Fall Film Festival Recap: The Best & Worst of TIFF, Telluride and Venice
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.
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris detours into (mostly) scripted fare with this six-part miniseries that will stream on Netflix in December. Based on a true story (and incorporating interviews with real participants), Wormwood follows two brothers' twist-filled, six-decade investigation into the mysterious death of their father—an event that is tied to the CIA's secret LSD and mind control experiments.
Critics saw the full series at Venice, and they seemed to enjoy it. The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy calls it a "staggering, sometimes daunting work" that will greatly appeal to "conspiracy theorists, Cold War buffs, [and] murder mystery fans." Indiewire's Eric Kohn also likes the series even if "Morris sometimes gets carried away," and is surprised to find that the dramatic sequences are the highlights of the show. The Guardian's Xan Brooks also praises "the film’s hallucinatory mood" in a 4/5 review.
TV | USA
Directed by Errol Morris
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