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........

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