Venice Film Festival draws to a close and will announce its awards,
which can give an Oscars boost
[September 06, 2025]
By LINDSEY BAHR
VENICE, Italy (AP) — The 82nd Venice Film Festival is coming to a close
Saturday as its juries make final choices for the awards. The prizes,
including nods for acting, directing and best picture, called the Golden
Lion, will be handed out during an evening ceremony.
This year’s competition lineup included many possible Oscar
heavyweights. Kathryn Bigelow set off a warning shot about nuclear
weapons and the apparatus of decision-making with her urgent, and
distressingly realistic, thriller “A House of Dynamite.”
Guillermo del Toro unveiled his “Frankenstein,” a sumptuously gothic
interpretation of the Mary Shelley classic, with Oscar Isaac portraying
Victor Frankenstein as a romantic madman and Jacob Elodri, naive and
raw, as the monster.
Park Chan-wook delighted with his darkly comedic “No Other Choice,” a
satire about the desperation of white-collar workers competing for jobs.
Dwayne Johnson took a serious turn as a fighter grappling with addiction
to painkillers and winner in the MMA/UFC sports drama “The Smashing
Machine,” while Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are strange and fierce as
kidnapped and kidnapper in Yorgos Lanthimos’s provocative “Bugonia.”
George Clooney and Adam Sandler moved audiences as an aging movie star
and his devoted manager on a soul-searching journey through Europe in
“Jay Kelly,” a ruthlessly truthful love letter to Hollywood, in all its
ridiculousness and beauty.
Jude Law furrowed his brows as Vladimir Putin in “The Wizard of the
Kremlin” and Amanda Seyfried put a human, feminist, face to the
religious sect the shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee.”
Julia Roberts also flexed her acting muscles as a Yale philosophy
professor in the midst of a misconduct accusation against a colleague in
“After the Hunt,” but neither she nor her castmates Andrew Garfield, Ayo
Edebiri and director, Luca Guadagnino, are eligible for Venice prizes.
The film debuted out of competition.
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Emma Stone poses for photographers on the red carpet for the film 'Bugonia'
during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice,
Italy, on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (Photo by Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP)
 Far from Hollywood, Tunisian
filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, had a late-festival smash with “The
Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the 6-year-old girl killed in Gaza,
which reportedly got a 22-minute standing ovation. The film is a
shattering document of the Israel-Hamas war, set entirely inside the
dispatch center of the Palestine Red Crescent Society rescue
service. It uses the real audio of Hind’s call, while actors portray
the first responders.
“Nebraska” filmmaker Alexander Payne presided over the main
competition jury, which included Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres,
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé,
Italian director Maura Delpero, Chinese actor Zhao Tao and Romanian
director Cristian Mungiu.
Both Lanthimos and del Toro have won the Golden Lion before, for
“Poor Things” and “The Shape of Water,” respectively. Those films
also went on to win top Oscars, including best actress for Stone in
“Poor Things,” and best picture and director for del Toro’s “The
Shape of Water.”
Since 2014, the Venice Film Festival has hosted four best picture
winners, including “The Shape of Water,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight" and
“Nomadland.” Last year, they had several eventual Oscar-winning
films in the lineup, including Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which
won three including best actor for Adrien Brody, Walter Salles’ best
international feature winner “I’m Still Here,” and the animated
short “In the Shadow of the Cypress.”
The previous Golden Lion winner, Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language
debut “The Room Next Door,” a smash at Venice with an 18-minute
standing ovation, received no Oscar nominations.
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