Saturday, August 31, 2019

Inside the Venice Film Festival

The temperature’s still scorching, the humidity’s still high—but it’s starting to feel a lot like fall, now that a pair of glitzy festivals have officially kicked off the 2019–2020 film awards season. Vanity Fair chief critic Richard Lawson has decamped to Italy for the Venice Film Festival, while Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins is jetting off to Colorado for the Telluride Film Festival—a pair of whirlwind events that will, between them, debut many of the movies we’ll be debating and rooting for until the 92nd Academy Awards are handed out February 9. And while Telluride is just getting started, Venice has already debuted a few potential heavy hitters: James Gray’s sad-Brad-looks-for-Dad drama, Ad Astra, and Noah Baumbach’s piercing, funny Marriage Story.Lawson walked away higher on the latter film: “Marriage Story is a sharp, ardently felt, fair movie, giving both sides their due and finding a melancholy kind of parity by the end,” he writes, noting that stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver—as dueling exes—both get plenty of meaty material. The bottom line: “Forgive my crassness, but both have major awards potential.”
Elsewhere in HWD, Joy Press explores the world of Emmys-ready “must-endure TV”; the Little Gold Menpodcast team discusses whether The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning doorstop, can possibly be made into a satisfying (and potentially Oscar-ready) movie; and Anthony Breznican goes deep on It: Chapter Two.