Hit Pix Superpower, Brooklyn, NY (2026)

09/09/2026

Anna Foglietta’s A Common Story may be Venice’s Orizzonti breakout

Anna Foglietta’s feature-directing debut A Common Story has emerged from Venice’s Orizzonti section with the kind of first review that makes a sidebar title suddenly difficult to ignore. Screen singles out Alba Rohrwacher as “extraordinary” while suggesting Foglietta’s confident, formally daring debut might have been strong enough for the main Competition.

An empty nest drama that refuses to look ordinary

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7592/a-common-story

Rohrwacher and Guido Caprino play Erika and Mauro, a married couple whose comfortable routines begin to collapse after their daughter Irene leaves home to study.

The premise sounds deliberately modest. Foglietta, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tania Pedroni and Matteo Ferri, instead uses the couple’s suddenly empty house to examine identity, caregiving and a marriage forced to confront what remains once parenthood no longer organizes every day.

Screen critic Wendy Ide praises the performances for finding considerable emotional complexity inside that seemingly simple setup, with Rohrwacher receiving the strongest notice. But the review is just as enthusiastic about Foglietta’s refusal to treat the material like a visually restrained actor showcase.

Foglietta makes a formally ambitious debut

Cinematographer Andrea Benjamin Manenti shot the film using vintage anamorphic lenses, frequently obscuring or destabilizing the characters within the frame rather than presenting their emotional lives cleanly.

Screen sees an almost impressionistic quality in parts of the photography and draws a comparison to early Lynn Ramsay. The film also uses an assertive Rodrigo D’Erasmo score and a chapter structure organized around the seasons as Erika and Mauro drift further from the certainties that previously held their lives together.

That matters because A Common Story could easily have been programmed and received as another respectable European relationship drama. The early indication instead is that Foglietta has arrived with an unusually specific filmmaking language of her own.

Venice is only the beginning

A Common Story now heads from Venice to Toronto for its international premiere before screening at the BFI London Film Festival, where it will compete in the First Feature Competition. True Colours is handling international sales, while BIM will release the film in Italy on September 24.

One enthusiastic review does not make a critical consensus, but it does make A Common Story worth pulling out of the increasingly crowded Venice lineup. Screen calls Foglietta “a considerable talent”; Toronto and London will now get the chance to see whether that first burst of enthusiasm turns into something larger.

Tags: A Common Story, Anna Foglietta, Alba Rohrwacher, Venice Film Festival, Orizzonti, Guido Caprino, Venice 2026, Venezia 83, TIFF 2026, BFI London Film Festival, Italian cinema, True Colours, BIM, Andrea Benjamin Manenti

09/09/2026

Godzilla Minus Zero finally unleashes its full IMAX scale in new trailer

Takashi Yamazaki is done teasing around the edges of Godzilla Minus Zero. The first full trailer puts the Godzilla Minus One sequel on a much larger canvas, expanding into the film’s 1.43:1 IMAX presentation as postwar Japan discovers that surviving Godzilla once was not the end of the problem.

Japan is rebuilding, and so is Godzilla

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7591/godzilla-minus-zero

Godzilla Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after the events of Minus One. Japan has begun the painful work of rebuilding when another threat interrupts whatever peace the country managed to reclaim.

Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe return as Koichi and Noriko Shikishima, continuing the human story that gave Minus One much of its weight rather than resetting the franchise around another collection of people waiting for the monster to arrive.

Hidetaka Yoshioka, Yuki Yamada, Kuranosuke Sasaki, Sakura Ando and Miou Tanaka also return. Min Tanaka joins the cast as biologist Kanji Murakami.

The full IMAX frame is part of the pitch

The new trailer is the first substantial look at Yamazaki’s sequel after a campaign built around shorter teasers and first-look footage, and its most obvious new selling point is scale.

Presented in the film’s 1.43:1 IMAX ratio, the trailer expands vertically as the destruction escalates. It is a particularly appropriate format for a sequel that has to make Godzilla feel overwhelming again after Minus One already delivered one of the character’s most effective modern incarnations.

Yamazaki returns as director, screenwriter and VFX lead, preserving the unusually unified creative control he brought to the previous film.

The question is less whether Minus Zero can simply make Godzilla bigger than whether Yamazaki can reproduce the trick that made Minus One work: treating the monster as an extension of Japan’s trauma rather than an interruption of the human drama.

Godzilla heads to New York before theaters

The film will first screen at the New York Film Festival on September 26 before GKIDS opens it in North American theaters on November 6.

That gives Godzilla Minus Zero an unusual runway for a monster movie sequel: a major festival premiere followed by a wide theatrical release built heavily around the IMAX experience.

Minus One made Godzilla frightening again by making the people running from him matter. The full Minus Zero trailer suggests Yamazaki knows that simply giving audiences more monster is not enough — even when there is now considerably more screen for him to occupy.

Tags: Godzilla Minus Zero, Godzilla Minus Zero trailer, Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One, IMAX, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, GKIDS, TOHO, New York Film Festival, NYFF 2026, Japanese cinema, monster movies

09/08/2026

Renate Reinsve leads Mia Hansen-Løve’s Mary Wollstonecraft film as Vicky Krieps and Johnny Flynn join

Mia Hansen-Løve has assembled the core cast for If Love Should Die, with Renate Reinsve officially set to play Mary Wollstonecraft alongside Vicky Krieps and Johnny Flynn. What had previously been a promising project in development now looks like one of the more formidable European period films taking shape, with Goodfellas boarding international sales ahead of TIFF: The Market.

Hansen-Løve takes on Mary Wollstonecraft

Written and directed by Hansen-Løve, If Love Should Die will focus on roughly the final 12 years of Wollstonecraft’s life, tracing the writer and philosopher during the period in which her personal struggles, relationships and political thinking helped establish her as a foundational figure in feminist thought.

Reinsve will play Wollstonecraft, while Flynn and Krieps have joined in key roles that have not yet been disclosed. Charlie Kelly, Will Keen, Tom Sturridge and Jane Beever round out the announced ensemble.

For Hansen-Løve, the film represents a significant shift in scale without necessarily abandoning the preoccupations that have defined her work. Films including Things to Come, Bergman Island and One Fine Morning have repeatedly examined women negotiating intellectual life, relationships, family and independence; Wollstonecraft places those tensions inside an explicitly historical and political framework.

Krieps also reunites with Hansen-Løve after starring in Bergman Island.

A major European package heads to TIFF

Goodfellas has boarded If Love Should Die for international sales and will introduce the project to buyers at TIFF: The Market, giving the film a substantially more concrete industry footprint than when it first surfaced in development.

The production brings together partners from Ireland, France, Norway, Spain and the UK, with Anonymous Content and RT Features among its backers. Anonymous Content and CAA Media Finance are representing domestic rights.

Hansen-Løve has also assembled significant collaborators behind the camera. Claire Mathon will serve as cinematographer, while longtime Hansen-Løve collaborator Marion Monnier will edit the film.

Mathon’s involvement alone makes the package particularly notable: her credits include Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Spencer and Saint Omer, making If Love Should Die an unusually strong convergence of contemporary European filmmaking talent in front of and behind the camera.

The project now has considerably more than an intriguing filmmaker-subject pairing. With Reinsve at its center, Krieps and Flynn surrounding her and an international sales campaign underway, Hansen-Løve’s Wollstonecraft film has finally moved from something to watch into something actively taking shape.

Tags: If Love Should Die, Renate Reinsve, Mia Hansen-Løve, Vicky Krieps, Johnny Flynn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Mathon, Marion Monnier, Goodfellas, TIFF, TIFF 2026, Bergman Island, Anonymous Content, RT Features

09/08/2026

Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii survival compound inspired Florian Zeller’s Penélope Cruz-Javier Bardem thriller Bunker

Florian Zeller’s Bunker began with a real-world contradiction: Mark Zuckerberg made his fortune connecting billions of people, then started building himself a survival compound in Hawaii. Speaking ahead of the film’s Venice premiere, Zeller made explicit just how directly that story shaped his new Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem thriller.

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7495/bunker

According to ANSA, Zeller said at the Venice Film Festival press conference that “the inspiration of the film comes precisely from the story of Mark Zuckerberg building a bunker in Hawaii,” describing himself as fascinated by the paradox when he first encountered it.

The idea was already embedded, without Zuckerberg’s name, in Zeller’s official director’s statement for the festival.

“A few years ago, I came across an article about a tech billionaire building a survivalist bunker in Hawaii. I remember asking myself: ‘Does he know something we do not?’ It struck me as a fascinating paradox: the man who had built his fortune on connecting people was now isolating himself from the world.”

That paradox became the foundation of Bunker, which premieres September 8 in the Venezia 83 Competition.

The billionaire bunker becomes a marriage problem

Rather than fictionalizing Zuckerberg directly, Zeller uses the bunker as the catalyst for a domestic thriller.

Javier Bardem plays an architect who accepts a morally questionable commission to design a survival bunker for a tech billionaire. His wife, played by Penélope Cruz, begins reconsidering both the project and their 17-year marriage as the anxieties surrounding wealth, inequality and an increasingly unstable world move inside their home.

For Zeller, the literal bunker is only the most visible version of the film’s central idea. He described people as increasingly living inside “invisible” bunkers of their own, retreating behind wealth, security, fear and social separation.

The irony is deliberately uncomfortable: condemning the billionaire who wants walls around himself becomes considerably easier than recognizing the smaller fortifications built into ordinary privileged life.

Cruz and Bardem bring the politics into the open

Cruz and Bardem did not treat those themes as merely theoretical during the Venice press conference.

Cruz spoke about power and manipulation, saying she feels “sadness and anger” over the way people are increasingly treated like puppets. Bardem connected the movie’s questions about privilege to immigration and the material conditions that force people to leave their countries.

“Our luxuries are based on someone else’s misery, we all know that,” Bardem said, arguing that war, poverty, climate and geopolitical conditions cannot be separated from Western consumption.

Those are Cruz and Bardem’s political arguments rather than claims made by the film itself, but they underline how openly the Bunker team is framing Zeller’s thriller as a story about class and insulation rather than simply a troubled marriage with an unusually expensive construction project attached.

Zeller’s starting point, meanwhile, is unusually concrete. The fictional billionaire may not be Zuckerberg, but the film exists because Zuckerberg’s attempt to build a private refuge made Zeller wonder what it says when one of the architects of global connectivity starts planning for disconnection.

Bunker also stars Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger. The 126-minute France-Spain production screens in Competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.

Tags: Bunker, Florian Zeller, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Mark Zuckerberg, Venice Film Festival, Venice 2026, Venezia 83, Paul Dano, Stephen Graham, Patrick Schwarzenegger

09/08/2026

The best new movies to rent, stream and own this week

Moana leads a busy September 8 digital slate, but several of this week’s better bets cost considerably less than Disney’s $24.99 premium rental. The smartest immediate options are hiding among the specialty releases, newly discounted rentals and a physical-media lineup capped by Criterion’s 12 Angry Men in 4K.

HitPix+ Picks

Leviticus

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7102/leviticus

The price drop makes Leviticus one of the easiest decisions this week: it is now $5.99 to rent or $19.99 to buy, down from its earlier premium window. Hulu is currently estimated to get the film in November, but the rental price is low enough that waiting no longer feels mandatory.

Check Amazon availability

Sheep in the Box

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/6460/sheep-in-the-box

At $9.99 to rent and $14.99 to buy, Sheep in the Box lands in the much more reasonable end of this week’s new-release pricing. Its eventual subscription home is expected to be Hulu in December, giving anyone interested now a fairly long wait otherwise.

Check Amazon availability

12 Angry Men — Criterion 4K

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/2632/12-angry-men

The week’s strongest collector release is an easy one: Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men gets a Criterion 4K edition. For a movie whose entire dramatic engine depends on faces, framing and the slowly tightening geography of one jury room, this is exactly the kind of catalogue title that benefits from a serious physical-media edition.

Check Amazon availability

Maddie’s Secret — Blu-ray

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7311/maddies-secret

Maddie’s Secret also makes the jump to Blu-ray this week, giving the smaller-scale release a physical edition rather than leaving it stranded in the digital catalogue. It is the more interesting new-release option for collectors looking beyond franchise movies and studio blockbusters.

Check Amazon availability

More movies to buy or rent

Moana

The live-action Moana is the week’s biggest digital release and priced accordingly: $29.99 to buy and $24.99 to rent. Disney+ is estimated to add it in October, which makes that premium rental considerably easier to resist unless this is an immediate family-viewing requirement.

Check Amazon availability

One Night Only

One Night Only arrives at $19.99 to buy and a more approachable $9.99 rental. Peacock is the expected subscription destination in November, so the question is mostly whether two months is worth ten bucks.

Check Amazon availability

Mutiny

Mutiny remains firmly in premium-VOD territory at $24.99 to buy or $19.99 to rent. Starz is currently estimated to pick it up in November, making patience the cheaper option unless this one is already on your list.

Check Amazon availability

Hot Spot

Hot Spot is also $24.99 to buy and $19.99 to rent, with Peacock expected to add it as early as October. With such a short projected gap, the economics heavily favor waiting for the subscription window.

Check Amazon availability

On the Sea

On the Sea joins the September 8 watch-at-home lineup as another digital option this week. No subscription-streaming date is currently included in the release calendar, so the immediate route is VOD.

Check Amazon availability

Portal to Hell

Portal to Hell also makes its VOD arrival this week. There is no confirmed subscription date attached to the release, making digital rental or purchase the current home-viewing route.

Check Amazon availability

Motor City

Previously available at a premium price, Motor City is now $19.99 to buy and $9.99 to rent. An AMC+ arrival is estimated for November, but the new rental price makes catching up now considerably less punitive.

Check Amazon availability

Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall

The first Batman: Knightfall installment has also dropped to $5.99 to rent and $19.99 to buy. HBO Max is the expected subscription destination in December, so the reduced rental is a reasonable middle ground for anyone not inclined to wait three months.

Check Amazon availability

Cookie Queens

Cookie Queens is the cheapest of the major new September 8 digital arrivals at $6.99 to rent and $14.99 to own. Paramount+ is currently set to add it January 6, 2027, so this is also one of the larger gaps between the home-rental window and subscription streaming.

Check Amazon availability

New movies streaming this week

This week’s supplied calendar is primarily a VOD and physical-media slate rather than a batch of confirmed new SVOD premieres. The subscription dates above are future destinations or estimates, so none should be mistaken for a September 8 streaming debut.

New Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD releases

Supergirl — 4K

Supergirl reaches 4K this week for anyone who skipped buying the movie digitally or simply wants the DCU entry on disc. This is the more sensible route for collectors who already know they want to keep it rather than paying repeatedly through digital storefronts.

Check Amazon availability

Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall — 4K

The newly discounted digital edition is joined by a 4K physical release, giving Knightfall viewers the option of renting cheaply or starting the series on disc.

Check Amazon availability

Minions & Monsters — 4K

Minions & Monsters gets the full 4K treatment as well. For households where the movie is likely to enter the repeat-viewing rotation, owning the disc has a more obvious use case than another temporary rental.

Check Amazon availability

Leviticus — Blu-ray

The same week its digital rental drops to $5.99, Leviticus arrives on Blu-ray. Rent it cheaply if you are curious; buy the disc if it is already a keeper.

Check Amazon availability

Passenger — Blu-ray

Passenger joins the physical slate on Blu-ray, providing another genre option for viewers still keeping a shelf rather than trusting everything to remain licensed indefinitely.

Check Amazon availability

The headline release may be Moana, but this is a better week for shopping around than immediately hitting the biggest “rent” button on the screen. The discounted titles and Criterion’s 12 Angry Men are where the value is.

Tags: Moana, Leviticus, Sheep in the Box, 12 Angry Men, new movies September 2026, Cookie Queens, One Night Only, Mutiny, Motor City, Batman Knightfall, Supergirl, Minions & Monsters, Criterion Collection, 4K Blu-ray, VOD

09/08/2026

Extra Geography turns falling in love into a very bad school project

Two inseparable boarding-school students decide that academic excellence has left one obvious gap in their education: they have never been in love. Molly Manners’ Extra Geography turns their attempt to fix that into a coming-of-age comedy about the moment when an all-consuming teenage friendship stops being quite as perfectly synchronized as its participants imagine.

Falling in love, for educational purposes

Set at an English girls’ boarding school, Extra Geography follows Flic and Minna, played by newcomers Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear, two ambitious best friends who approach adolescence with roughly the same seriousness they bring to their studies. Their self-assigned summer project is simple enough on paper: fall in love with the next person they see.

Unfortunately, that person is their geography teacher, Miss Delavigne, played by Alice Englert.

The premise gives Manners a deliberately absurd route into something more recognizable. Flic and Minna have built a world in which their opinions, plans and ambitions seem interchangeable, until attraction, jealousy, boys from a neighboring school and a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream begin exposing the limits of that arrangement.

The new trailer leans into that collision between adolescent confidence and complete emotional inexperience: the girls treat becoming “worldly” as another problem they can solve together, right up until their experiment starts producing variables neither of them can control.

From One Day to a feature debut

Extra Geography is Manners’ first feature after directing television including In My Skin and four episodes of Netflix’s One Day. Miriam Battye adapted the screenplay from Rose Tremain’s short story of the same name, with Sarah Brocklehurst producing for Brock Media and Film4, the BFI and Screen Yorkshire backing the production.

Manners has described the film as a story about the intensity of formative female friendship, treating those early relationships less as supporting material around romance than as love stories in their own right. That emphasis appears to be the distinction here: the project may technically be about Flic and Minna trying to fall in love, but the relationship actually being tested is the one they already have.

Extra Geography already has Sundance behind it

The film premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in January, where Sundance programmer John Nein introduced it as one of the festival discoveries he was most excited about. Reviews have largely backed up that early enthusiasm.

Rotten Tomatoes currently lists Extra Geography at 100% from 21 reviews, with critics particularly highlighting Duggan and Clear, Battye’s dialogue and the film’s handling of the intensity, competition and codependency that can sit inside teenage friendship.

Vertigo Releasing acquired UK and Ireland rights following Sundance and will release the film in cinemas on October 2. HanWay Films is handling international sales; as of September 8, a U.S. theatrical release has not been announced.

There are plenty of movies about teenagers desperately trying to become adults. Extra Geography at least starts from the more entertaining premise that two very smart teenagers believe they can turn the process into coursework.

Tags: Extra Geography, Molly Manners, Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear, Alice Englert, Sundance Film Festival, Miriam Battye, Rose Tremain, coming-of-age movies, British cinema, Film4, BFI, Vertigo Releasing, indie movies, 2026 movies

09/08/2026

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial trailer turns OpenAI’s power struggle into a horror story. Thanks NEON.

The first trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial is here, with Andrew Garfield playing Sam Altman in a story about the people who built the technology currently rearranging the world around us. Neon is selling the OpenAI drama less like a conventional tech biopic than a darkly funny corporate thriller in which everyone has realized the stakes are enormous and nobody can agree who should be in control.

Andrew Garfield becomes Sam Altman

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7523/artificial

Written by Simon Rich, Artificial dramatizes the rise of OpenAI and the extraordinary November 2023 power struggle that saw its board fire Altman as CEO, only for him to return to the job days later.

But Guadagnino’s film apparently has considerably more on its mind than reenacting one spectacularly dysfunctional week in Silicon Valley.

The New York Film Festival describes the 140-minute film as spanning two decades of machine-learning development, beginning with Ilya Sutskever studying artificial neural networks under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2003. Yura Borisov plays Sutskever, with Mark Rylance as Hinton, before Andrew Garfield’s Altman enters the story and OpenAI begins taking shape.

The trailer immediately establishes the tone. Garfield’s Altman talks about technological transformation while Guadagnino surrounds him with something closer to existential dread than startup optimism — including the considerably less reassuring sight of Altman walking into a basement filled with guns.

That feels particularly appropriate for a movie arriving after several years in which conversations about artificial intelligence have somehow managed to alternate between “this will improve productivity” and “this may permanently alter human civilization.”

Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever

Garfield may be playing the movie’s most recognizable figure, but Artificial appears to be built just as heavily around Borisov’s Sutskever.

According to NYFF, the film follows Sutskever from his early research through his eventual encounter with Altman, framing OpenAI’s corporate crisis as the endpoint of a much longer story about machine learning, ambition and the increasingly uncomfortable question of who gets to control the technology. Festival director Dennis Lim has described the movie as approaching that history with “clear-eyed horror, dark humour, and a sense of existential urgency.”

Monica Barbaro plays OpenAI executive Mira Murati, while Ike Barinholtz takes on Elon Musk. Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O’Dowd are also part of the ensemble, with Damon Albarn providing both the score and original songs.

Amazon dropped Artificial. Neon picked it up.

There is already a corporate subplot surrounding the movie that would sound a little too convenient if Rich had written it into the screenplay.

Amazon MGM Studios originally developed the roughly $40 million film but abruptly decided not to release it in June, several months after Amazon announced a massive investment and expanded partnership with OpenAI. Amazon publicly said only that it believed Artificial would be “better served” at another studio and did not attribute its decision to its relationship with OpenAI.

The Los Angeles Times subsequently reported, citing sources briefed on the situation, that the movie takes a critical view of artificial intelligence and that Amazon’s increasingly substantial OpenAI relationship contributed to its desire to distance itself from the film. Amazon declined to comment on those claims.

Neon eventually acquired worldwide rights and is now positioning Artificial squarely inside awards season rather than quietly finding somewhere to park it.

Artificial premieres at NYFF before Christmas release

Artificial will have its world premiere October 5 as part of the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, with Guadagnino and members of the cast scheduled to attend. The film then heads to the BFI London Film Festival for a gala screening on October 11.

Neon will open the movie in select U.S. theaters on December 25, with a wider theatrical expansion planned for January 2027.

Guadagnino making a movie about the OpenAI power struggle was already one of the stranger combinations on the 2026 calendar. The first Artificial trailer suggests he understood exactly what makes the material interesting: the real story is not that a technology company had a boardroom coup, but that the people fighting inside that boardroom believed they were deciding the future.

Tags: Artificial, Luca Guadagnino, Andrew Garfield, Sam Altman, OpenAI, Yura Borisov, Ilya Sutskever, Neon, Artificial trailer, Monica Barbaro, Mark Rylance, Ike Barinholtz, Simon Rich, Damon Albarn, New York Film Festival, NYFF 2026, 2026 movies

09/08/2026

Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary arrives with damning reviews and an “almost existential fear” of speaking out

Alex Gibney says the most striking obstacle he encountered while making Musk was not access to Elon Musk himself, but the fear surrounding people who might speak about him. That claim took on more weight at Venice on Tuesday, as Gibney expanded his argument about Musk’s political power and the first reviews of his 225-minute documentary arrived.

Gibney says fear followed the investigation

https://hitpixplus.com/titles/7499/musk

Speaking at the Venice Film Festival press conference for Musk, Gibney said there was a “tremendous sense of fear of talking, really almost existential fear” among people his team approached.

That reluctance extended across Musk’s critics, business associates and friends, with many ultimately declining to appear. Gibney has said some potential interviewees would not speak without Musk’s permission, while others feared repercussions from participating.

Musk himself declined Gibney’s request to participate. He had previously dismissed the project as “a hit piece” in 2023, prompting Gibney to respond at the time: “How would you know?”

The filmmaker said he began the project as something of an admirer of Musk but changed his assessment as the reporting progressed. Gibney said his research ultimately “upended” the popular image of Musk as a modern Leonardo da Vinci, leading him instead to focus on the gap between Musk’s self-created mythology and the enormous power attached to his businesses and public persona.

Venice pushed the conversation beyond the documentary itself

The press conference widened that argument considerably. Asked about Musk’s potential threat to democracy, Gibney answered that he considered him “extremely” dangerous and argued that Musk is pursuing what the director described as a “global right-wing agenda.”

Gibney pointed to Musk’s involvement with right-wing political movements in Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Turkey, arguing that ideological alignment overlaps with what he sees as a practical interest in governments more receptive to concentrated corporate influence. Those are Gibney’s conclusions about Musk’s motivations, not independently established findings.

Gibney also raised concerns about the government data accessed through Musk’s DOGE operation, warning that such information could potentially be combined with AI to influence elections. Again, that was presented as a risk Gibney fears, not evidence that such an operation has occurred.

Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk and appears in the documentary, joined Gibney and technology journalist Zoë Schiffer at the press conference. St. Clair discussed her previously reported claim that she rejected an NDA package worth roughly $40 million that would have restricted what she could say about Musk — giving the film’s broader discussion of silence around its subject a rather less abstract example.

The first Musk reviews are strongly favorable

The other significant development is that Musk is no longer merely a provocative trailer attached to a four-hour runtime. The first substantial reviews have now landed around its Venice premiere, and they are notably consistent about the documentary’s severity.

Early notices describe the film as a lacerating, exhaustive and deeply critical portrait of Musk, with particular attention paid to the scale of power concentrated around him.

One recurring issue in the reviews is the obvious challenge facing Gibney: Musk has been so omnipresent that much of the biographical and archival material is already familiar. The film appears to become most potent in its final stretch, when Gibney moves into Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump, DOGE and events recent enough to make the documentary feel less like retrospective biography than an unfinished record of power still accumulating.

Other reviews have noted something that complicates the easy fraudster narrative: unlike figures such as Elizabeth Holmes, Musk also presides over companies with genuine technological achievements. Gibney’s target, in other words, is less the proposition that Musk has accomplished nothing than the mythology that extraordinary accomplishment should make extraordinary concentrations of power immune from scrutiny.

That makes the Venice story considerably stronger than yesterday’s teaser framing. Musk has arrived not simply as Gibney’s portrait of a billionaire, but as an investigation explicitly asking what happens when the people around one private citizen become afraid to talk about him.

Bleecker Street will open Musk in select U.S. theaters October 16 before expanding nationwide October 23.

Tags: Elon Musk, Alex Gibney, Musk documentary, Venice Film Festival 2026, Venice 83, Ashley St. Clair, Zoë Schiffer, Bleecker Street, HBO Documentary Films, documentary films, DOGE, film reviews

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