Fall Film Festival Recap: The Best & Worst of TIFF, Telluride and Venice

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor
and Keith Kimbell, Metacritic Film Editor – September 17, 2017

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.

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88 Foxtrot

Writer-director Samuel Maoz returned to Venice with his first feature since winning the 2009 Golden Lion for Lebanon. His latest, a complex study of grief that embraces the absurdity and tragedy of life in modern Israel, won the festival's Grand Jury Prize. “It's a daring and bold film, highly-stylised and imaginative,” according to John Bleasdale of CineVue. And The Film Stage’s Zhuo-Ning Su calls it “thoughtful, melodic, and devastating.”