Is Venice still vibrating from all the rounds of applause?
It’s become customary for audiences at the festival’s premieres to clap and cheer for a seeming eternity after the credits roll. (Often to the visible discomfort of the actors and filmmakers, who look like they don’t know what to do with themselves when the hurrahs rage into double digits.) Call it a Champagne (or Aperol spritz — we’re in Italy, after all) problem for stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell and director Martin McDonagh, whose dark comedy “Wild Horse Nine” was embraced with a rousing 13-minute standing ovation inside the Lido’s famed Palazzo del Cinema. But that didn’t turn out to be the festival’s biggest reception — later in the week, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem received 15.5 minutes of applause for their marriage-in-crisis drama “Bunker, and on Thursday, Gaza documentary “NAZA” was greeted with a massive 24.5 minutes, the longest of any recorded ovation at a major film festival.
And for all the complaints that Hollywood has basically abandoned film festivals, there was no shortage of celebrities to elicit big reactions from crowds. Robert Pattinson (“Primetime”), Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem (“Bunker”) and Oasis’ Liam and Noel Gallagher (“Don’t Look Back in Anger”) were among the boldface names hoping to turn festival kudos into awards chatter or box office plaudits.
As Venice wraps up and festivalgoers take their last bites of pasta and sips of spritzes, here are takeaways from the floating city.
George Clooney Steals the Show
Malkovich Storms Into the Oscar Race
Politics, Politics, Politics
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera wasn’t exaggerating when he called this year’s lineup “the most political ever.” The 83rd edition was packed with films about hot-button issues like right-wing media barons (“Ink”), right-wing trolls (“Musk”), conflict in the Middle East (“NAZA”) and ICE (“They’re Here”). Offscreen, it’s become de rigueur to probe actors and directors at film festivals about the state of the world — a conversation that escalated at Berlin after jury president Wim Wenders said filmmakers should “stay out of politics.” Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is presiding over the Venice jury, disagrees. At the jury press conference, she called movies “fundamentally, unavoidably political” and challenged people to “hear stories about the most corrupt, most perverse people.” Her reasoning? “It opens up the opportunity to find empathy.”
A Record-Breaking Embrace
Audiences, for their part, seem just fine with politics at the forefront. “NAZA,” a devastating exposé about the systems behind the Israeli military’s remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, elicited the longest standing ovation in film festival history. (Or, at least since journalists began reporting on the trend.) The documentary was met with 24.5 minutes of applause, surpassing the ovation for last year’s Gaza-set drama “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and that of Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” at Cannes in 2006, both of which clocked in at 22 minutes. Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are two of the four filmmakers behind 2025’s Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land.” Given the warm reception for and timeliness of “NAZA,” will the duo find themselves back in the awards conversation?
