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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77 I, Tonya

Craig Gillespie (The Finest Hours, Lars and the Real Girl) directs Margot Robbie as infamous figure skater Tonya Harding in this unconventional biopic. Indiewire’s David Ehrlich believes Robbie “has never been better. ... Sympathetic but not too sympathetic, her performance is all that allows the film to maintain its tenuous hold over its queasy tragicomedy.” According to Kevin Jagernauth of The Playlist, Robbie is matched by an “outstanding” Allison Janney as Tonya’s ruthless mother, LaVona Golden, in this “terrifically entertaining picture that’s the Goodfellas of figure skating, mixed with a dash of Coen Brothers darkness and absurdity, and a splash of David O. Russell’s ability to capture family dysfunction with intimate immediacy.”

I, Tonya