Six of the best Oscar contenders from the 2026 Venice film festival

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.