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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68 Professor Marston & the Wonder Women

The new film from director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) tells the true story of what inspired Harvard psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) to create Wonder Woman in the 1940s. Marston's muses for Wonder Woman were his wife Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall) and their lover Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote).

Screen Daily’s Tim Grierson finds it “a little too conventional” for a film about sexual freedom, but Matt Singer of ScreenCrush argues that “Robinson’s less-edgy aesthetic is even more subversive than graphic sexuality. By treating the Marstons’ lovemaking the same way arthouse movies have treated heterosexual couples for decades, she refuses to portray them as aberrant or abnormal.”

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women