Primetime to Flesh Impact: Six of the best Oscar contenders from the 2026 Venice film festival

From a wild-eyed performance by Robert Pattinson to an Elon Musk documentary and a short film about Marilyn Monroe at 100, here are the Venice films attracting Oscars buzz.

The Venice International Film Festival is often a launchpad for films that rocket their way to Oscar glory. Over the past decade, these have included La La Land and The Shape of Water, Roma and The Brutalist, Joker and Frankenstein. This year's festival featured fewer big-budget Hollywood awards contenders than usual, but here are six films that are already fizzing with Oscar buzz.

Robert Pattinson has had quite a year. He was hilariously flustered in The Drama and scene-stealingly oily in The Odyssey, and now he excels in the juiciest role of his career. Primetime tells the story of Chris Hansen and his controversial television show, To Catch a Predator, which tricked potential sex offenders into incriminating themselves on camera in the early 2000s. Pattinson, who also produces the film, is in almost every scene. He moves and sounds just like the real Hansen, while adding some signature touches of reptilian menace and wild-eyed obsession. Between the Academy's taste for impersonations of real people, and Pattinson's popularity as an art-house character actor with Hollywood leading-man charisma, it could be time for his first Oscar nomination.

Martin McDonagh's last film, The Banshees of Inisherin, was nominated for nine Oscars, but didn't win any. Could Wild Horse Nine do any better? A politically charged black comedy about two CIA agents on holiday on Easter Island in 1973, it's a showcase for another of McDonagh's dysfunctional double acts, but instead of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who starred together in The Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges, the two main men are played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Malkovich is a best actor front-runner. He is always magnetically weird, but here, as a pained, red-eyed, ageing assassin, he is touching and complex too. It helps that the 72-year-old has been nominated for two previous Oscars, most recently for In the Line of Fire (1993), and that Academy voters love a "comeback" narrative.

Flesh Impact is a Venice rarity: a potential Oscar nominee in the best live action short film category. A warm-hearted 17-minute charmer, it was written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and commissioned to celebrate Marilyn Monroe's centenary. Gyllenhaal imagines Monroe as a sprightly 100-year-old auditioning for a Broadway play (Gyllenhaal's husband, Peter Sarsgaard, plays the director), and taking the opportunity to tell her life story in her own words. "Flesh impact," she explains, was Billy Wilder's term for the quality that made cinema viewers believe they could reach out and touch her. In a stroke of casting genius, Monroe is played by the 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn (an Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner), while Dakota Johnson plays her younger self in flashback.

As soon as Woman Unknown premiered, this steely Danish drama was mentioned as a potential best international film nominee, thanks to its heavyweight themes, nerve-racking plot, impeccable period details, and its terrifically contained but expressive performance by Mathilde Arkel. Directed by May el-Toukhy (it was the only film in Venice's main competition strand to be directed by a woman), Woman Unknown is set in Copenhagen just after World War Two. Arkel plays a nanny who is now engaged to her boss, a widowed industrialist (Carsten Bjornlund). But one day on the tram, an old schoolmate recognises her, and threatens to expose the sexual relationship she had with a German during the Nazi occupation. Woman Unknown examines the lines people will cross to survive, and the way men justify their abuse of women.

Lee Chang-dong's last film, Burning, came out in 2018, but the intricacy and delicacy of his follow-up, Possible Love, suggests why it might have taken so long. This piquant drama revolves around a middle-class director (Cho Yeo-jeong) who, with the help of her wealthy husband (Zo In-sung), is making a documentary about a striking factory worker (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife (Jeon Do-yeon). She bonds with her subjects over drunken dinners and weekend breaks. But can the two couples have a genuine connection across the class divide, or is theirs is a friendship of convenience? Possible Love currently has a 100% score on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews round-up site, so it's more than possible that it will be nominated for a best international film Oscar.

Alex Gibney's profile of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a four-hour epic. Without pausing for breath, the documentary races through the tech mogul's life, from his childhood in South Africa to his years as a geeky Silicon Valley hopeful, to his trillion-dollar success as the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, to his support of far-right political parties around the world. Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2008, and Musk is making so many headlines that it could do the same. The tycoon himself called it "a hit piece that misses and makes the fatal sin of being boring for four hours". He couldn't be more wrong.

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