Venice Knew First: Italy Always Owned This Red Carpet
Venice 2026 opens against this backdrop, which is either accidental or very well timed.
Venice Knew First: Italy Always Owned This Red Carpet
There is a specific kind of beauty that doesn't perform — it simply arrives, and the room reorganises itself around it. Sophia Loren understood this before anyone had a vocabulary for it. Monica Bellucci understood it differently, which is why they are both impossible to forget and impossible to compare. Vogue's retrospective on Italian women at the Venice Film Festival is technically a fashion piece, but what it's actually documenting is something closer to a recurring proof of concept: that Italian cinema and Italian femininity have always been the same argument, made in different registers.
Venice 2026 opens against this backdrop, which is either accidental or very well timed. The Amanda Awards swept by Joachim Trier's *Sentimental Value* — eight statuettes, including best Norwegian film — is the other story worth paying attention to this week, because Trier has been doing something quietly radical for years: making films about emotional architecture that most directors don't even know exists. An Oscar. Now the Amandas. The critical consensus has stopped being polite and started being a verdict.
Meanwhile, the box office is having its own conversation. *Spider-Man: Brand New Day* is on its fourth consecutive weekend at number one, which at this point is less a phenomenon and more a demonstration of what happens when a franchise still has genuine audience affection rather than obligation. Tom Holland's version of Spider-Man remains the one people actually showed up for — not out of completionism, not out of Marvel loyalty, but because they wanted to. That distinction matters more than the numbers.
Netflix's live-action *One Piece* adds four more cast members for its Season 3 Alabasta arc, which is either exciting or terrifying depending on how much of your childhood was spent reading the manga. *National Treasure 3* is confirmed, Nicolas Cage is involved, and absolutely nobody should be surprised. Jon Turteltaub says it's happening at Disney, and honestly — fine. Some franchises exist to exist.
The real news this week is quieter than all of it. Forty-one years ago, Michael J. Fox had the number one *and* number two films in America on the same weekend. *Back to the Future* was one of them. The other was *Teen Wolf*. That is either the most 1985 sentence ever written or a reminder that genuine star power used to mean something physical, specific, and unrepeatable — a person, not a property.
Italian bombshells, Norwegian precision, a superhero on his fourth lap. Cinema contains multitudes this August, and most of them are worth the darkness.
