The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened this week with two of American cinema's most durable careers taking center stage. On Wednesday, George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn each received the festival's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, an honor Venice reserves for performers whose work has shaped the medium over decades rather than a single award season. The dual tribute set an unusually reflective tone for a festival that then spent its opening night confronting, through its selected films, the very industries — journalism, media, celebrity — that built careers like theirs.
Clooney received his Lion from Laura Dern, a friend since the 1980s, during a ceremony that by multiple accounts left both the actor and his wife, Amal Clooney, in tears. Venice has been a recurring backdrop in Clooney's career: he premiered Good Night, and Good Luck, Michael Clayton and Gravity there, and married Amal at the Aman Venice hotel in 2014. Accepting the award, he leaned on that history of the festival as a meeting point across languages and industries.
Nobody laughs in a different language. Nobody cries in a different language.
George Clooney, Venice Golden Lion acceptance speech
Clooney had greeted news of the honor with characteristic self-deprecation, telling reporters ahead of the ceremony it "probably means I'm old, but I'll take it." Festival director Alberto Barbera described him as "a complete and charismatic artist" with "one of the most luminous parabolas of contemporary film," citing a body of work that spans two Oscars and four Golden Globes alongside two decades of festival premieres.
Burstyn's Lion arrived with its own note of astonishment from an actor who has been working since the 1960s, when she began her career under the name Ellen McRae before an Oscar-winning run that includes The Exorcist, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and, more recently, Requiem for a Dream. The honor was announced ahead of the festival and presented alongside a screening tied to this year's jury programming.
I not only get to travel to one of my top most favorite cities in the whole world, I get to return home carrying a Golden Lion in my arms! I feel so honored — so happy — so filled with gratitude! Wow indeed!
Ellen Burstyn, statement on receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement
An Opening Film About the Birth of Tabloid Culture
The lifetime honors bracketed the festival's actual opening-night premiere: Danny Boyle's Ink, a dramatization of the launch of Rupert Murdoch's redesigned Sun newspaper in 1969, adapted by James Graham from his own stage play. Jack O'Connell stars as editor Larry Lamb and Guy Pearce as Murdoch. The film received a five-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, and has settled at 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 80 on Metacritic — a strong opening notice for a festival that will run through September 12.
The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney called it an "irreverent and inventive recap" of the tabloid revolution Murdoch set off, while critics elsewhere converged on a similar reading of the film as, in effect, a period piece with present-tense anxieties: a story about what the press became, aimed at an audience still arguing about what it is becoming next. It is a pointed choice of opener for a festival that has, in recent years, leaned into films interrogating media and power rather than simply celebrating them.
A Competition Built for an Anxious Year
The Golden Lion for best film — the prize the festival is actually built around — will be decided by a jury chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal, with Valéria Donzelli leading the Orizzonti sidebar and Carolina Cavalli overseeing the Luigi De Laurentiis award for best debut feature. The main competition includes Florian Zeller's Bunker, Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, Lance Oppenheim's Primetime and new work from Lee Chang-dong and Werner Herzog, alongside Luca Guadagnino, who is receiving the festival's Glory to the Filmmaker award this year rather than competing for the Lion.
The lineup has not been without friction: Barbera has spent part of the festival's opening days defending the competition selection of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's "DAU," after Ukraine's foreign and culture ministries objected to a Russian-born director's work screening in the main lineup. Barbera insisted it "is not pro-Putin propaganda" but "a film that denounces totalitarian regimes and their intrusion into citizens' lives," noting Khrzhanovsky has renounced his Russian citizenship and opposed the invasion of Ukraine. That dispute is likely to keep circulating as the jury's deliberations continue over the next week.
For Clooney and Burstyn, the Golden Lion caps careers that, between them, span more than a century of American filmmaking. For the festival itself, the pairing of that tribute with Ink's opening-night reception suggests Venice's programmers are using this edition to ask a pointed question about the industry both honorees have spent their careers inside: what happens to public trust when the press — and, by extension, celebrity itself — becomes the story.
SOURCES — The Hollywood Reporter — George Clooney Receives Venice Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement · Variety — Venice Chief Alberto Barbera Defends Selection of 'DAU' After Ukraine Backlash · Deadline — Danny Boyle's 'Ink' Earns Five-Minute Ovation at Venice World Premiere
