73rd Venice Film Festival Update and 43rd Telluride Film Festival Summary
Last week I gave a short lowdown on what was showing up at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival, and the festival closes Saturday, but I thought I’d give a quick update on what we’ve seen so far and also a showcase for what’s been happening at the 43rd Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Let’s get started.
La La Land rocked the fest opening night. Praise went out for Damien Chazelle ‘s send-up to the classic Hollywood musical, with equal praise for the actors involved. The film has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 8.5/10. Not a bad start. Next up was The Light Between Oceans and Arrival. While the former has already been released to 59% on Rotten Tomatoes and a fairly disappointing box office take, Arrival received the polar opposite reception, with all positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and an average rating of 8.3/10. Nocturnal Animals was next up, and it was fairly well received with 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and an average rating of 7.4/10. Overall these are great things to hear out of the opening films.
On Sunday we had Hacksaw Ridge and it has one of the higher ratings, 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the average rating is down to 7.2/10. Since then we haven’t had too many big Oscar contenders show up, but The Magnificent Seven comes up later this week and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey just premiered tonight to an average rating of 7/10 with all positive reviews.
So the big takeaways were definitely La La Land, Arrival, and Hacksaw Ridge. While the former is an early favorite to be nominated in several categories, and the latter has an uphill battle ahead of it, Arrival is somewhere in the middle. There’s no early guarantee that it’ll get as far as Best Picture, Director, Actress, etc., I wouldn’t be too surprised if it got a lot of nods across the board coming December and January.
Telluride Film Festival only ran over the Holiday weekend, but there were some things to talk about. First off, Manchester by the Sea, which showed up earlier this year at Sundance, had a screening, as did Arrival and La La Land. The two big headliners coming out of the festival were the premieres of Sully and Moonlight.
Sully is currently sitting at 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, after many reviews on top of the initial, and it is released this weekend, and the average rating is 7/10. This isn’t bad, and worse-reviewed films have done better at the Oscars, but I can’t see it being the most-nominated film in January. Perhaps Tom Hanks and a few other technical aspects can get in, but now we might have other films pass it up.
Moonlight was a huge hit, scoring all good reviews and an average rating of 8.9/10. A lot of the credit went out to the acting, writing, and directing. While I hadn’t really had the film on my radar before, it absolutely will be now. I’ll have to investigate more into the film and see what aspects are going to have good shots at being nominated.
While I don’t have too much else to say about these two film festivals, we do have the Toronto International Film Festival, which begins tomorrow and will run through Sunday, September 18th, and there’s a lot to enjoy. They open with a screening of The Magnificent Seven, then we have all sorts of fun stuff: A Monster Calls, Deepwater Horizon, Loving, Snowden, American Pastoral, The Birth of a Nation, Bleed for This, Denial, Lion, plus re-screenings of Arrival, La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Nocturnal Animals, Voyage of Time, and Moonlight. It all ends with a screening of The Edge of Seventeen. So I’m sure by the middle of next week I’ll have some more to talk about.
