Five days into the fall film festivals, we’ve got ourselves a real awards season. Maybe even a monster awards season.
And for that, we might have to thank a couple of iconoclastic international filmmakers and a pair of British works of literature written in 1600 and 1818, or thereabouts.
That’s the conclusion after the first five days of the Venice Film Festival and the first three (out of only four) of the Telluride Film Festival, where Guillermo del Toro’s epic adaptation of “Frankenstein” and Chloé Zhao’s emotionally devastating Shakespeare riff “Hamnet” debuted and cemented themselves as formidable contenders.
Some of the high-profile films that have premiered so far still have some work to do before they can be considered top awards players, but others came out of the gate with a bang, and plenty may be on the fence as Best Picture hopefuls but are definitely in the mix for other categories.
Venice, for example, kicked off with Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia,” a drama about a conflicted politician that seems to have become the favorite to be Italy’s submission in the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film race, the third time one of Sorrentino’s films will have been chosen. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s the only director in the last 26 years to win an Oscar for Italy, something he did in 2013 with “The Great Beauty.”)
In the higher-profile English-language titles, meanwhile, Venice has unveiled Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” a wacky sci-fi concoction that might win over bold voters and might be too weird for mainstreamers, although Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons will undoubtedly get lots of attention for the things they do for Yorgos; “Jay Kelly,” a Noah Baumbach blend of comedy and drama that has a showbiz setting (appealing to voters), an utterly charming lead performance by George Clooney (ditto) and a cast with an amazing array of names (SAG Ensemble or the new Oscar for casting, anyone?); “After the Hunt,” Luca Guadagnino’s tale of trouble in academia, which has proved to be predictably divisive (who knew that some people would take offense at a movie about how easily people take offense at everything?) but also has the most substantial Julia Roberts performance in years.
The robust selection of documentaries shown so far in Venice includes strong work from past winner Laura Poitras (“Cover-Up,” with Mark Obenhaus) and past nominees Gianfranco Rosi (“Below the Clouds”) and Tamara Kotevska (“The Tale of Silyan”).
And then there’s Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and a monumental work even if some critics have thought two-and-a-half hours is too long. Given the film’s all-but-locked nominations in many below-the-line categories, and given his history with the Academy – six nominations and three wins for “Pan’s Labyrinth,” plus Best Picture noms for three of his last four movies, including a win for “The Shape of Water” – this one emerged from its Saturday Venice premiere as a likely Best Picture nominee in my book. (And by the way, everybody loves Guillermo. Everybody.)
Venice still has a week to go, and that week will include potential contenders like Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” Benny Sadfie’s “The Smashing Machine,” “The Brutalist” co-writer Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee” and Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante.”
In the meantime, Telluride wraps up with a day of screenings on Sunday and then some repeat showings on Monday, but it has already given us a de facto Best Picture frontrunner in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” by all reports a wildly emotional adaptation of the bestselling Maggie O’Farrell novel about William Shakespeare and his wife in the wake of the death of their young son in the late 16th century, just before he wrote “Hamlet.”
You can expect more measured reactions to come when the film screens more at sea level, but it’s likely to get another rapturous reaction at the fan-heavy Toronto Film Festival next weekend, and to come out of the first batch of fall festivals as the presumptive leader. That’s a very difficult position to maintain for the six-and-a-half months between now and the Oscars, but two movies have done it in recent years: “Oppenheimer” in 2023 and “Nomadland” (by, um, Chloé Zhao) in 2020.
Telluride also premiered “The Ballad of a Small Player” by prolific “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave” director Edward Berger and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” by Scott Cooper, both of which may have Best Picture chances and will definitely be in the acting conversation with Colin Farrell for the former movie and Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong for the latter.
Granted, film-festival buzz should always be taken with more than a modicum of suspicion: What’s brilliant to viewers on the shores of the Adriatic or in the mountains of Colorado does not always maintain that appeal in more mundane surroundings. But at the moment, it appears that the 2025-2026 awards season is off to a formidable start.
