The 76th Venice International Film Festival opens today, kicking off a jam-packed fall festival season. Before heading off to the Lido, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish to discuss the films in the lineup—by auteurs both established and new—that we're most excited about. They speculate about Haifa Al-Mansour's The Perfect Candidate (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the only two Competition films directed by women), Roy Andersson's About Endlessness, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, Ciro Guerra's Waiting for the Barbarians, Lou Ye's Saturday Fiction, and James Gray's Ad Astra, amongst others.

Check back over the course of Venice for a regular stream of new episodes diving into these and other films.