
George W Bush, Barrack Obama, Trump and even Biden have all enabled the creation and proliferation of Musk through various programmes and policies that made his companies strategically valuable.
That, for this writer, is the biggest takeaway from the film, a fact that Gibney shrewdly emphasises at different intervals throughout the documentary.
Musk, in that sense, is an American monster through and through: a manifestation of the unbridled corporate capitalism, interventionist policies and unilateral approach to power that disregard the common good.
Musk’s technological utopianism is now a faint trace of a different life led by a different man.
The only point in the film when Musk feels vulnerable is when people around the world begin to burn Tesla cars and attack his factories.
The power of the people he has been salivating to control proves too strident even for the almighty Musk.
The American system will never willingly change from the inside, the Venice films suggest, and Washington's insatiable desire to shape the narrative for nations across the globe will never be sated.
Chris in Wild Horse Nine dismisses protesting, claiming that demonstrations are only useful for bodies like the CIA to identify activists and kill opposition.
Yet it’s these activists who would form nationwide grassroots movements and unseat the US-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988 in a democratic election.
Solidarity and unification would eventually defeat Chris’s violent creed of kill or be killed; solidarity and unification are what shook the Musk kingdom; and solidarity and unification are the only potent means of changing an America that may be finally waking up from its moral slumber.
The 83rd Venice Film Festival ran from 2 September to 12 September.
