Venice Picks Its Golden Lion Saturday, and the Frontrunner Story Falls Apart on Inspection

The 83rd Venice Film Festival closes on Saturday 12 September, when Maggie Gyllenhaal's jury hands out the Golden Lion in the Sala Grande. Twenty-one films are in competition. As of a day ago, nine of them had not screened.

None of which has stopped a frontrunner narrative forming around Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine. It is worth taking apart, because almost every load-bearing element of it turns out to be either unsourceable or about a different award.

The standing ovation nobody can attribute

You will have read that the film drew a 13-minute ovation. Or a 14-minute one, depending on the outlet. Both numbers are circulating and neither can be traced.

Nine reviews filed from the Lido — The Playlist, The Film Stage, RogerEbert.com, NME, Time Out, The Film Verdict and others — mention no ovation at all, of any length. The film's own reference trail contains nothing post-premiere. La Biennale publishes no ovation timings and never has; there is no page, no release, no field where such a thing is recorded.

Which is the actual story about this metric. Nobody officially times these. They are stopwatch counts by individual trade reporters standing in a cinema, published without method, then rounded differently downstream until two numbers exist and no one can say which came first.

And there is a live counter-example sitting on this year's jury. At Venice 2025, the loudest ovation figure anyone attributed to anything was 23 minutes, for Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, reported under the headline "Emerges as Golden Lion Frontrunner." It won the Silver Lion. Ben Hania is on the 2026 jury.

The frontrunner talk is about the Oscars, not the Lion

Read the actual reporting and the prediction collapses. World of Reel, surveying twelve of twenty-one films on 7 September, declines to predict anything, calls the competition "fairly uneven," and lists Wild Horse Nine alongside Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, Lance Oppenheim's Primetime and Nanni Moretti's It Will Happen Tonight — not above them.

The one piece everyone is citing, Awards Daily on 3 September, is headlined about Best Actor: "Pundits Rally Around John Malkovich for the Win." Its comparison set is Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling and Andrew Scott — none of whom are in this competition, in films that are not at this festival, for an award handed out in March 2027 by roughly ten thousand Academy members.

That is being converted into a prediction about what eight people — a British composer, an Italian film theorist, an Afghan director, a Hong Kong genre master and four others — will decide on Saturday. Malkovich is not even eligible for it. The acting prize at Venice is the Volpi Cup.

Two films in the competition are rated higher

All scores as of today, with the review counts, because at a festival the counts are the story:

• Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong) — 100%, from 15 reviews. Netflix. 164 minutes.
• Primetime (Lance Oppenheim) — 96%, from 23. A24.
• Wild Horse Nine (McDonagh) — 90%, from 29; Metacritic 80 from 19, with 17 positive, 2 mixed and no negatives.
• Look Back (Kore-eda) — 90%, from 10.
• Ink (Danny Boyle, the opening film) — 83%, from 30. Netflix.
• Bucking Fastard (Herzog) — 71%, from 24.
• Company (Casey Affleck) and Bunker (Florian Zeller) — premiered today. Zero reviews.

A 100% built on 15 reviews is two bad notices from 88%. A 90% on 29 is far more load-bearing than a 90% on 10. The three highest-rated titles in the competition are the three with the fewest votes counted.

Worth knowing about the McDonagh: its only substantially negative review, on Metacritic's board, is a 42 from TheWrap — roughly 38 points below the mean of everything else. Two mixed notices, one of them that. Everyone else is between 80 and 100.

Venice hands out three Golden Lions, and the jury controls one

This is the conflation that produces the worst headlines. George Clooney received a Golden Lion on 2 September, at the opening ceremony, with Laura Dern giving the laudatio. Ellen Burstyn received one on 7 September, at the Palazzo del Cinema. Both are Lifetime Achievement awards, decided by La Biennale's Board of Directors on Alberto Barbera's recommendation.

Gyllenhaal's jury had no say in either. The competition Golden Lion is a separate prize, announced Saturday, and it is the only one of the three the jury touches. By the time it is awarded, Venice will already have given away two.

What the film actually is

118 minutes, UK/USA/Chile, from Blueprint Pictures, distributed by Searchlight, out 6 November. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell are CIA officers dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup by their bureau chief, played by Steve Buscemi. Tom Waits and Parker Posey are in it. Ben Davis shot it; Carter Burwell scored it; Mikkel E. G. Nielsen, who cut Sound of Metal, edited.

Mark Ruffalo was originally cast and departed; Buscemi replaced him in March 2025. Shot on Rapa Nui and across Santiago, wrapping that April.

The reviews are warm and specific. Rodrigo Perez calls it "a terrific mixture of the pathos of The Banshees of Inisherin and the dark comedic texture of In Bruges." Robbie Collin: "The film is downright wonderful, and Malkovich and Rockwell are irresistible in it." Kevin Maher: "a cheery, sweary embrace of mortality." Stephen Dalton praises "a towering autumnal performance" from Malkovich while noting the CIA-assassination material "mostly fizzles out" and that the dead-horse motif is "so bluntly symbolic it almost looks like self-parody."

The Golden Lion has stopped predicting the Oscars

The line that Venice launches the season is five years out of date on its own top prize. The record since 2015:

• Four winners were serious Oscar players: The Shape of Water (2017, Best Picture and Director), Roma (2018, three wins), Joker (2019, two), Nomadland (2020, Picture, Director, Actress).
• Five winners got nothing at all: From Afar, The Woman Who Left, Happening, The Room Next Door, and last year's Father Mother Sister Brother, which took no nominations at the 98th Academy Awards in March.
• In between, Poor Things (2023) turned 11 nominations into four wins including Best Actress, and lost Picture and Director.

At those Oscars in March, Best Picture and Director went to One Battle After Another; Michael B. Jordan won Actor for Sinners; Jessie Buckley won Actress for Hamnet. Venice's Golden Lion winner went home empty.

The one thing worth actually watching on Saturday

Netflix holds two of the twenty-one competition slots: Ink, the opening film, and Possible Love, currently the best-reviewed film in the competition. If the jury goes with the scores, the streamer can only lose the Golden Lion to itself.

Meanwhile A24's Primetime opens wide on 25 September — thirteen days after the ceremony. Its theatrical run was locked before a single juror saw it. Wild Horse Nine opens 55 days after the Lion is announced; Ink, 90 days after.

And nobody has published a US distributor for Look Back, Bucking Fastard, Company or Bunker. A Golden Lion for an undistributed film is the single largest variable in whether Venice sets anything up this year at all.