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.

33 of 38 photo by Merrick Morton

88 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The latest (and in the opinion of Indiewire and The Telegraph, also the best) film from writer-director Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths, In Bruges) stars Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes, who posts billboards outside her town reflecting her displeasure with a police department that has failed to arrest her daughter’s murderer. An escalating battle ensues between Mildred, the town's chief of police (Woody Harrelson), and his second-in-command, Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell).

The winner of the Best Screenplay Award in Venice and the top award at TIFF (as voted by festival audiences)—with the latter virtually guaranteeing an Oscar best picture nomination, if recent history is a judge—is “an uproarious delight of a film that snaps the eyelids up like roller-blinds and had the Venice film festival audience breaking into rounds of spontaneous applause,” according to Xan Brooks of The Guardian. Look for it in theaters beginning October 13.