Fall Film Festival Recap: The Best & Worst of TIFF, Telluride and Venice
The fall film season kicks off each year with a trio of prestigious festivals: the just-completed Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the Venice Film Festival (now in its 74th year), and the smaller but no less interesting Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It is at these festivals where many of the year's Oscar contenders typically make their debuts. (Last year, five best picture nominees—including eventual winner Moonlight—had their world premieres at one of these festivals.) And this year's crop includes promising upcoming releases from Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Aaron Sorkin, Joe Wright, and Armando Iannucci ... as well as more divisive films from the likes of Alexander Payne, George Clooney, and Louis CK.
Below, learn more about the critical response to these and other notable films (and TV shows) debuting at the three festivals in 2017.
The second major Margaret Atwood adaptation to hit the small screen this year (following Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale) is a six-episode Netflix miniseries that, like the book, is inspired by the true story of a shocking double murder in a remote Canadian town in 1843. Sarah Polley (Away From Her) pens the adaptation for director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol), and it stars Sarah Gadon, Anna Paquin, Kerr Logan, Zachary Levi, and David Cronenberg.
The first two episodes screened at TIFF, where they received an encouraging response from critics. Variety TV critic Sonia Saraiya called it a "remarkably faithful" adaptation that "is much less cinematically adventurous, but much more narratively complex" than The Handmaid's Tale. The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg (who saw the full series) warns that comparisons to Handmaid don't really make sense, but that Grace stands on its own as "consistently literate, thoughtful and insinuating." And the standout for NOW Toronto's Radheyan Simonpillai is Gadon’s "exhilarating performance."
TV | Canada/USA
Directed by Mary Harron
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