After a sleepy summer movie season, can the fall offer fireworks? We’ll know soon, now that a trio of overlapping film festivals is about to begin in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, each offering a launchpad for some of the most tantalizing titles still to come this year.
With the Venice Film Festival kicking things off on Wednesday, here are three questions to ponder as a whole new awards season gets underway.
Can the fall fests reclaim their best-picture heat?
For a long time, the eventual best-picture winner was expected to emerge from one of the fall film festivals. But after a hot streak that included the Venice entries “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “The Shape of Water,” as well as “12 Years a Slave” (Telluride) and “Green Book” (Toronto), five of the last six best-picture winners either skipped festivals entirely or debuted at ones held much earlier in the year, like Sundance or Cannes.
For moviegoers, that’s arguably a good thing, since it means that Oscar-worthy titles can come from anywhere on the release calendar. But the fall festivals have a lot riding on their kingmaker reputations, and to that end, they’ve stacked their 2025 lineups with directors who’ve already proven they can get a film across Oscar’s most formidable finish line.
Venice has two notable scores on that front: The “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow is debuting her nuclear-weapon thriller, “A House of Dynamite,” and Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”) offers a new take on “Frankenstein,” starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. Not to be outdone, both Telluride and Toronto will program “Hamnet,” a drama about William Shakespeare’s wife from the “Nomadland” director Chloe Zhao.
Has Hollywood shaken off its post-strike doldrums?
Two years ago, dual strikes by the actors and writers guilds meant that the fall festivals had to forgo big-studio fare. Even last year, the long shadow from those strikes could be felt in the festivals’ thin programs, since it took a while for starry projects to get back into production.
This year appears to be a major rebound. Venice can boast a Julia Roberts drama from Luca Guadagnino (“After the Hunt”), a new Emma Stone vehicle from Yorgos Lanthimos (“Bugonia”) and Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler. There’s also Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine,” with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, a Sofia Coppola documentary about the designer Marc Jacobs, and the musical “The Testament of Ann Lee,” which stars Amanda Seyfried and was made by much of the same team behind last year’s Venice sensation “The Brutalist.”
After enthusiastic Toronto premieres for his last two Benoit Blanc mysteries, the director Rian Johnson and the star Daniel Craig will return to that festival for their latest sequel, “Wake Up Dead Man.” The Canadian festival, which begins Sept. 4, will also unveil a surplus of star vehicles: Brendan Fraser in “Rental Family,” Channing Tatum in “Roofman,” Angelina Jolie in “Couture” and Sydney Sweeney in “Christy,” a boxing drama that promises a transformative role for the highly scrutinized actress. (The full lineup for Telluride, which starts Friday, won’t be released till the day before.)
Which major contenders are M.I.A.?
With its late-September release date, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” could have debuted at Venice, but the festival’s chief, Alberto Barbera, said that Warner Bros. dodged his overtures. It’s true that Anderson has never been especially partial to the festival circuit, but the movie’s rollicking critique of contemporary American politics surely would have contended for a major prize on the Lido.
Though Bradley Cooper’s first two directorial efforts both premiered at Venice, he instead picked a New York Film Festival bow for his forthcoming “Is This Thing On?,” starring Will Arnett as a stand-up comedian. That’s quite a coup for the New York event, which has recently struggled to land big premieres but will also unveil “Anemone,” with Daniel Day-Lewis returning to the screen in a film directed by his son, Ronan.
Three of the year’s other big awards contenders hardly need a festival debut to burnish their credentials. Two are blockbuster sequels — “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” — while the Timothée Chalamet vehicle “Marty Supreme,” about an unlikely pingpong champion, will simply skip ahead to the Christmas release that worked so well for the star’s last Oscar contender, “A Complete Unknown.”
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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