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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87 The Shape of Water

Director Guillermo Del Toro earned the top award at the Venice Film Festival for this original, adult fairy tale co-written with Vanessa Taylor. Set in 1963 America, this December 8 release stars Sally Hawkins as Elisa, a mute, who forms a connection with a creature in a high-security government laboratory.

Praising one of the best-reviewed films of the fall festival season, New York Times critic A.O. Scott writes, “I am dazzled by Mr. del Toro’s ability to mobilize old-movie tropes and movie-geek scholarship with the heart-on-the-sleeve humanism he displays here.” And Jessica Kiang of The Playlist believes it’s the “greatest showcase for del Toro’s mercurial, dark-tinged but delightful sensibilities, and his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth. It perhaps even equals it, though let’s give time its chance to tell on that.”