The Venice Film Festival Movies Worth Adding to Your Watchlist
As the 2026 Venice Film Festival wraps up, revisit seven Venice Film Festival movies on Tubi starring Joaquin Phoenix, Colin Firth, Willem Dafoe, and more.
The 2026 Venice International Film Festival is here, which means some of the movies we're about to spend the next several months hearing about are starting their journey on the Lido. One of the world's oldest and most prestigious film festivals, Venice has a habit of being an early stop for future awards contenders, career-defining performances, and the kind of movie that has film people immediately opening the group chat with “okay, when can WE see it?”
While this year's premieres begin collecting standing ovations, reviews, and inevitable Oscar predictions, there's plenty of Venice Film Festival history already streaming on Tubi. These seven movies have competed or taken home major prizes at the festival, spanning Westerns, intimate dramas, post-apocalyptic survival, and performances that sent their actors home with Volpi Cups and Silver Lions.
The Master
Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman walked into Venice with The Master, and apparently the jury looked at both performances and said: we're not choosing. Paul Thomas Anderson's drama follows Phoenix's volatile WWII veteran Freddie Quell as he falls into the orbit of Lancaster Dodd, the magnetic leader of a movement known as the Cause. Phoenix makes Freddie feel like he's permanently trying to escape his own body, all hunched posture, unpredictable movement, and barely contained rage. Hoffman goes the opposite direction, making Dodd's calm confidence feel every bit as dangerous.
Venice noticed. Phoenix and Hoffman shared the Volpi Cup for Best Actor in 2012, while Anderson took home the Silver Lion for Best Director. Sometimes prestige cinema really is just watching ridiculously good actors make each other better.
A Single Man
If you're going to have an existential crisis, Tom Ford would at least like the lighting to be impeccable. A Single Man follows Colin Firth's George Falconer, a college professor moving through one day while grieving the death of his longtime partner. Firth keeps George's pain carefully buttoned beneath the surface, while Ford surrounds him with immaculate clothes, saturated colors, and frames composed like somebody might hang them in a gallery.
As a result, Firth won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice in 2009, and if you mostly know him as Britain's reigning king of emotionally restrained leading men, here's the performance that asks exactly how much feeling one man can hide behind a very good suit.
Philomena
Philomena pairs Judi Dench with Steve Coogan for the true story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman searching for the son she was forced to give up decades earlier. Dench gives Philomena warmth, stubbornness, and a wonderfully dry sense of humor, while Coogan's skeptical journalist Martin Sixsmith becomes her reluctant partner on a journey neither of them approaches in quite the same way.
The screenplay by Coogan and Jeff Pope won Best Screenplay at Venice in 2013, and the chemistry between Dench and Coogan keeps the search intimate, funny, and deeply human. Come prepared for feelings. At least Judi Dench will make you laugh between them.
At Eternity's Gate
There are conventional artist biopics, but At Eternity's Gate isn't particularly interested in turning Vincent van Gogh's life into a neat timeline of Famous Artist Events. It's more immersive than that, following his final years through color, movement, isolation, and the obsessive need to keep painting. Willem Dafoe gives van Gogh an almost restless sensitivity, making creativity feel less like a profession than something he physically cannot stop doing.
Dafoe won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice in 2018, and watching him makes the decision easy to understand. Add Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin and you've got a movie for anyone who likes their biopics less “here are the facts” and more please enter this man's extremely complicated head for two hours.
The Sisters Brothers
Joaquin Phoenix. John C. Reilly. Jake Gyllenhaal. Riz Ahmed. Honestly, we could stop there. But The Sisters Brothers also happens to be a wonderfully strange Western about assassin brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters pursuing a prospector across the Gold Rush-era American West. Phoenix brings the volatility, Reilly gives the story an unexpectedly tender center, and Gyllenhaal and Ahmed enter with their own completely different rhythm.
Director Jacques Audiard took home the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in 2018, and the movie makes a strong argument for anyone who thinks Westerns aren't really their thing. Yes, there are horses. Yes, there are guns. There are also four fantastic actors playing deeply complicated men who could all benefit from discussing their feelings approximately 40% more often.
99 Homes
Andrew Garfield loses his house to Michael Shannon. Then Michael Shannon offers him a job. 99 Homes turns the housing crisis into a thriller, following Garfield's Dennis Nash after he and his family are evicted by ruthless real-estate broker Rick Carver. Desperate to get his home back, Dennis begins working for the very man responsible and slowly finds himself participating in the same system that devastated him.
Garfield gives Dennis the desperation of someone who can see the moral line moving underneath his feet, while Shannon is terrifying precisely because Carver doesn't think of himself as a villain. The film competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2014, but you don't need festival credentials to appreciate this one.
The Road
We have reached the uplifting portion of the Venice watchlist. Just kidding. It's The Road. Based on Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel, the film follows Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son traveling through a devastated post-apocalyptic America where food is disappearing, civilization has collapsed, and meeting another human being is generally not cause for celebration.
The Road competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2009, and it's the heaviest watch here by a comfortable margin. But Mortensen's performance keeps all that bleakness attached to something deeply simple: a father trying to keep his son alive without letting the world turn him into something unrecognizable. Beautiful filmmaking. Devastating story.