Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera. Alessandra Benedetti - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment After getting upstaged by Cannes at this year's Oscars - when Sean Baker's Palme d'Or winner Anora took best picture over Brady Corbet's Lido champ The Brutalist - Venice has come roaring back. Venice's 2025 lineup, with its blend of prestige auteurs, big-name debuts and politically charged provocations, reaffirms the Lido as the premiere launchpad for award-season hopefuls. Highlights this year include Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, Dwayne Johnson in Benny Safdie's The Smashing Machine and a triple threat from Netflix: Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein starring Jacob Elordi, Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly with George Clooney and Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite with Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson. Related Stories TV Jussie Smollett Speaks in Netflix Doc 'The Truth About Jussie Smollett?' Business Paramount Execs Tell Staff That Africa Offices and Channels May Close Amid Strategy Review (Exclusive) Add in new features from Yorgos Lanthimos, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, François Ozon, Paolo Sorrentino, Mona Fastvold, Gus van Sant, Julian Schnabel, Mamoru Hosoda and Laszlo Nemes, and the political heft of Kaouther Ben Hania's Gaza drama The Voice of Hind Rajab and Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin [with Jude Law as Vladimir Putin], and you have, on paper, one of the best Venice festivals in years. That's saying something. Shortly after unveiling this year's program, Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the fierce but friendly rivalry between the major festivals, the challenge of programming two-to-three-hour epics and why politics are back on screen in a big way. This is going to sound like I'm a broken record, because I say it every year, but you have another phenomenal lineup. We in the press always pit the big festivals - Cannes, Venice, Toronto - against one another, but how much is competition, a desire to beat the other big festivals, a drive for you? I'm a good friend of [Cannes festival director] Thierry [Fremaux] and [Toronto Film Festival CEO] Cameron [Bailey]. We're colleagues. We meet each other at each other's festivals. I've got a wonderful relationship with them. But of course, it is a competition. That's just a fact. There is competition between festivals, and each of us tries to get the best films from what the market gives us. We are lucky in that we're maybe in a better position, coming at the beginning of the new season, where Cannes is at the end of the old one. And we're a week, 10 days, ahead of Toronto, so we are often lucky to get a lot of world premieres. I know Toronto tries to get as many world premieres as possible, and they don't always succeed in competing with us on certain films. But this competition is a way to push you to do your best, to get the best out of the submitted films. How do you measure success for a festival lineup? The first element is the way the film is accepted during the festival, the response of both the critics and the audience to the film. That's the first moment when you realize if you made a good choice or if you were wrong. Because when you invite one film, it means you give up the chance to invite another. And it always happens that this or the other film doesn't meet the expectations that were created when we announced the lineup. That first moment when the film screens is when I realize if I did a good job or not. Then, of course, if the film travels to other festivals or gets awards, if it goes to or wins the Oscars, which happens a lot, that helps to confirm and establish the position of the festival, of our position in the international calendar of festivals, and gives us the chance the following year to get access to the most interesting and important films of the season. In your presentation, you suggested you would have liked to have put Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt in competition. Was it Amazon MGM that wanted it to run out of competition? That was a decision by Amazon MGM. From the beginning, when they showed the film to us, they told us "We don't want to be in competition. This is a film we believe in. It's our candidate for the Oscars. It doesn't need to be in competition." So I accepted that. I respect the decision of producers. Most of the time. The Smashing Machine A24 After the Hunt star Julia Roberts will make her Venice debut this year, as will Dwayne Johnson, star of Benny Safdie's competition film The Smashing Machine. Any advice for the Lido newbies on navigating the Venice red carpet? I'm sure they know how to behave. They are great professionals, both of them. And they are delivering exceptional performances in the two films that we'll